What is Mind & Mythos?

A re-introduction + Q3 update

It has been over two years since I first published to Mind & Mythos. For those who don’t know, my original intention in starting this blog was to explore interesting topics at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and mythology, with the rather lofty long-term goal of constructing a unifying framework through which to understand all of human psychology (I call this the ‘Mind & Mythos Project’).

A lot has changed since I first published Understanding Human Personality. I’ve written on topics as diverse as psychology, psychotherapy, and cognitive science, social media, literature, politics, theology, aesthetics, and, of course, mythology. Over these two years I have interacted with countless readers and writers from all walks of life, and have drawn a readership of incredibly intelligent and interesting people (yes, you specifically!). I now host monthly conversations about great essays, Essay Club, in which I have discussed an even wider array of topics. It’s fair to say that Mind & Mythos is not just about psychology anymore.

So what is this thing? The short answer is that Mind & Mythos is a blog hosted by me, Dan Ackerfeld (real name¹), where I publish essays about things that I find interesting. As a psychologist I naturally gravitate toward psychology-related topics, but I’ve also always been a keen reader of philosophy, mythology, fantasy fiction, classic literature, history, religion and spirituality, and obscure political theory. The Mind & Mythos Project is still a major focus of this blog, but if you find any of these other topics interesting, you can look forward to reading about them here at some point too.

The long answer is that Mind & Mythos has evolved. Over the past two years I’ve discovered more about myself and what makes me tick, intellectually speaking, and my writing has changed to reflect this. I think this is something that happens to all writers over a long enough time scale—you start with a single idea, perhaps enough for a series of essays or a book, and as that well runs dry you start to incorporate new sources of inspiration. Naturally, those sources tend to reflect the writer’s own interests. For me those inspirations are often very old ones; I enjoy reading old books and essays, I’m fascinated by old ideas and traditions, and when I write fiction, I write about old-timey worlds populated by wizards and warriors. I still enjoy writing about psychology, of course, but as I’ve slowly written some of the bigger psychological ideas out of my system, other interests have started to reveal themselves.

There’s another thing that has caused this shift in my approach to writing. When I first started Mind & Mythos, the most recent examples of my writing (for years) were either academic or clinical in nature. Academic and clinical conventions have their place, but that place isn’t on a blog for interested laymen where the writing is supposed to captivate an audience. With this in mind, I’ve been trying to develop my authorial voice and content choice to suit the blog format. It’s slow going—I think this is something that requires active, intentional work to develop, and such work requires the kind of time and focus that I encounter only occasionally at this stage in my life. But I’m doing what I can, and recent posts like How Great Writers Become Great and Perhaps We Expect Too Much of God are products of this effort.

All of this is to say that you can expect to keep reading about psychology at Mind & Mythos, but you can also expect to see essays on other topics as I pursue my interests and work to develop myself as a writer. I’m not a STEM guy—I’m not likely to post anything about AI or string theory any time soon—but anything that might broadly fall under the banner of ‘the Humanities’ is fair game. If this interests you too, then stay tuned! I have 20-something drafts on a variety of topics all waiting to be written up. If it doesn’t interest you, that’s fine, but consider sticking around for the psych stuff anyway. There’s a lot more of that on the way.

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2024 Goal Progress - Q3

Substack

Mind & Mythos

2024 goals: monthly Essay Club posts, quarterly updates, and semi-regular essays on all the topics usually covered by M&M.

For various IRL reasons I wasn’t able to publish as much as I would have liked over the past three months. But I did post two great Essay Club posts, on The Extended Mind and Tradition and the Individual Talent), and now that things have calmed down a bit I hope and intend to publish more frequently between now and the end of the year.

What’s next? I’ve been making steady progress on the second chapter of The Stories We Tell, and I have a couple of shorter pieces in the pipeline. I won’t spoil these just yet, but if you’ve enjoyed some of my recent broad-topic pieces I think you’ll enjoy these too.

Mythopoetics and Songs of Sarenthé

I very much intend to write more fiction and poetry. It hasn’t happened this quarter—partly due to my busy-ness, and partly due to a lack of inspiration—but it’s still my intention to return to these side-blogs.

I’ve actually been weighing up whether to merge my Mythopoetics content into Mind & Mythos. This would streamline things a bit, keeping most of my content in one place, and allowing for more regular posts, but I wanted to get some feedback on this before going ahead with it. What do you all think? Would it bother you to have my poetry or Art of Poetry essays published alongside my regular Mind & Mythos content? Please vote below!

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Reading

2024 goal: Familiarise myself with the Arthurian legends and develop an understanding of their mythological and psychological significance.

This is a vague goal, but one with which I feel that I’m on track. I’m slowly making my way through Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian Romances at the moment, have read a few other texts, and have just finished a 12-hour Great Courses lecture series on the history and legends of King Arthur (very, very good—if you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend it). This has all been a lot of fun, and once I’ve read a few renditions of the Grail stories I plan to go deep on the various interpretations of the Grail, both in my reading and on the blog.

Alongside this, I’ve started a couple of audiobooks on other topics that interest me, and have been reading some classic fiction for my local book club. In short, I’m doing a lot of reading and listening at the moment, and enjoying it immensely.

Over the next few months I hope to finish The Righteous Mind audiobook and a couple of the books I’ve been sitting on for a while. We’ll see how I go.

Current books:

• Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances:

  • Erec and Enide: Completed

  • Cliges: Not started

  • The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot): Not started

  • The Knight with the Lion (Yvain): Not started

  • The Story of the Grail (Perceval): In progress

• Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (audiobook): 9/12 chapters read

• Tom Holland, Dominion: Started

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: 101/170 pages read

• Joseph Campbell, Romance of the Grail: 95/233 pages read

• Numa de Coulanges, The Ancient City: 70/323 pages read.

Completed:

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

• Dorsey Armstrong, King Arthur: History and Legend (The Great Courses audiobook/lecture series)

• Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

• J. R. R. Tolkien (translator), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

• Albert Camus, The Stranger

• John Whitworth, Writing Poetry

• Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

• Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return

• Epictetus, The Enchiridion

• Neema Parvini, The Prophets of Doom (audiobook)

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Exercise

Nada. This is getting embarrassing—anyone got any fitness tips for time-poor dads?

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Poetry

2024 goal: Improve my poetry writing, and publish at least one poem per month.

Alas, I’ve written no poetry this quarter. I’ve been reading poetry—my local book club is reading T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets this month, so I’ve been immersing myself in this and some other of Eliot’s poetry—but I’ve been experiencing a bit of writer’s block in the poetry department.

It’s a strange thing. Over these past three months I’ve experienced a number of things that one would expect to generate poetical feelings (grief, love, excitement, fatherly pride), but my poetry doesn’t seem to flow this way. I think for me it’s a more intellectual pursuit, a way for me to explore feelings like deracination and suffering in a less academic way. I suspect this is why I resonate so much with Eliot’s work and ideas—his poems can be deeply personal, but they are also soaked in allusions to a plethora of works from the Western canon and beyond. He’s an intellectual at heart, and his work reflects this.

Either way, I’m going to keep reading poetry and other literary works, and will try to dedicate more time to sitting down with a notepad and just writing. I’ll see what comes of it—maybe, eventually, you will too.

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Language Learning: German

First goal: Complete section 1 of Duolingo’s German course.

Not too much to say after my first three months. I achieved a little less than I planned to, but still managed to complete half of the first Duolingo German module. It’s all pretty simple so far—many of the words sound similar to their English counterparts—but you’ve got to start somewhere. I’ll keep working on this between now and the next update.

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A slightly underwhelming update, but an update nevertheless! Please take some time to vote in the poll above, and feel free to share any other thoughts in the comments below. I’ll see you all again on the 12th for Essay Club.

- D

1. Don’t believe everything you read online.