Myth
To be sure, the fulfilment of the Oedipal wish is symbolic rather than literal, disguised rather than overt, unconscious rather than conscious, mental rather than physical, and vicarious rather than direct. By identifying himself with the named hero, the creator or reader of the myth acts out in his mind deeds that he would never dare act out in the world. Even the Oedipal deeds of the named hero are disguised, for the heroic pattern operates at or near the manifest, not the latent, level. Still, the myth does provide fulfilment of a kind and, in light of the conflict between the neurotic’s impulses and the neurotic’s morals, provides the best possible fulfilment. Rank contrasts the neurotic, who has repressed his impulses and so needs an indirect outlet for them, to the ‘pervert’, who acts out his impulses and so presumably has no need of any halfway measure like myth.
Jacob Arlow
Mainstream psychoanalysis has changed considerably since Rank’s Myth of the Birth of the Hero. Led by the development of ego psychology, which has expanded the scope of psychoanalysis from abnormal to normal personality, contemporary psychoanalysts like the American Jacob Arlow (b. 1912) see myth as contributing to normal development rather than to the perpetuation of neurosis. For them, myth helps one to grow up rather than, like Peter Pan, to remain a child. Myth abets adjustment to the social and the physical worlds rather than childish flight from them. Myth may still serve to fulfil wishes of the id (the part of the mind from which instinctual impulses arise), but it serves far more the functions of the ego – defence and adaptation – and of the superego – renunciation. Furthermore, myth for contemporary Freudians serves everyone, not merely neurotics. Put summarily, contemporary Freudians take myth positively rather than, like classical ones, negatively. To quote Arlow:
Psychoanalysis has a greater contribution to make to the study of
mythology than [merely] demonstrating, in myths, wishes often
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encountered in the unconscious thinking of patients. The myth is a particular kind of communal experience. It is a special form of shared fantasy, and it serves to bring the individual into relationship with members of his cultural group on the basis of certain common needs. Accordingly, the myth can be studied from the point of view of its function in psychic integration – how it plays a role in warding off feelings of guilt and anxiety, how it constitutes a form of adaptation to reality and to the group in which the individual lives, and how it influences the crystallization of the individual identity and the formation of the superego.
(Arlow, ‘Ego Psychology and the Study of Mythology’, p. 375)
Where for classical Freudians myths are like dreams, for contemporary Freudians myths are unlike them. Dreams still serve to satisfy wishes, but myths serve either to deny or to sublimate them. For classical Freudians, myths are simply public dreams. For contemporary Freudians, myths, because public, serve to socialize.
Bruno Bettelheim
In his bestselling book The Uses of Enchantment the well-known Freudian analyst Bruno Bettelheim (1903–90), Viennese-born and eventually American-resident, says much the same as Arlow but says it of fairy tales rather than of myths, which he quirkily pits against fairy tales and interprets in a classically Freudian way. Classical Freudians tend to see myths and
fairy tales as akin, just as they do myths and dreams. It is contemporary Freudians who contrast myths to fairy tales, but usually they favour myths over fairy tales, seeing myths as serving the ego or the superego and seeing fairy tales as serving the id. (The key exception among classical Freudians to the paralleling of myths to fairy tales was the Hungarian
anthropologist Géza Róheim [1891–1953], who contrasts myths to fairy tales, or folk tales, in a fashion that presciently anticipates Arlow.)
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Bettelheim does the reverse of Arlow. To be sure, he does not consider myths to be wish fulfilments. Echoing Arlow, he maintains that
Myth
Myths typically involve superego demands in conflict with id-
motivated action, and with the self-preserving desires of the ego.
(Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, p. 37)
But for Bettelheim, in contrast to Arlow, the mythic superego is so unbending that the maturation it espouses is unattainable. Fairy tales no less than myths preach maturation, but they do so more gently and thereby succeed where myths fail. In myths the heroes, who are often gods, succeed only because they are exceptional. In fairy tales the heroes are ordinary persons, whose success inspires emulation. In short, myths for Bettelheim wind up hindering psychological growth, where fairy tales foster it.
Alan Dundes
Not all present-day Freudians have spurned the classical approach to myth. The pre-eminent American folklorist Alan Dundes (b. 1934) is defiantly old fashioned. For him, myth fulfils rather than renounces or sublimates repressed wishes. Declares Dundes:
The content of folklore . . . is largely unconscious. Hence it represents id, not ego, for the most part. From this perspective, ego psychology cannot possibly illuminate much of the content of folklore.
(Dundes, Parsing through Customs, p. xii)
Dundes delights in demonstrating the hidden, antisocial wishes vented by myths – wishes that are as often anal as Oedipal, as often homosexual as heterosexual, and at times completely nonsexual.
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Post-Freudian Rank
While Freud was prepared to grant that ‘the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety’, he was never prepared to make birth the main, let alone the sole, source of anxiety and neurosis. He refused to subordinate the Oedipus Complex, which centres on the father, to the trauma of birth, which necessarily centres on the mother. For Rank, who broke with Freud over this issue, the infant’s anxiety at birth is the source of all subsequent anxiety. Conflict with the father remains, but because he blocks the son’s yearning to return to the mother’s womb rather than because he blocks the son’s Oedipal yearning. Fear of the father is a displacement of fear of the mother, who, moreover, has abandoned, not castrated, her son. Sexual desire for the mother is likewise a means of returning to the womb, not of securing Oedipal satisfaction.
Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero already evinces the hiatus between his subsequent, post-Freudian focus on the hero’s birth and his original, Freudian focus on the hero’s deeds. While the title obviously singles out the hero’s birth, the pattern subordinates the birth to the deeds: the birth is decisive not because of the hero’s separation from his mother but because of the parents’ attempt to fend off at birth the prophesied parricidal consequences. Rank does observe that the son’s birth thereby constitutes defiance of the parents, but it is the parents who oppose the son’s birth, not the son who opposes his own birth.
The real shift comes with Rank’s The Trauma of Birth, in which he systematically interprets all of human life to fit the birth trauma. Rank continues to see myth as wish fulfilment, but the wish now fulfilled is, like that in the rest of culture, either to undo birth or to create a second womb. Where in Myth of the Birth of the Hero the father is the culprit for opposing birth, in The Trauma of Birth the mother is the culprit for giving birth. Oedipus’ blinding of himself
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upon discovering that he has committed incest represents not guilt for his Oedipal deeds but
Myth
a return into the darkness of the mother’s womb, and his final disappearance through a cleft rock into the Underworld expresses once again the same wish tendency to return into the mother earth.
(Rank, The Trauma of Birth, p. 43)
Surely the myth of Adonis would fall here as a case of pre-Oedipal, not Oedipal, attachment to the mother. Yet Adonis’ case is more extreme: he does not even realize that he has been born and
has been thrust into the world. He assumes that he still lives in a womb-like world. Not his birth but his death proves his undoing, and it provides no return to the womb.
C. G. Jung
Where for Freud and Rank heroism is limited to the first half of life, for C. G. Jung it involves the second half even more. For Freud and Rank, heroism involves relations with parents and instincts. For Jung, heroism involves, in addition, relations with the unconscious. In the first half of life heroism means separation not only from parents and antisocial instincts but even more from the unconscious: every child’s managing to forge consciousness is for Jung a supremely heroic feat. Like Freudians, Jungians at once analyse all kinds of myths, not just hero myths, and interpret other kinds heroically. Creation myths, for example, symbolize the creation of consciousness out of the unconscious.
For Freud, the unconscious is the product of the repression of instincts. For Jung, it is inherited rather than created and includes far more than repressed instincts. Independence of the Jungian unconscious therefore means more than independence of instincts. It means the formation of consciousness, the object of which in the first half of life is the external world.
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