Like Jung, Rank saw that there was an intimate relationship between dream and myth.

Myths
are dreams of the masses of the people, expressing the libidinal aims of the collective social
body. The hero is the leading figure in our collective dream, and as such is an image of the Self.
Jung says, “the finest of all symbols of the libido is the human figure, conceived as a demon or
hero." The hero is an image of the 'creative force' of the Self.

In Symbols of Transformation, Jung provides many archetypal images of libidinal aspect of the
Self. We see images of the fire, sun, phallus. In animal terms: the lion, the eagle and the ram.
Each of these symbols represents the creative, libidinal instinct of the Self as revealed in myth
and art. Jung says that the hero myth represents “the longing of the unconscious, of its
unquenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciousness” (para. 299). The hero is
likened to the sun: “the myth of the hero is a solar myth” (para. 299). Jung provides a metaphor
so that we see the heroic movement of the soul in astral images. Jung says:

"The finest of all symbols of the libido is the human figure, conceived as a demon or hero. Here
the symbolism leaves the objective, material realm of astral and meteorological images and
takes on human form, changing into a figure who passes from joy to sorrow, from sorrow to joy,
and, like the sun, now stands high at the zenith and now is plunged into darkest night, only to
rise again in new splendor as the sun, by its own motion and in accordance with its own inner
law, climbs from morn till noon, crosses the meridian and goes its downward way towards
evening, leaving its radiance behind it, and finally plunges into all-enveloping night, so man sets
his course by immutable laws and, his journey over, sinks into darkness, to rise again in his
children and begin the cycle anew" (Jung, para 251).

The sun transcends the earthly realms from which it is arises, reaching up toward the heavenly
skies. Like the sun the hero transcends earthly life, seeking the zenith in heavenly realms. Here
we can see a relationship between father sun and mother earth. The first movement of the soul
is associated with a mythological ascent toward the zenith of the heavenly father sun and the
second movement a return to the mother earth as ocean. The father sun transcends the earthly,
‘going beyond’, up toward the heavenly zenith. Then, once psychic life has archived its solar
aims it begins its second movement: inward, immanence. This movement is a return, a rebirth,
often associated with images of the mother, the sea, the deep earth, the night, the cave.
To better understand this we can go back to the basic drives of psychic life as postulated by
Sigmund Freud. Freud saw that the energy inherent to psychic life, the creative force or libido,
always seeks an object. Freud postulated that libido has four aspects: pressure, source, aim
and an object (1905). With this insight, the question of psychoanalysis became: What is the true
object of libido? The aim of the libido varies with different theories. For the Freudians, the object
is always a pleasure fulfilling object. Post-Freudians often speak of 'object-relations' indicating
that 'libido is primarily object-seeking... rather than pleasure seeking' (Fairbairn, 1941).
For Jung the object of psychic life is the Self. Jung saw that on a biological level libido (as the
creative force) seeks a physical object, while on a psychical level libido seeks an archetypal
object. This archetypal object form the horizons of psychic life.
Instinct exists within the deepest archetypal layers of psychic life, as the urge, the pressure, the
instinct of the soul. Creative force seeks an object. But this begs the question: what is the
archetypal object of psychic life? In the Origins of the Hero, Jung offers an answer. He says:
"the symbolism is plain:
“sun = phallus, moon = vessel (uterus)”
It is with this heiroglyphic equation that we may begin to understand the secrets which Jung has
left behind in the tombs of his scholarly work. In the solar myth the hero is likened to the Sun,
which aims toward the zenith, and then plunges into the depths of the night sea. In the ​Origin of
the Hero (​ CW5), Jung points out in an earlier passage that the sea is an "analogy of the womb."
Here we leave the realm of astral images and descend back into the somatic, the body of life.
The answers to our most profound questions are found in images of bodily life: the creative
force, the libido, seeks an object and the object is the womb. While in bodily life this is the most
simple of all things, in the life of the soul— in archetypal life— it is most profound.
When we look at the hero myth from this perspective we see that the hero is one side of the
equation: the active, the seeking force. The other side of the equation is the object which the
'creative force' seeks. Yet it is quite difficult to articulate this 'object' because it is the very object
of psychic life: mysterious, unknown, hidden, womb-like. We can never quite know this object,
yet it is the teleological aim of psychic life. In this way it is sublime. Kant spoke of the sublime:
"The feeling of the sublime is, therefore, at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the
inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by
reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgement of the
inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the
effort to attain to these is for us a law" (1964).
While the creative force is the raw fact of the phenomenology of being, the urge of being, the
sublime object is the aim of such libidinal desire, and yet always out of reach, always beyond
the adequacy of imagination to represent. Reason cannot get at it, imagination fails to fully
grasp it, and yet we are urged ever closer to it: to join with it in a sort of cosmic union. And in
this cosmic union we become the Self.
Carl Jung understood that the sublime aspect of psychic life is always veiled in feminine images:
it is the very thing, das ding, which hides up the cosmic mother's skirt. These sublime images
represent the hidden, the unobtainable horizon, the sublime object of desire. For Jung this is
best represented as the 'realm of the mothers.' In fact, Jung ends the chapter on the hero with
an extended quotation from Goethe's Faust, speaking of the realm of the mothers:
Here, take this key.
..............
The key will ​smell​ the right place from all others:
Follow it down, it leads you to​ the Mothers​.
..........................
Then to the depths- I could as well say height: It's all the same. From the Existent fleeing, Take
the free world of forms for your delight, Rejoice in things that long have ceased from being. The
busy brood will weave like coiling cloud,
But swing your key to keep away the crowd!
A fiery tripod warns you to beware,
 This is the nethermost place where now you are. You shall behold the Mothers by its light,
Some of them sit, some walk, some stand upright, Just as they please. Formation,
transformation, ​Eternal Mind's eternal recreation.​
Thronged round with images of things to be, They see you not, shadows are all they see. Then
pluck up heart, the danger here is great, Approach the tripod, do not hesitate, And touch it with
the key (emphasis added).
Jung says that "heroes are usually wanderers, and wandering is a symbol of longing, of the
restless urge which never finds its ​object​ of nostalgia for the lost mother" (para 299, emphasis
added). The dynamic play between the cosmic mind and its mother 'object' is the ​'Eternal Mind's
eternal recreation​.' He adds:
"The 'realm of the Mothers' has not a few connections with the womb (CW5, para 182)."
Again and Again in Jung's writing we spiral around the primal relations of psychic life: light and
dark, sun and moon, phallus and womb. Wholeness is realized in the both the dynamic
relationality and divine unity of such opposing forces.This is the nature of the Self.
Carl Jung saw this dynamism of the Self in the hero myth. The creative force exists always in
relation to its object: the sea, the night, the great womb of being. The hero is the image of the
libidinal, instinctual, seeking, passionate aspect of psychic life as it knows wholeness through
union with a sublime otherness. Such a phenomenological reading of mythology reveals a
primordial pulsation in a dynamic play between the known and unknown, between revealed and
hidden, between the primordial father and mother of the Self.
There are many permutations on the hero myth, telling of the trials, tribulations, tragedies of the
hero. If we condense the hero myth, however, and take it as a psychic fact, another view
emerges. The hero myth reveals the primal relationality of the Self. The living soul is heroic in so
far as it completes its journey, finds its object, partakes in creative union, becomes as Self. This
is the diastole and systole of psychic life, the expansion and absorption, transcendence and
immanence.

By partaking in the rhythm of the flow we may realize the telos of soul, the aims of psychic life.
τελος, a Greek word meaning 'consummated goal.' Here the consummation is both psychic
union and divine union, the hieros gamos of being. Such divine union occurs not only at the end
of life, at the end of a heroic journey, but in every moment of life-- as the union of the conscious
and unconscious, container and contained. Not as a collapse into a rigid sense of oneness, but
as a realization of the primordial relationality inherent in the nature of the Self.

This is the potential for wholeness found not only in the individual but in the collective social
body as well. I believe that the social body has realized a state of collective transcendence.
Over the last few thousand years we, the 'collective ego', have been in a process of
transcending the mother-- as earth, as ocean, as womb of life. In doing so we have split off from
the totality of life. To find wholeness we, to discover the collective Self, we must establish a
connection, a reconnection to 'lost Mother.'

With this shift, psychic life is no longer focused on 'going beyond,' but instead on discovering
that which 'lies within.' As we shift from transcendence to immanence the collective imagination
may begin to shift and reform-- the Mother may open as a new horizon within psychic life. Here I
am not speaking of the emergence of classic images of the ancient mother. Nor am I speaking
of a return or regress to our Mother of origin. Instead, I am speaking of the emergence of
something which is currently unrepresentable-- beyond the ability of our current language to
represent in verbal terms. Such knowledge always arises first in images, as seeds of new life,
as represented through the minds of artists, poets and madmen. And then blossoms into words,
bearing fruit in the actions of the social body.

For those trapped in the false transcendence of the ego, the emergence of the mother into
consciousness may appear in negative form only. She appears as the abyss, the void, the
terrible mother-- the womb as vacuity.

For those with a connection to the Self the experience is not one of emptiness alone, but of
fullness also, of the emergence of multiplicity, of interwoven interrelationality between the
mother and father principles. It is here that the soul realizes its aim, and is reborn of/in divine
union.

Faust speaks with the earth spirit, Faust spricht mit dem Erdgeist, Margret Hofheinz-Döring, Öl,
1969. Creative Commons vis wikimedia.
Read More:
Beyond Transcendence: the immanent turn
References:
Carl Jung, Cw 5, Symbols of Transformation (in US Pubic Domain, first published 1912)
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (1790)
Otto Rank, Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1914)