Our history of joint research, meetings, discussions and even translations of Bachelard’s texts began in 2006, when we organized the first joint conference „Mythopoeia 2006” in the palace of Count H. von Keyserling in Kobierzyce near Wroclaw, where Rudolf Steiner used to give lectures. Originally we dealt with the history of myth research, definitions of myth and the contemporary presence of myth, as well as the separation of the concepts of „myth-like forms” and „myth-derived forms”. In this context, we immediately formed an interdisciplinary research group, since myth has been studied by many disciplines in the sciences and humanities. So we began by comparing the approaches of the anthropology of myth, the philosophy of myth, the psychology of myth, the religious studies of myth, trying to determine the specifics of our own philosophical conceptions of myth and the philosophies of myth themself. We were a group of more than a dozen researchers from the Institute of Philosophy and the Institute of Sociology in Wroclaw, and we invited to subsequent conferences and joint publications researchers from other centers in Poland and from other fields, including psychology, communication and cultural studies. For us, the interdisciplinary environment was simply a school of dialogue and interdisciplinarity itself. We understood that myth, symbol, and image function most effectively and interestingly in this environment, and that only through dialogue between perspectives, researchers, and approaches can we do justice to the complexity of these phenomena in both socio-cultural and cognitive space, learning what Gilbert Durand called „reciprocal genesis,” i.e. the intersection of internal, mental, subjective and individual conditions with environmental, external, socio-cultural conditions in the emergence of the phenomena and notions we are studying. The whole research, the conversations, the conference was a wonderful experience – observing and trying to understand the socio-political functioning of colorful, multifaceted myths, symbolic imaginations, imaging processes. Something vivid, rich and strong in the space of mental and psychic life of the individual, as well as in the collective world, cultural history, the dynamics of socio-political processes, in advertising, in popular culture, in the world around us.
We have organized several seminars, nearly thirty conferences, many of them international, and published more than thirty volumes on these topics. We were and still are a multilingual group, and we conduct research in the fields of modern French philosophy (especially the philosophy of Bergson, Bachelard, the anthropology of the structures of the imagination of Gilbert Durand, the philosophy of images of J.-J. Wunenburger), psychological and psychoanalytical interpretations of myth, the functioning of myth and image in political space, the symbolic imagination in the hermeneutics of P. Ricoeur, Kantian and neo-Kantian approaches to the imagination, the functioning of the symbol in Russian philosophy, the philosophy of N. Berdyaev, philosophical aspects of Dostoevsky’s work, the philosophy of German Romanticism, the history of the concept of the unconscious in German philosophy and psychoanalysis, methodological approaches to defining our basic concepts, and many other theoretical threads. In 2017, we established the Mythopoeia Bachelard Society, which immediately began to function as part of the broad network of the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l’Imagnaire (CRI 2 i) based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania bringing together centers from many continents, from Europe, Asia and South America under the leadership of Prof. J-J. Wunenburger and Prof. C. Braga. We hosted Prof. Wunenburger at our home in 2018 at a conference in Szklarska Poreba (“Imagination – Art., Science and Social World”), which also featured guests from the University of St. Petersburg, with whom we have had a long collaboration.
In 2020, we endeavored to establish the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Philosophy of Culture at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Wroclaw, and in 2023 – with inspiration coming from our international cooperation – i.e., ideas present at conferences, in dialogue and discussions with Prof. Randall Auxier (Southern Illinois University, US) and Prof. E. Kramer – we established the Cassirer Center. Our fields of research were thus greatly expanded, as they included Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and American philosophy and culture with its take-ups of S. Langer’s concepts, among others, or the problem of the American mind itself – presented to us in wonderful analyses by Prof. R. Auxier and Prof. Stikkers. We have thus covered a very large theoretical territory – the conceptions of the French, German, Russian, many European and, finally, American traditions. We bring together in our Center more than twenty researchers of different generations, very experienced, like our honorary members, Prof. Krasicki, Prof. Auxier or Prof. Stikkers, and the youngest, like our doctoral students.
