International Journal of Family Medicine & Healthcare

Open Access ISSN: 2833-0382

Abstract


Mythology as a Therapeutical Tool in Clinical and Psychological Care

Authors: Alina MAPN da Silva, Luiz Carlos Miller Paiva Nogueira da Silva, Anita LR Saldanha, Ana Paula Pantoja Margeotto, André Luis Valera Gasparoto, Paulo Maurício Garcia Nosé, Natália Rodrigues Daniel, Tania Leme da Rocha Martinez.

Myth is the form of expression of humanity in its primitive stage and of the deficiency of language in relation to thought. It is situated in the dream and in the unconscious, mainly collective (archetypes), showing conflicts of the human soul, sometimes transmitted phylogenetically. The psychoanalyst starts from a myth that is individualized, and above all, hidden, and the shaman starts from the collective myth, already known and consecrated by the culture. If ancient man followed the course of some myth, modern man follows his own myth. Man would be the son of gods and demons, a struggle between Eros and Thanate, and would therefore have a divine and a demonic part. A single and widespread family of languages, which must have originated from a single source, includes, in addition to Sanskrit and Pali (the language of the Buddhist scriptures), most of the languages of northern India, as well as Sinhalese (the language of Ceylon), Persian, Armenian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Polish, Russian, and the other Slavic languages. As well as Greek, Latin, and all the languages of Europe, with the exception of Estonian, Finnish, Sámi, Hungarian, and Basque. In this way, an ongoing series from Ireland to India was revealed. Not only could languages be easily compared, but also the civilizations and religions, mythologies, literary forms, and modes of thought of the peoples in question, such as the Vedic pantheon of ancient India, that of the Edas of medieval Iceland, and the Olympus of the Greeks. It is no wonder, then, that such discoveries caused such astonishment among the leading scholars and philosophers of the century. Man is, mythically speaking, created by the spirit. However, man is distinguished from all other forms of life by the fact that he is the being made conscious: he is intellectualized and individualized.

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