The Muses of Truth and Transformation: A Jungian Perspective on Timeless Tales

Drawing on the author’s own experiences as a psychiatrist-psychotherapist, this fascinating new book gathers and analyzes folktales from around the world about adults struggling with conflicts and trying to determine truth. These narratives illustrate how storytelling is crucial to the process of reconciliation.

The stories included within this book feature both familiar and forgotten ones: e.g., ＂The Fisherman and the Djinn＂ from Arabia; ＂Why the Platypus Is Special＂ from Australia; the Native American, ＂How Nanapush Brought the Peace Pipe to the People,＂ and the ancient Greek tale of ＂Baucis and Philemon＂. The anthology retells the tales and discusses them in terms of psychological and spiritual development - the role of individuation and wisdom in reconciling disputes. The tales reveal astonishing cross-cultural similarities about how to do so, and directly apply to many modern dilemmas. Particularly important is a new paradigm of truth and transformation illustrated by long overlooked tales of the Greek Muses.

The Muses of Truth and Transformation draws on Chinen’s research in adult cognitive, emotional, and spiritual development. The new perspective will appeal to Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, as well as students of psychology, mythology, and epistemology.

Allan B. Chinen, MD is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (voluntary), University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is the author of In the Ever After, Once Upon a Midlife, Waking the World and Beyond the Hero, as well as a co-editor of The Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology.