Despite our postmodern, polysemiotic, ironic, avant-garde, deconstructed, psychoanalytical sophistication, it is still so damned difficult for us to shed our historical monotheism. I once heard Karl Kerényi, who taught me mythology in Zurich almost fifty years ago, say it was impossible to return to the Greek style of mind. We cannot escape two thousand years of Christianity and its pervasive monotheistic psychology, which favors an abstracting, cohesive, unifying, and centrally organizing viewpoint—or what psychology has baptized as “ego.” We seem unable to escape obeisance to “one-sidedness” (Jung’s definition of neurosis, by the way), which raises one or another perspective above all others. Thus it is not Hermes who has caught the psychology of our times, but the perdurance of monotheism. Hermes and his computer is merely the fashionable frontman.
The shifts in gods influencing twentieth-century psychology do not indicate a true displacement of the monotheistic model in favor of a polytheistic consciousness. One god rises to the foreground to vanquish all others and then subsides. For a while it was the Great Mother. Neumann, Bowlby, the Kleinians took over the entire pantheon. Earlier there wasthe dominance of the heroic ego: “where id was there ego shall be,” draining the Zuider Zee like Hercules cleaning the stables, resisting the regressive monsters and sirens of the id, like Ulysses tied to the mast, a good-enough husband heading home. We have also had a monocular focus on Artemis and on the Amazons with anti-phallic combative feminism. And, we have had, or been had by, a one-sided identification with the abandoned child, victimized, abused, and sentimentalized.