Myth and Psyche - eBook

The volume aims to address two closely connected themes: the genesis of motifs and figures in modern art (with particular reference to the avant-garde and their theory of art) and the mythology – or mythologization – of the modern. The second theme consists of the tendency on one hand to interpret the modern era and its artistic phenomena through myth and on the other to produce a mythology of the modern through a hybridization with motifs from the more recent tradition. Walter Benjamin confronts the “mythology of the modern.” The ambiguity of his position, often evoked, lies in his interest in mythology, which he partly uses as a symbolic apparatus and simultaneously seeks to combat. He indeed conducts a conceptual and methodological campaign against a “mythological” interpretation of the modern; paradoxically, Benjamin performs a political action precisely when he “descends” into the “underground,” into the spaces of the mythical, the “sacred,” and the magical: his “incursions” into these “intermediate spaces” assume the value of a political-cultural battle against those who want to interpret the phenomena of the modern as “inevitable” and “inexplicable.” In his essay on the Surrealists and Aragon, but especially in his *Passagen-Werk*, Benjamin radically denies the possibility of interpreting the modern through myth. The anthropological approach to this phenomenon is also represented by a scientifically more founded current of thought with which Benjamin repeatedly engaged: Collège de France, Bachofen, Kerényi, and, in his own way, Aby Warburg. Psychoanalysis itself (and the aforementioned anthropology) uses a mythological iconography. When Benjamin speaks of “play,” he refers to the verbal play of the Dadaists, but also to children's play. The mimetic faculty of children's play, which expresses the unconscious and is often a “distortion” of pain or trauma, should be interpreted in light of Freud's writings. In *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*, Freud indeed explains the defense mechanisms of the psyche – he actually speaks of the “cerebral cortex” – against external stimuli. In this way, Benjamin attempts to construct a heuristic system capable of understanding how the artistic products of the modern are perceived. Author: [Daniela Padularosa](https://www.nepedizioni.com/daniela-padularosa/) Edited by: [Luciana La Stella](https://www.nepedizioni.com/luciana-la-stella/)