1. The Swiss psychoanalyst Jung, Carl proposed that the comparative study of myths could be used to understand and interpret the dreams and hallucinations of psychotic patients. For Jung myths are metaphors or dramatizations of the inner workings of the dimension of the psyche he calls the archetype, which in Jungian theory is the inherited part of the mind, namely our link to the collective unconscious. In a manner that Jung thought potentially therapeutic, myths illustrate to us the dangers of an archetype being given free rein. Myths can thus be treated as revelations of the structure of the pre-conscious psyche, that is, the psyche of pure archetypes as yet undomesticated by consciousness. The crucial implication here is that Jung assumes that the behaviour of the unconscious resembles the structure of myths, so when mythic elements appear in the course of treatment they are accorded a high level of significance. Canadian literary critic Frye, Northrop adapts Jungâs theory in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) to develop his own powerful form of analysis of literature as essentially mythic. 2. The great French anthropologist LĂ©vi-Strauss, Claude transformed the study of myth in a famous essay, âThe Structural Study of Mythâ (1955), which asked the apparently innocent question: if the content of myths is contingent, if anything can be incorporated into a myth as seems apparent from the incredible richness of the worldâs vast collection of myths created throughout the centuries, then how do we account for their apparent similarity of form? LĂ©vi-Strauss answers this question, which encapsulates the structuralism approach in a nutshell, by drawing on the insights of Swiss linguist Saussure, Ferdinand de who observed that similar sounds recur in different languages, but have different meanings and argued that in the case of spoken language it is the combination of sounds (i.e. the form) that is significant, not the specific sounds themselves (i.e. the content). Applied to myth, as LĂ©vi-Strauss explains, this logic results in the almost completely opposite view to Jung---now the elements of a myth (the challenges the hero must face, the special powers brought to bear, and so on) can be considered significant only in terms of the combination of their relations with other elements and not for themselves. The specific combination of elements will vary from myth to myth, but the way of producing this combination is unique to myth and universal according to LĂ©vi-Strauss. Myths have the following constitutive characteristics: they are timeless or simultaneously historical and ahistorical (e.g. as Anderson, Benedict argues in his account of imagined community, although nations are only a comparatively recent invention in history, they always present themselves as eternal, as having always been there); they are the opposite of poetry inasmuch as they can be translated from language to language, from one type of media to another, without loss of coherence or consequence (and thus, there is no such thing as the âtrueâ or âoriginalâ form of a myth---the myth consists of all its variations taken together); and they are effective or performative (their telling is itself a kind of message). This last idea has been taken up by Jameson, Fredric in Signatures of the Visible (1992) to suggest that contemporary Hollywood films can be read as symbolic solutions to real problems, and that is why cinema has such an important place in society today. 3. Inspired by Brecht, Bertoltâs concept of ressentiment, French literary critic Barthes, Roland developed a concept of myth as a critique of ânaturalnessâ (i.e. that which appears to simply occur without any historical determination, just as the sun does every morning). In a series of short essays initially published in the cultural journal, Les Lettres nouvelles, and subsequently republished in book form as Mythologies (1957), translated as Mythologies (1972), Barthes used myth as a codephrase for that which âgoes without sayingâ because it is so widely accepted as a âtruthâ, and by this means he tried to demonstrate that what passes for âtruthâ is in fact the result of careful glocalization stage-managing. As Barthes puts it in the afterword to Mythologies, the widely read essay âMyth Todayâ, mythâs key principle is to transform history into nature. In the same essay, Barthes attempted to synthesize his theory of myth as follows: myth is a special type of speech (by which he means coded form of language use or communication); myth is not an object, idea, or concept, but rather a form of signification (it is a process rather than a thing); anything can be turned into a myth, though not everything is a myth (they are subject to history); myths are constructed from material that has already been worked on (they are a second-order or meta system that uses pre-existing symbols and icons); myths are not universal, they have to be dealt with in the specificity. Myths can thus take a variety of different forms---at the end of his essay, Barthes lists seven common varieties, all of which can be found in abundance in virtually any newspaper.