اسطوره تولد قهرمان مقدمه
The Myth of the Birth of the Hero
A Psychological Exploration of Myth
EXPANDED AND UPDATED EDITION
Otto Rank
Translated by Gregory C. Richter, Ph.D., and E. James Lieberman, M.D.
With an Introductory Essay by Robert A. Segal, Ph.D.
Introductory Essay Robert A. Segal, Ph.D.
Theories of myth purport to cover all kinds of myths, but in practice every theory is best suited to a particular category of myth. Freudian theory best fits hero myths, for the subject matter of myth for Freudians is striving and accomplishment. Heroism can evince itself at varying stages of psychological development. At the Oedipal stage the Freudian hero may be the stereotypically young rebel defying a tyrannical father but alternatively may be the dutiful heir of the father. Heroism can even go back to infancy, with birth and survival the chief feats. The hero can also be female. Conversely, a male hero can even accomplish the female feat of giving birth to the world.
The study of hero myths goes back at least to 1871, when the Victorian anthropologist Edward Tylor showed that many of them follow a uniform plot: the hero is exposed at birth, is saved by other humans or animals, and grows up to become a national hero (1871, 1:254–55). In 1876 the Austrian scholar Johann Georg von Hahn asserted that all “Aryan” hero tales follow an “exposure and return” formula more comprehensive than Tylor’s (1876, 340). 1 In each of von Hahn’s fourteen cases the hero is born illegitimately, because of fear of the prophecy of his future greatness is abandoned by his father, is saved by animals and raised by a lowly couple, fights wars, returns home triumphant, defeats his persecutors, frees his mother, becomes king, founds a city, and dies young. Similarly, in 1928 the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp sought to demonstrate that Russian fairy tales follow a common biographical plot in which the hero goes off on a successful adventure and upon his return marries and gains the throne (1968). Propp’s pattern skirts both the birth and the death of the hero. While Tylor, von Hahn, and Propp all had their own theories of myth, none applied his theory to hero myths. The three confined themselves to establishing a common plot, or pattern, for hero myths and did not seek to determine the origin, function, or subject matter of the myths.
Of those scholars who have not only delineated patterns but also theorized about hero myths, the most important have been the Viennese psychoanalyst Otto Rank (1884–1939), the American mythographer Joseph Campbell (1904–87), and the English folklorist Lord Raglan (1885–1964). Rank later broke irreparably with Sigmund Freud, but when he wrote The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909; trans. 1914), he was, at least overtly, a Freudian apostle. 2 Freud himself wrote the section on “family romances.” 3 Although Campbell was never a full-fledged Jungian, he wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) as a kindred soul of C. G. Jung. 4 Raglan wrote The Hero (1936) as a theoretical ally of James Frazer, who tied myths to ritualistic regicide. Having elsewhere compared this trio, I confine myself here to Rank. 5 Along with Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, the classically Freudian analysis of myth is Karl Abraham’s Dreams and Myths, also originally published in 1909 (trans. 1913). 6 Freud’s own key analysis of myth, that of Oedipus, occurs in The Interpretation of Dreams (100; trans. 1953, 4:261–64). 7 Abraham and Rank alike follow Freud in comparing myths with dreams (see Freud 1964a, 25) and in declaring both the disguised, symbolic fulfillment of repressed, overwhelmingly Oedipal wishes lingering in the adult mythmaker or reader of the myth. Both Abraham and Rank dismiss those theorists, called nature mythologists, who either take myth to be about the physical world rather than about the human mind or, worse, turn myths about humans into myths about the physical world. Thus the story of Oedipus becomes a symbol of the triumph of light over darkness: “Oedipus … is the solar hero who murders his procreator, the darkness; shares his couch with the mother, the gloaming, from whose lap, the dawn, he has been born, and dies blinded, as the setting sun” (Rank 1914, 10). 8 Rank’s work is much fuller and sprightlier than Abraham’s, and the second, till now untranslated, 1922 edition of the work is richer still. Rank considers far more myths than Abraham, and studies them in far more detail. The number of myths he surveys actually constitutes evidence for the universality of the Oedipus complex. Most of all, Rank establishes a common plot for myths. True, he can do so because, unlike Abraham, he limits himself to hero myths, but he boldly implies that all myths can be seen as hero myths. In addition to The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Rank wrote Der Künstler (1907), The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (1912; trans. 1992), The Don Juan Legend (1922–24; trans. 1975), The Trauma of Birth (1924; trans. 1929), The Double (1925; trans. 1971), Will Therapy (1929 and 1931; trans. 1978a [1936a]), Truth and Reality (1929; trans. 1978b [1936b]), Psychology and the Soul (1930; trans. 1998), Art and Artist (1932; trans. 1932a), Modern Education (1932; trans. 1932b), and Beyond Psychology (1941). In 1913 he and Hanns Sachs wrote an accessible overview of applied psychoanalysis entitled The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences (trans. 1916). Their chapter on “Myths and Legends” matches the analysis in the first edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.
For Rank, following Freud, heroism deals with what Jungians call the “first half of life.” The first half—birth, childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—involves the establishment of oneself as an independent person in the external world. The attainment of independence expresses itself concretely in the securing of a job and a mate. The securing of either requires both separation from one’s parents and mastery of one’s instincts. Independence of one’s parents means not the rejection of them but selfsufficiency. Similarly, independence of one’s instincts means not the denial of them but control over them. When Freud says that the test of happiness is the capacity to work and love, he is clearly referring to the goals of the first half of life, which for him hold for all of life. Freudian problems involve a lingering attachment to parents or instincts. To depend on one’s parents for the satisfaction of instincts, or to satisfy instincts in antisocial ways, is to be stuck, or fixated, at a childish level of psychological development. Rank’s pattern, which he applies to more than thirty hero myths, falls within the first half of life. Roughly paralleling von Hahn’s pattern, of which he was apparently unaware, Rank’s goes from the hero’s birth to his attainment of a “career”:
The hero is the child of most distinguished parents; usually the son of a king. His origin is preceded by difficulties, such as continence, or prolonged barrenness, or secret intercourse of the parents, due to external prohibition or obstacles. During the pregnancy, or antedating the same, there is a prophecy, in the form of a dream or oracle, cautioning against his birth, and usually threatening danger to the father, or his representative. As a rule, he [i.e., the son] is surrendered to the water, in a box. He is then saved by animals, or by lowly people (shepherds), and is suckled by a female animal, or by a humble woman. After he has grown up, he finds his distinguished parents, in a highly versatile fashion; takes his revenge on his father, on the one hand, and is acknowledged, on the other, and finally he achieves rank and honors. (1914, 61)
Literally, or consciously, the hero, here always male, is a historical or legendary figure like Oedipus. He is heroic because he rises from obscurity to, typically, the throne. Literally, he is an innocent victim of either his parents or, ultimately, fate. While his parents have yearned for a child and sacrifice him only to save the father, they nevertheless do sacrifice him. The hero’s revenge, if the parricide is even committed knowingly, is, then, understandable: who would not consider killing one’s would-be killer? Symbolically, or unconsciously, the hero is heroic not because he dares to win a throne but because he dares to kill his father. The killing is definitely intentional, and the cause is not revenge but sexual frustration. The father has refused to surrender his wife—the real object of the son’s efforts: “[A]s a rule the deepest, generally unconscious root of the dislike of the son for the father, or of two brothers for each other, is referable to the competition for the tender devotion and love of the mother” (Rank 1914, 74). Too horrendous to face, the true meaning of the hero myth gets covered up by the concocted story, which makes the father, not the son, the culprit. The pattern is simply “the excuse, as it were, for the hostile feelings which the child harbors against his father, and which in this fiction are projected against the father” (Rank 1914, 68–69). 9 What the hero seeks gets masked as power, not incest. Most of all, who the hero is becomes some third party—the named hero—rather than either the creator of the myth or anyone stirred by it. Identifying himself with the named hero, the mythmaker or reader of the myth vicariously revels in the hero’s triumph, which in fact is his own. He is the real hero of the myth, which, properly deciphered, is not biography but autobiography. Literally, the myth culminates in the hero’s attainment of a throne. Symbolically, the hero gains a mate as well. One might, then, conclude that the myth fittingly expresses the Freudian goal of the first half of life. In actuality, it expresses the opposite. The wish fulfilled is not for detachment from one’s parents and from one’s antisocial instincts but, on the contrary, for the most intense possible relationship to one’s parents and for the most antisocial of urges: parricide and incest, even rape. Taking one’s father’s job and one’s mother’s hand does not quite spell independence of them.
The mythmaker or reader is an adult, but the wish vented by the myth is that of a child of three to five: “Myths are, therefore, created by adults, by means of retrograde childhood fantasies, the hero being credited with the myth-maker’s personal infantile history” (Rank 1914, 82). The fantasy is the fulfillment of the Oedipal wish to kill one’s father in order to gain access to one’s mother. The myth fulfills a wish never outgrown by the adult who either invents or uses it. That adult is psychologically an eternal child. Having never developed an ego strong enough to master his instincts, he is neurotic: “There is a certain class of persons, the so-called psychoneurotics, shown by the teachings of Freud to have remained children, in a sense, although otherwise appearing grown up” (Rank 1914, 63). Because no mere child can overpower his father, the mythmaker imagines being old enough to do so. In short, the myth expresses not the Freudian goal of the first half of life but the fixated childhood goal that keeps one from accomplishing it. To be sure, the fulfillment 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: “[T]he myth is constituted as compensation for disowned psychic realities and the justifiable projection of these upon superhuman gods and heroes who may still be permitted that which has become shocking to man” (Rank and Sachs 1916, 38). Even the Oedipal deeds of the named hero are disguised, for the heroic pattern operates at or near the manifest, not the latent, level. 10 Still, the myth does provide fulfillment of a kind and, in light of the conflict between the neurotic’s impulses and the neurotic’s morals, provides the best possible fulfillment. It constitutes a compromise between “powerful mental tendencies clamoring for expression and at the same time … the counter impulses which keep these from complete achievement” (Rank and Sachs 1916, 36). 11 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 (1914, 93). 12
Contemporary Psychoanalysis
The first issue to be considered is how much psychoanalysis—mainstream psychoanalysis—has changed since 1909. Led by the development of ego psychology, which has expanded psychoanalysis from a theory of abnormal personality to a theory of normal personality, contemporary Freudians like the American Jacob Arlow 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 fulfill id wishes, but it serves far more the ego functions of defense and adaptation and the superego function of 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 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. (1961, 375)
For classical Freudians, myths are like dreams. Declares Abraham, the title of whose book says it all: “I aspire to an interpretation of myths after the model of dream interpretation” (1913, 13). For contemporary Freudians, myths are unlike dreams. Where dreams still serve to satisfy wishes, myths serve either to deny or to sublimate them. Writes Mark Kanzer: “Where the dream represents the demands of the instincts, the myth tends to perpetuate and represent the demands of society on the mental apparatus for symbolization and acceptance” (1964, 32). For classical Freudians, myths are simply public dreams: “The manifestation of the intimate relation between dream and myth … entirely justifies the interpretation of the myth as a dream of the masses of the people” (Rank 1914, 6). For contemporary Freudians, myths, because public, serve to socialize: “Myths are instruments of socialization” (Arlow 1961, 379). In his best-selling book The Uses of Enchantment (1976) Freudian analyst Bruno Bettelheim 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. 13 It is contemporary Freudians who contrast myths to fairy tales, but usually they favor myths over fairy tales, seeing myths as serving the ego or the superego and seeing fairy tales as serving the id. Bettelheim does the reverse. To be sure, he does not consider myths to be wish fulfillments. In fact, he seems to echo Arlow, himself uncited, in maintaining that “Myths typically involve superego demands in conflict with id-motivated action, and with the self-preserving desires of the ego” (Bettelheim 1977, 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 in gentler ways and thereby succeed where myths fail: “In the myth there is only insurmountable difficulty and defeat; in the fairy tale there is equal peril, but it is successfully overcome” (Bettelheim 1977, 199). In myths the heroes, who are often gods, succeed 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 spur it. 14
The key exception among classical Freudians to the paralleling of myths to fairy tales is the Hungarian anthropologist Géza Róheim, who contrasts myths to fairy tales, or folktales, in a fashion that presciently anticipates Arlow. For Róheim, myths provide “a more adult” and folktales “a more infantile” “form of the same conflict” (1941, 279). Folktales are sheer fantasies: “[T]he child obtains a fulfilment in imagination of those unconscious wishes which it cannot yet obtain in reality” (1922, 181). By contrast, myths “link up phantasy and reality” (1941, 275). Oedipal folktales end in parricide; Oedipal myths end in submission to the resurrected, triumphant father, who is the real hero (see Róheim 1941, 277– 78). Where in the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk Jack outsmarts the ogre, becomes rich, and lives happily ever after (see Róheim 1941, 275), in the myth of Prometheus the hero “becomes the representative of renunciation; and his achievement, the great cultural act of the discovery of fire, is performed with energy, or better libido, that has been diverted from its original aim” (Róheim 1974, 260). Moreover, Prometheus is punished by Zeus for stealing fire: “The desire [id] continually returns (the liver) and is continually eaten by the eagle (superego)” (Róheim 1974, 261). 15 Even if the case of Prometheus or that of Oedipus involves punishment and only eventual submission rather than initial renunciation, myth is still not, like folktale, the sheer fulfillment of wishes.
Much like Róheim, whom he acknowledges only in passing, Arlow takes fairy tales as serving to fulfill wishes and takes myths as serving to renounce or sublimate them. Just like Róheim, Arlow contrasts Jack to Prometheus and then adds the case of Moses at Mount Sinai. Manifestly, all three stories describe a hero’s ascent to the domain of an “omnipotent figure resident in the heavens” and a return “with some token of power, wealth, or knowledge” (Arlow 1961, 381). But where Jack brashly steals whatever he wants from the ogre, Prometheus fears and is punished by Zeus. Still, like Jack, he steals. By contrast, Moses ascends Mount Sinai as the servant, not the antagonist, of God and relays God’s laws to the Israelites below:
The fairy-tale version [i.e., Jack and the Beanstalk] of this problem belong[s] to the wishfulfilling tendency of childhood in which contribution of the superego is minimal and unformed and the fear of retaliation is disposed of omnipotently. … What is epitomized in this variation [i.e., the myth of Prometheus] is the stage beyond the untroubled wish fulfillment of the simple fairy tale, the overwhelming impact of the fear of retaliation. … What was originally [i.e., in Prometheus] a crime of defiance and aggression against the gods is, in this later version [i.e., the myth of Moses], represented as carrying out the wishes of God Himself. (Arlow 1961, 382–83)
Where Prometheus is put in his place for daring to challenge god, Moses is elevated to godlike status for deferring to god. Moses thus fulfills his wish to become the father, but not by toppling him. Ironically, Abraham also focuses on the cases of Prometheus and Moses but argues that the obedient Moses is a “displacement” for a Promethean-like, rebellious, Oedipal Moses, who, after all, is barred from entering the Promised Land (see Abraham 1913, 50–51). 16 As for Rank, so for Arlow, the presumably male mythmaker or reader identifies himself with Moses and thereby vicariously becomes the real hero of the myth, but now as lawgiver rather than as rebel: “The mythology of religion fosters social adaptation of the individual and integration with the community and its values by virtue of the fact that the individual unconsciously identifies with the idealized qualities of the mythological hero” (Arlow 1982, 188). For Arlow, as for Freud, Rank, and Abraham, myth represents a compromise, but not, as for them, in the form of the disguised rather than open fulfillment of wishes. Rather, myth combines fulfillment with sublimation and renunciation. It satisfies at once id, ego, and superego. 17
What would ego psychologists say of the myth of Oedipus? Presumably, they would focus not on what precedes Oedipus’ deeds—his pre-Oedipal stage—but on what follows the deeds: the guilt that overwhelms him once he discovers what he has done. The punishment that he immediately imposes on himself goes far beyond what was demanded by the Delphic Oracle. Still, the ideal myth for ego psychologists would be one in which the hero renounces or sublimates his antisocial urges in the first place. Not all present-day Freudians have spurned the classical approach. 18 The preeminent American folklorist Alan Dundes (1975, 1980, 1987, 1989, 1997) is defiantly old-fashioned. For him, myth fulfills 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” (1987, 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 nonsexual altogether. 19
Also against the contemporary Freudian emphasis on the adaptive function of myth stands the American analyst Harry Slochower (1970a, 1970b). Distinguishing “myth” from “mythopoesis,” he grants that myth, as part of religion, espouses renunciation and sublimation, as Arlow asserts, but argues that mythopoesis, or myth transformed by individual artists, touts rebellion. In mythopoesis the hero, undertaking a journey that roughly duplicates that etched by the barely acknowledged Campbell, creates new values, ones not easily harmonized with old values. Slochower contrasts Rank’s heroic pattern, which by Slochower’s superficial rendition ends cheerfully with the hero’s triumphant return to the community, to his own, which ends with only a temporary modus vivendi (see Slochower 1970a, 25; 1970b, 153). Yet Slochower, in contemporary fashion, attributes rebellion to the ego and not to the id: “[W]hereas in mythology there is pressure toward conformity, in mythopoesis we have a change in function which allows a greater role of the ego, as well as of a more critical individualized superego” (1970b, 155).
From the perspective of contemporary psychoanalysis, Rank’s analysis seems classically Freudian. Myths are like dreams. 20 Myths are also like fairy tales. All three evince the satisfaction of repressed, antisocial wishes. 21 The mythic hero topples his father, not submits to him, and does so to secure sexual access to his mother. There is neither sublimation nor renunciation.
Post-Freudian Rank
The real issue is not how contemporarily Freudian The Myth of the Birth of the Hero is but how Freudian it is altogether. How much does the much expanded and revised 1922 second edition, published only two years before The Trauma of Birth, yet never translated into English until now, reflect post-Freudian Rank? How much does even the first, 1909 edition do so? To begin with, what is meant by later, independent Rank? In contrast to Freud, Rank—Rank his own person—makes the prime relationship for everyone that to one’s mother rather than to the parent of the same sex. Because the maternal relationship goes back to birth and infancy, the prime stage of life is pre-Oedipal rather than Oedipal. The relationship to the father comes later—in, above all, the Oedipal stage. The relationship to the mother is originally that of union, and the deepest feelings toward her are those of dependence and identification. With birth comes the first trauma: that of separation. Because the mother carries the fetus yet then bears it— kicks it out—and because the mother feeds yet also weans her child, feelings toward the mother are ambivalent. Like the father for Freud, the mother for Rank is feared as well as loved.
Rankian therapy seeks to reestablish the original bond, though now with the therapist. The therapist is not a blank slate onto whom one projects— transfers—a past relationship to a parent but a present partner. Empathy counts more than insight. Therapy aims at reexperiencing separation—in the form of the termination of therapy—but without the trauma that accompanied the original separation.
While Freud, at least as early as 1909, 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” (1953, 5:400, n. 3), he was never prepared to make birth the main, let alone the sole, source of anxiety and neurosis. 22 He refused to subordinate the Oedipus complex, which centers on the father, to the trauma of birth, which necessarily centers on the mother. For Rank, 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.
For yet later Rank, the infant, while still seeking to remain with the mother, simultaneously seeks to separate from her. Life is an ongoing struggle between the desire for autonomy and the desire for reunion. The striving for autonomy leads to the fear of decision over one’s life and so to what Rank calls the “life fear.” The yearning for reunion leads to the fear of the loss of individuality and so to what Rank calls the “death fear.” The conflict between id and superego is simply one place where the conflict between the desire to separate and the desire to unite is played out. The conflict cannot be resolved, but it can be diminished. Mental health consists of a balance between the inclinations. One can be independent yet still connected to others.
The mother matters less as the object of fulfillment, sexual or otherwise, and more as the nurturer. Indeed, the father matters in the same way. Both parents are desexualized. The child seeks not to kill one parent in order to have sex with the other but to retain the love of both without sacrificing autonomy. Even a parricidal or matricidal urge would still stem from a desire for separation. The converse urge for union with the parents would stem not from an incestuous desire but from cowardice.
For Rank, the key entity in the psyche is the will, which is much stronger than its closest Freudian counterpart, the ego. Where Freud’s ego develops out of the denial or delay of drives, Rank’s will is innate. Where Freud’s ego can at best mediate between the drives and the superego, Rank’s will can master and direct the drives. Where Freud’s ego strives only to mediate, Rank’s will strives creatively to forge an independent person. By the will Rank means not a Nietzschean or Adlerian will to power but a will to autonomy. The cause of neurosis is not a weak ego but a weak will, which therapy strives to strengthen. Resistances are taken as expressions of the will and are therefore not to be dismantled but to be reinforced. The will is weak because it is burdened by guilt, which is reflected in the ambivalence felt toward the act of separation.
Almost from birth, children assert their will against that of their parents in order to forge their independence. Their will becomes a “counterwill.” Refusal to submit to toilet training evinces this counterwill, and adolescent rebellion evinces it above all. At the same time children remain dependent on their parents and afraid of the world. Their would-be independence stirs anxiety. More, the pristine union with the mother makes the child empathize with her feelings of loss and rejection, thereby stirring even more guilt. Therapy seeks to enable patients to experience separation without either guilt or anxiety.
There are four kinds of persons: average, creative, neurotic, and antisocial (criminal and psychopathic). Average, or “normal,” persons are conformists. They overcome the tension between separation and union by surrendering their independence to the community, and Rank has disdain for their easy conformity. Creative persons, for whom he has the most respect, vaunt their independence by setting themselves against the community. Their alienation from the group is willed. Creativity is not limited to the arts. It is to be found in science and, even more, in the creation of a distinctive self. Neurotic persons, whom Rank, like Freud, seeks to help, are also alienated from the community, but they are too stymied by guilt and anxiety to assert themselves. Their will is a counterwill. Where Freud deems neurosis failed normality, Rank deems it failed creativity. The neurotic is a failed artist, not a failed “normal.” As the expression of will, creativity signals the striving for autonomy more than sublimated sexuality (see, e.g., Rank 1932a, 26).
Creative persons establish original selves not only for themselves but also for others. They are like Erik Erikson’s Luther—Rank’s own favorite example being Saint Paul. 23 In giving to others, creative persons alleviate the guilt they feel for their separation. Where neurotics assert themselves by rejecting the world, average persons reject themselves for the world. Where the neurotic separates without uniting, the ordinary person unites without separating. Average persons accept themselves as society defines them. Creative persons recreate themselves. Their creation is a rebirth.
Creative persons are heroes—not, as for Freud, in asserting themselves at the expense of others but, on the contrary, in providing a self for others to emulate. Heroism is the glorification of creativity, not of aggression. The creative person is a successful hero; the neurotic, a failed one. 24 The ultimate goal of separation is the forging of not just an independent self but an immortal one. Immortality constitutes the highest form of creativity. The birth of a child signifies one’s own mortality: with life looms death. For Rank, as for Freud, the father thus fears the newborn, but as a threat to his immortal self, not to his mortal one. 25 The creative person forges not merely a new identity but an immortal one. Freud’s own immortality came through psychoanalysis itself. Average persons achieve immortality by adhering to an existing ideology.
The Myth of the Birth of the Hero
The issue at hand is how much post-Freudian Rank is to be found in the second or even the first edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. In my opinion the second edition (translated in this volume) does not so much break with the first as exacerbate the divide already found in the first edition between Freudian and post-Freudian Rank. That the second edition drops almost nothing from the first and instead adds to it supports this view. In both editions there is a hiatus between the post-Freudian focus on the hero’s birth and the Freudian focus on the hero’s deeds—with the emphasis in the second edition shifting toward birth. In both editions there is a parallel disjunction between the post-Freudian title and the Freudian pattern, neither of which changes. Although 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.
In the second edition Rank presents a series of dreams that connect birth to water, as in the pattern (see pp. 53–58 in this volume). But the dreams are all women’s, not men’s, and the anxiety is over giving birth, not over being born. Rank is confident that he has shown that in hero myths exposure on water symbolizes birth, water symbolizes the amniotic fluid, and the “little chests, baskets, or ships” in which the newborn is placed symbolize the womb (pp. 55, 58). But the meaning of these elements still comes from the dreams of would-be mothers, not fathers. It is not easy to tie the dreams recounted here to the two wishes that Rank retains from the first edition: the wish for perfect parents, which is fulfilled by the family romance, and the Oedipal wish, which is fulfilled by the myth as a whole. Similarly, there is no apparent connection between the folk belief that Rank also introduces in the second edition—the common, conscious belief that birth is symbolized by exposure to water (see pp. 58–67)—and either wish in hero myths. Newborns may face drowning, but not because they have been left to die by their parents; rather, birth itself is dangerous. Indeed, as Rank’s examples recount, parents save their children from drowning. In the second edition Rank asks rhetorically whether, after “the overwhelming evidence for this birth symbolism, doubts remain about its application to the hero myth” (p. 61), but in actuality he is still trying to link two distinct subjects: the trauma of birth and the trauma of the Oedipus complex. When he declares that “a deeper generalization and clarification is expressed in the idea of birth in the water, which also represents the exposure myth par excellence—birth itself” (p. 66), he is referring to the precariousness of birth itself. But in the pattern, exposure in water means exposure after birth, not exposure at birth. Here exposure is the passive way the parents plot to have their newborn die, not get born. Having failed to heed the divine warning against birth itself, they must now scurry to kill their son at birth. Rank continually conflates exposure as birth with its opposite: exposure as death. He does observe that in the myth exposure as birth is presented as exposure as death: “The children come out of the ‘water.’ The basket, box or receptacle simply means the container, the womb; so that the exposure directly signifies the process of birth, although it is represented by its opposite” (1914, 69–70). But if the pattern is guiding the symbolism, exposure as birth should symbolize exposure as death, not vice versa. That Rank here makes exposure as death the symbol of exposure as birth underscores his preoccupation, even in the first edition, with birth itself.
Beyond simply declaring exposure as death to symbolize exposure as birth, Rank connects the disparity to the pattern: “The first reason for the representation of the birth by its opposite—the life threatening exposure in the water—is the accentuation of the parental hostility towards the future hero” (1914, 72). But everywhere else hostility is masked by love or neutrality—for example, Fate rather than the parents being blamed for the opposition to the birth. Why should exposure as birth be masked by exposure as death rather than vice versa? Rank never says. Rank does employ Freud’s explanation of the source of the family romance to connect birth with death, for Freud attributes the fantasy of birth to grander parents not just to the invidious comparison that the child draws between his present parents and other adults but also to the neglect that the child feels from his parents:
Opportunities arise only too frequently when the child is neglected, or at least feels himself neglected, when he misses the entire love of the parents, or at least regrets having to share the same with the other children of the family. The feeling that one’s own inclinations are not entirely reciprocated seeks its relief in the idea … of being a step-child, or an adopted child. (Freud, in Rank 1914, 64)
For Rank, it is but a short step from feeling neglected by the parents to feeling opposed by them: “[T]he entire family-romance in general owes its origin to the feeling of being neglected, namely the assumed hostility of the parents” (1914, 72). For Rank, it is likewise but a short step from feeling opposed by the parents to feeling that they opposed the birth itself: “In the myth, this hostility goes so far that the parents refuse to let the child be born” (ibid.). Therefore birth represents defiance of the parents: “[M]oreover, the myth plainly reveals the desire to enforce [the child’s] materialization against the will of the parents” (ibid.). But even if Rank ties exposure as birth to exposure as death—the parents oppose birth, so that birth defies death—how does averted death symbolize birth? Birth circumvents death, not involves death. The section of the second edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero with the fewest changes is the presentation of the myths themselves. Rank does add considerable examples—notably, the case of Dionysus and of parallels to it; the case of Trakhan; a parallel to the case of Sargon; additional parallels to the case of Moses; Hamlet and King David as further parallels to Kaikhosrav, himself a parallel to the case of Cyrus, at least as Cyrus is presented by Herodotus; and Neleus and Pelias as a further parallel to the twins Romulus and Remus. But like the original examples, all of them retained, the new ones are varied and therefore inconclusive: while most focus on birth, exposure, and rescue—the pre-Oedipal aspects—some proceed to eventual revenge and triumph—the Oedipal ones.
Oedipus
Strikingly, Rank alters not at all the presentation of Oedipus. The elements of the 1909 pattern remain: royal parents; delay in conception; prophetic warning against birth; attempted infanticide to elude the prophecy; infanticide by exposure, which in the earliest versions of the myth is on sea rather than, as for Sophocles, on land; rescue by foster parents; eventual discovery of identity; subsequent parricide; and succession as king. 26 To be sure, the foster parents are as royal as the real parents, so that the wish for worthier parents goes unfulfilled. Far more important, Oedipus consciously seeks to avert parricide, so that the wish to kill the father is fulfilled most unintentionally. Oedipus’ discovery of his identity comes only long after the parricide and so can hardly be the spur to it. 27 Rank could have used the inadvertent nature of the parricide to downplay Oedipus’ Oedipus complex. Certainly many commentators stress Oedipus’ pre-Oedipal traumas of abandonment, mutilation, and adoption. 28 For example, Peter Rudnytsky argues that Sophocles’ play “enacts a return to Oedipus’s infancy” (1991, 19). Working backward from the present to the past, as in analysis itself, the play fills in the picture of Oedipus’ earliest years, which Oedipus thereby relives. More than regressing to infancy, Oedipus symbolically returns to his mother’s womb, “first passing through the doors of the palace and then through the doors of the bedchamber” (ibid.). Oedipus’ reemergence from the palace symbolizes rebirth—and the beginning of healing. For Rudnytsky, Sophocles’ play fits uncannily closely both Rank’s theory and Rank’s practice in The Trauma of Birth. The key trauma occurs at birth, and therapy involves a nontraumatic reexperiencing of it (see Rudnytsky 1991, 17–18).
The Trauma of Birth
The question is whether the Rank of The Trauma of Birth can be found, if only in embryonic form, in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. Rudnytsky, like others, thinks that it can, and can be found in even the first edition of Myth. He quotes the passages, already cited by me, in which Rank goes from the child’s feeling neglected by his parents to the child’s feeling opposed by them to the parents’ opposition to the child’s birth (see Rank 1914, 72). For Rudnytsky, Oedipus’ adult defeat of his father is simply the reenactment of his defeat of his father at birth: “[T]he scene at the crossroads in which Oedipus meets and slays his father, Laius, can justly be seen as a reenactment of the birth trauma at the oedipal level” (1991, 23). In both situations the son triumphs over the father who threatens him. Rudnytsky further quotes part of a line from Myth that seems to anticipate The Trauma of Birth: “[T]he future hero has actually overcome the greatest difficulties by virtue of his birth, for he has victoriously thwarted all attempts to prevent it” (Rank 1914, 73, partly quoted in Rudnytsky 1991, 23). 29
Rudnytsky could have drawn an even tauter tie between birth and parricide. For according to Rank’s pattern, the son’s motive for killing his father is revenge for the would-be killing of him at birth. True, the parents genuinely want a child and expose him at birth only because of the prophecy that a son, if born, will one day kill his father—a prophecy that they accept yet somehow think they can circumvent. Still, they choose the father over the son, who, upon discovering his lineage, returns home to kill his father. True, he kills only his father, but then the father is the more culpable parent since the would-be infanticide was undertaken to protect only him. The mother’s limited role is to have sided with her husband against their son—and, for later Rank, even to have sided with the son against the husband. 30 The pattern surely absolves the son of blame by making his motive revenge, not desire for his mother. But the pattern covers up the Oedipus complex. Now the son is the culprit because he instigates the fight to the death with his father and does so to gain access to his mother. To quote Rank anew: “The fictitious romance [i.e., the myth] is the excuse, as it were, for the hostile feelings which the child harbors against his father, and which in this fiction are projected against the father” (1914, 68–69). Is not Rank here, in a passage retained in the second edition (p. 52 in this volume), “exposing” the pattern as a cover-up? Is he not contending that the mythmaker and any reader or hearer of the myth are concocting the story of abandonment to disguise the child’s hostility toward his parents rather than theirs toward him? Is not Rank in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, antithetically to Rank in The Trauma of Birth, taking the pre-Oedipal traumas of abandonment, exposure, and adoption as excuse rather than reality? 31 It is hard to see how Rank can be said to be subordinating the complex to birth when, again to quote anew a passage retained in the second edition, “as a rule the deepest, generally unconscious root of the dislike of the son for the father, or of two brothers for each other, is referable to the competition for the tender devotion and love of the mother” (Rank 1914, 74; p. 68 in this volume). The issue is not whether Rank gives up either the primacy of the Oedipus complex or the meaning of the Oedipus myth in later writings 32 but whether he does so in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. For all his increasing attention to birth, I do not think that he does. The real shift in the meaning of hero myths comes with The Trauma of Birth itself, in which Rank systematically interprets seemingly all of human life to fit the birth trauma. Fear of the dark, oral and anal activities, sexual activities of every variety, neurotic symptoms, sleeping, dreaming, symbols, attitudes toward death, religion, art, philosophy, mysticism, and, not least, the Oedipus complex—all are either expressions of the physical separation from the mother at birth or efforts at undoing the separation, whether by returning to the womb or, as the fallback, by creating a womblike world after birth. As he declares, “just as the anxiety at birth forms the basis of every anxiety or fear, so every pleasure has as its final aim the re-establishment of the intrauterine primal pleasure” (1929, 17). Only analysis offers a solution by providing a nontraumatic rebirth: “[A]nalysis finally turns out to be a belated accomplishment of the incompleted mastery of the birth trauma” (1929, 5). Rank continues to see myth as wish fulfillment, but the wish now fulfilled is, like that of culture as a whole, either to undo birth or to create a second womb. Oedipus’ “blindness in the deepest sense represents 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” (1929, 43). Alternatively, creation myths describe the creation of a physical world “made into a substitute for the mother” (1929, 103). Myths of an initial or future paradise likewise envision a womblike ideal. While Rank cites his own Myth of the Birth of the Hero as if even it interpreted heroism a la birth trauma, in fact the interpretation changes sharply in The Trauma of Birth. If in The Trauma of Birth the hero’s first deed is, as in Myth, birth itself—“birth is the real achievement” (1929, 131, n. 1)—the hero simultaneously wants to remain in the womb, and “behind the mask” of the hero’s adult “deeds of reform and conquest he constantly strives to return again” (1929, 107). The father seems at once to oppose the hero’s birth and to cause it. God the Father’s prohibition against Adam and Eve’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge “shows the same unwillingness … to separate the ripe fruit from the maternal stem as, in the myth of the birth of the hero, the original hostility of the father to the hero’s coming into the world at all” (1929, 113). Here, as in Myth, the father is being blamed for opposing birth, symbolized by the “breaking off of the fruit” from the tree (ibid.). But God the Father’s eviction of Adam and Eve “represents once again a repetition of painful parturition, the separation from the mother [i.e., Eden] by the father” (ibid.). Here the father is being blamed for causing birth, symbolized by eviction. 33 At the same time in The Trauma of Birth the key relationship is that between mother and son. Where in Myth the father is the culprit for opposing birth, in The Trauma of Birth the mother is the culprit for giving birth. The father merely comes between mother and son. And to the line “separation from the mother by the father” in describing the Garden of Eden story, Rank adds, “to which men and women are subjected in the same way” (ibid.), so that, contrary to Freud, tension with the father is not limited to the son. One other difference between The Trauma of Birth and The Myth of the Birth of the Hero is the link now drawn between the hero and the artist. Rank now proposes the substitution of the term “artist” for hero to identify the cultural hero—the one who in religion, art, or philosophy creates “sublime wish compensations” for the lingering frustration of life outside the womb (1929, 190). 34 The link between hero and artist continues throughout Rank’s subsequent writings. 35
Beyond The Trauma of Birth
Yet not even The Trauma of Birth contains the concepts that prove most distinctively Rankian: will, creativity, and immortality. In Will Therapy Rank contends that Oedipus is condemned by Sophocles on multiple counts: for assuming that intellect—consciousness—rather than will governs human action; for assuming that knowing—consciousness—is superior to not knowing—illusion; and for blaming Fate rather than himself for his deeds. All three condemnations of Oedipus are for Rank also condemnations of Freud, who attributes neurosis to the unconscious and so to ignorance, who seeks to make the unconscious conscious and so relies on intellect for the cure, and who absolves Oedipus of responsibility by blaming his unconscious: 36
This moral [of the myth] … is exactly anti-analytic. The Greek Oedipus saga is to be understood as a reaction to that intellectual hybrid, the first occidental thinker, the ironic philosopher, who wanted to solve speculatively the riddle of human nature. … In the Oedipus saga all evil arises not from doing, but from knowing or wanting to know, for which one must finally take over responsibility oneself instead of putting it on fate, or the Gods, or the unconscious. (1978a [1936a], 50–51)
Where in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero Oedipus is the victim of his unconscious, which overrides his conscious will, in Will Therapy he consciously wills his actions. In Truth and Reality Rank contrasts the heroic myth, as represented by the story of Oedipus, to the “religious myth,” as represented by the Garden of Eden story (Genesis 3). Now Oedipus’ fall stems from will without consciousness, where Adam and Eve’s fall stems from consciousness, or overintellectualization, that paralyzes the will. Oedipus would not have married his mother had he known who Jocasta was, and Adam and Eve would not have been inhibited sexually had they not eaten from the Tree of Knowledge:
The hero myth represents experience (living), the deed, the will, which consciousness could only restrict, as we find it expressed in the Oedipus story but the hero comes to grief and must come to grief in the fact that he cannot know beforehand and does not even want to know so that he can act. The religious myth represents “knowing,” the knowledge of God, that is, self knowledge, and here man suffers again in that, knowledge about himself interferes with naïve action, restrains him and torments without affording him the satisfaction and liberation which the deed grants. (Rank 1978b [1936b], 28)
However one reconciles Rank’s characterization of the source of Oedipus’ downfall in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Truth and Reality, and Will Therapy, the main issue now is the relationship between consciousness and will rather than, as in Myth, the relationship between ego and id. Myth may partly foreshadow The Trauma of Birth, but it does not foreshadow the yet later Rank. 37 In Psychology and the Soul Rank traces the history, from “primitive” times down to the present “sexual era,” of the varying ways in which humans have sought immortality. Now he confines the myths in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero to “civilized” peoples. Where primitives believed that the spirits of the dead impregnated women, so that the spirits rather than “fathers” passed their immortal souls onto sons, fathers eventually came to believe that they were the begetters of their sons, onto whom they thereby passed their souls and consequently their immortality. Where fathers at first thereby accepted this “generative immortality”—immortality through procreation—in the sexual era fathers have sought individual immortality and have sought it by trying to kill their sons at birth to avoid ceding their souls. Sons in turn, having survived the attempted infanticide, grow up to seek immortality for themselves. They revert to the primitive belief that spirits rather than their “fathers” were their begetters—a variant of the non-Oedipal wish for alternate parents. Incest with the mother now becomes a means of procreating oneself and thereby securing immortality. Neither sex nor nurturing but immortality is what Oedipus now seeks from Jocasta. Survival remains the preoccupation, as in Myth, but now it is survival after death rather than survival after birth. 38 In the posthumous Beyond Psychology Rank ties heroism to the double and the double to immortality. The hero’s survival after birth attests to his immortality, but immortality requires a second, immortal self alongside the mortal one. The mortal self is a twin, who “had to die to assure immortality to the other” (Rank 1941, 95). But the surviving twin then “absorbs” his brother and becomes a double. Without claiming to have found a twin for Oedipus, Rank names this myth as a case of a new element in the mythic pattern: “how the hero is saved from an early doom by the substitution of another child who is killed in his stead” (ibid.). What in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero would be the killing of one brother by another over the mother is now the sacrificial killing of one brother for the immortality of the other.
The Dual Wishes
In the second edition of The Myth of the Birth of the Hero Rank continues to credit Freud with the discovery of both the nonsexual and the sexual wishes, and he retains the long passage from Freud on the “family romance,” a phrase that, strictly, refers to the first wish only, as I take it to be, but that sometimes seems to cover both wishes (see pp. 49–51 in this volume). 39
Yet no more in the second edition than in the first does Rank—or Freud —recognize the incompatibility of the wishes. The wish for perfect parents is the wish that the ordinary parents with whom the child finds himself are not the true parents: “The entire endeavor to replace the real father by a more distinguished one is merely the expression of the child’s longing for the vanished happy time, when his father still appeared to be the strongest and greatest man, and the mother seemed the dearest and most beautiful woman” (Freud, in Rank 1914, 67). The child invents the family romance to satisfy this wish, which is nonsexual, and the adult invents the fullfledged myth to satisfy the Oedipal wish as well as the nonsexual one. The myth satisfies the nonsexual wish insofar as the child turns out to have royal or aristocratic real parents and merely to have been raised by ordinary parents. The myth satisfies the sexual wish insofar as the child grows up to kill his real father.
The problem is not that the wishes are independent—the sexual wish scarcely requires that the toppled father be royal—but that the wishes are incompatible. Where the nonsexual wish assumes reverence for the real father, whom the child wishes to emulate, the sexual wish dictates hatred for that same father, whom the child wishes to replace. The splitting of the father into two figures enables the child to keep separate his conflicted feelings, but the negative feelings are toward the adoptive father in the nonsexual wish and toward the real father in the sexual one (see Rank 1914, 83–85; 1992, 43–44). As Freud’s own mention of the Oedipal wish in his presentation of the family romance makes clear, he as well as Rank thinks that the two wishes work in tandem, for both get rid of the father: “The influence of sex is already evident, in so far as the boy shows a far greater tendency to harbor hostile feelings against his father than his mother, with a much stronger inclination to emancipate himself from the father than from the mother” (Freud, in Rank 1914, 65). Furthermore, Freud observes that the boy’s aim comes to narrow from elevating both parents to elevating only the father. Since the sexual competition is between the boy and only his present father, there is no need to remove the present mother from the scene. The present father is removed by being unmasked as not the real father:
With the added knowledge of the manifold sexual relations of father and mother; with the child’s realization that the father is always uncertain, whereas the mother is very certain—the family romance undergoes a peculiar restriction; it is [now] satisfied with ennobling [just] the father, while the descent from the [present] mother is no longer questioned, but accepted as an unalterable fact. (Freud, in Rank 1914, 66)
But the Oedipal aim is still to get rid of the real, noble father, where the non-Oedipal aim is to be rid of the adoptive, lowly father—and, at least initially, of the mother as well. 40
Conclusion
However far Rank ventures beyond his original, classically Freudian view of myth, he continues to invoke Myth of the Birth of the Hero, as if, contrary to my own reading, it prophetically bore the seeds of postFreudian Rank. Myth is cited in Art and Artist, Psychology and the Soul, Modern Education, Truth and Reality, and Beyond Psychology. In his “Literary Autobiography” Rank retrospectively interprets Myth in light of his will psychology: Freud’s interest in the subject [of hero myths] was on account of the hero’s dependence on his family (Oedipus-complex) whereas I emphasized, particularly in the second edition, the hero’s struggle for independence. In the light of my later will-psychology one might explain the whole legend (with all its motives) as a symbol of independence from the parents (a denial of the same) as the presupposition of the heroic, i.e., creative type of individual. The hero must be free for his task to which he is bound; he becomes a hero because he does not want to owe anything to his parents but has to justify this independence by achievements (hero-artist type). (1981, 6)
Ironically, Freud himself cites Myth in his own last work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), although he reverses Rank’s levels: Moses, one of Rank’s own examples, is now manifestly the son of lowly parents who is rescued by royal parents but latently the son of Egyptian royalty who is simply depicted as Jewish for nationalistic reasons (see Freud 1964b, 10– 15). The hero here is Moses the father, not Israel the son, but the conflict remains staunchly Oedipal. No concession to the heroism of later Rank is even entertained.
Acknowledgment
I want to thank Gregory Richter and especially James Lieberman for their most helpful comments on this introduction.
Introduction
Nearly all prominent civilized nations, including Babylonians and Egyptians, Hebrews and Indians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, as well as the Germanic peoples and others, have left us literatures in which, early on, they glorify national heroes—mythical princes and kings, and founders of religions, dynasties, empires, and cities—in many poetic tales and legends. The history of the birth and youth of these supermen came to be especially invested with fantastic features, which in different nations, though widely separated by space and entirely independent of each other, present a baffling similarity or, in part, a literal correspondence. Many investigators have long been impressed with this fact.
One of the chief problems of mythological research still consists in the elucidation of the reason for the extensive analogies in the fundamental outlines of mythical tales. These analogies are rendered still more puzzling by the unanimity in certain details and their reappearance in most of the mythical groupings. The mythological theories aiming at the explanation of these remarkable phenomena, are, in a general way, as follows: 1
1. The idea of the people, propounded by Bastian (1868). This theory assumes the existence of elemental ideas, so that the unanimity of the myths is a necessary sequence of the uniform disposition of the human mind and the manner of its manifestation, which within certain limits is identical at all times and in all places. This interpretation was urgently advocated by Bauer (1882) as accounting for the wide distribution of the hero myths. 2. The explanation by original community, first applied by Benfey (1859) to the widely distributed parallel forms of folklore. The theory makes the claim that, originating in a favorable locality (India), these tales were first accepted by the Indo-European peoples, then continued to grow while retaining the common original traits, and ultimately radiated over the entire earth. This mode of explanation was first applied to the wide distribution of the hero myths by Schubert (1890).
3. The modern theory of conceptual migration, or borrowing, according to which individual myths originate from definite peoples (especially the Babylonians) and are accepted by other peoples through oral tradition (commerce and travel) or through literary influences (cf. Stucken 1907, especially part 5: Mose [Moses], and Lessmann 1906).
The modern theory of migration and borrowing can be readily shown to be merely a modification of Benfey’s theory, resulting from the incorporation of newly discovered, irreconcilable material. This profound and extensive research of modern investigations has shown that Babylonia, rather than India, may be regarded as the first home of the myths. 2 Moreover, they presumably did not radiate from a single point, but traveled over and across the entire inhabited globe. This thinking brought into prominence the idea of the interdependence of mythological structures, an idea that was generalized by Braun (1864) as the “basic law of the nature of the human mind”: “Nothing new is ever discovered as long as it is possible to copy.” The theory of elemental ideas, so strenuously advocated by Bauer over a quarter of a century ago, seems, by contrast, to have fallen by the wayside. That theory is thoroughly discounted not only by Schubert, apparently in direct opposition to Bauer, but also by recent researchers, like Winckler and Stucken, who maintain the theory of migration and borrowing. Although migration and borrowing can be demonstrated in many cases, one must accept other points of view when that is not possible. One must not block the progress of further research by invoking the somewhat unscientific viewpoint of the otherwise commendable Winckler, who claims: “When we encounter humans and their productions in complete correspondence, though in widely distant parts of the earth, we must conclude that migration has occurred. Knowing how and when is irrelevant in recognizing this fact” (1907, 47).
There is really no sharp contrast between the various theories or their advocates, for the concept of elemental ideas does not interfere with the claims of primary common possession or of conceptual migration. Furthermore, the ultimate problem is not whence and how the material reached a certain people. That question is, Where did it come from to begin with? All these theories would explain only the variability and distribution of the myths but not their origin. Even Schubert, the most inveterate opponent of Bauer’s view, acknowledges this truth by stating that all these manifold legends date back to a single very ancient prototype. But he is unable to tell us anything of the origin of this prototype. Bauer, who has responded critically (1891) to Schubert’s claims likewise inclines to this mediating view; he points out repeatedly that, in spite of the multiple origin of independent tales, it is necessary to concede a most extensive and ramified borrowing, as well as an original community of the concepts in related peoples. Beside these attestations of historians, the same conciliatory attitude is maintained by Lessmann (1908), who rejects the assumption of elemental ideas but admits that primary relationship and borrowing do not exclude each other. For an ethnological perspective, one must mention the moderate opinion of the late Americanist Ehrenreich, who states that “conceptual migration, borrowing, and independent origin” are “equally relevant and therefore apply simultaneously” (1910). Specifically with reference to the cycle of myths that concerns us here, and based on a rich variety of material, Frazer (1919) has recently formulated his view of this problem: he considers that borrowing (imitation) and independent origin are equally likely when there is a common strand in folklore (“popular imagination”). He declines to choose but notes, for example, that the Indic parallels of Semitic precursors seem more strongly to suggest an independent origin, as one cannot assume Indic knowledge of the Semitic versions.
In my opinion, a final decision on this question, to the extent that that is desirable or attainable, can only be achieved through a psychology based on the material provided by mythologists, ethnologists, and historians— whose complete lack of orientation in psychology would benefit their research if they would refrain from absolute judgments. Psychological investigation into the problem was initiated by Wundt. Acknowledging conceptual migration to account for complex thematic correspondences, he states: “For an understanding of the mythological thinking of primitives the question of these isolated cases of admixture is somewhat less significant, because only those elements corresponding to their level of mythological thought can be permanently maintained” (1905, 2.3:62). “Were it not for the persistence of the relevant themes, dim memories of earlier tales would hardly suffice for the reformulation of the same material; indeed, even without such associations these themes can therefore recreate a content corresponding in its basic motifs” (1905, 2.3:285). In any case, the purely psychological problem of the origin of the myth type remains. Its solution puts us in a position to understand, on better grounds than the mere wish for a pleasing solution, how myths migrate conceptually. Leaving aside for the present the inquiry as to the mode of distribution of these myths—a question approached in so many ways by the researchers just cited—we can now concentrate on the origin of the hero myth itself. Whatever one’s opinion as to their origin, one is struck by an insistent tendency in the myths to make all heroic figures fit the framework of a specific birth legend—a tendency still expressed with many heroes in contemporary novels. The choice between conceptual migration and original creation becomes less interesting, and the problem of explaining original creation becomes highly prominent. Ehrenreich, although influenced by a “lunar” perspective, formulates this in terms of the following question: “Why are the apparently so diverse folk or mythical heroes magically conceived and born? Why are they placed in boxes, baskets, feed troughs, mangers, and seashells, and then often set out in bodies of water?” (1910, 48).
Investigations along these lines into the psychic motives of myth construction will necessarily help to provide a deeper insight into the content of these tales than has been provided by mythologists, narrowly oriented within their professional circles, who see in them only a personification of the processes of nature, following the still dominant mode of interpretation in terms of nature myths. The newborn hero is the young sun rising from the waters, first confronted by lowering clouds, but finally triumphing over all obstacles (cf. Brodbeck 1893, 138). Whether one mainly considers atmospheric phenomena, 3 as did the first proponents of this method of myth interpretation, or one regards the legends in a more restricted sense as astral myths (Stucken, Winckler, and others), these two approaches are not so essentially distinct as their proponents believe. Nor does it seem a basic improvement that the purely solar interpretation, as advocated especially by Frobenius (1904), was no longer accepted and the view that all myths were originally lunar was advanced —a position first advocated by Siecke (1892, 1901) and taken up by Hüsing in his discussion of the myth of Cyrus the Great (1906). Siecke also claims this view as the only legitimate, obvious interpretation of the birth myths of the heroes (1908, 48). 4
The interpretation of the myths themselves will be taken up in detail later, and we shall refrain here from detailed criticism of the astral theory, noted earlier, which is accurate in a sense but is as a whole unsatisfactory and one-sided (cf. Rank 1919, ch. 1). For the present, we shall also disregard the fact that the astral theory fails to afford any insight into the motives of myth formation. We shall merely suggest that the tracing to astronomical processes does not fully represent the content of these myths and that much clearer and simpler relations might be established through a mode of interpretation based on the human psyche. The much disparaged theory of elemental ideas indicates a practically neglected aspect of mythological research. At the beginning, as well as at the end of his article, Bauer (1882) points out how much more natural and probable it would be to seek the reason for the overwhelming unanimity of these myths in the very general traits of the human psyche rather than in a common primal society or in conceptual migration. His assumption appears to be more justifiable, because such general impulses of the human mind are also expressed in other forms and in other domains. We can now take up this idea again from an angle long familiar to mythology but which, in the absence of psychological prerequisites, has not been given its due: dream analysis. As emphasized by Ehrenreich (1910), the great significance of dream life for myth has always been recognized. Not only are dreams the only source for myth formation according to certain primitive peoples themselves, but well-known mythologists such as Laistner, Mannhardt, Roscher, and most recently Wundt have recognized the significance of dream life and, specifically, of nightmares in the understanding of certain groupings of myths and themes.
The hostile attitude of the most recent interpretive trend in mythology (chiefly represented by the Society for Comparative Mythological Research) toward all attempts at establishing a relation between dream and myth (cf. Lessmann 1908) results for the most part from limiting the parallels to nightmares, as attempted in Laistner’s notable book (1889), and also from ignorance of the relevant teachings of Freud. The latter not only help us to understand the dreams themselves but also show their symbolism and close relationship with all psychic phenomena in general, especially with daydreams or fantasies, with artistic creativity, and with certain disturbances of normal psychic function. A common share in all these productions belongs to a single psychic function: the human imagination.
To this imaginative faculty the recent myth theory is obliged to concede a high rank, perhaps the first, as the ultimate source of all myths. The interpretation of myths in the astral sense, or more precisely, as “calendric tales,” gives rise to the query: in view of a creative imagination in humanity, “should we seek the first germ of the origin of such tales in celestial processes or, on the contrary, should we conclude that finished tales of an entirely different origin were only subsequently transferred to the heavenly bodies?” (Lessmann 1908, 31ff.). 5 Beside the doubts advanced by Lessmann about such an explanation, we must note the positive comments of Ehrenreich and Wundt, who reject an original celestial mythology as impossible. Ehrenreich states (1910, 104): “Myth development certainly begins on terrestrial soil, insofar as experiences must first be gathered in the immediate environment before they can be projected into the heavens.” And Wundt states (1905, 2.3:282): “The theory of the evolution of mythology according to which it first originates in the heavens, and later descends to earth, is contradictory both to the history of myth (which is unaware of such a migration) and to the psychology of myth formation (which must repudiate such a translocation as internally impossible).” We also hope to demonstrate that myths 6 are not merely of earthly origin (Ehrenreich) but, as Wundt agrees, of psychic origin: structures of the human faculty of imagination that may be secondarily transferred to the heavenly bodies with their baffling phenomena. The significance of the unmistakable traces—fixed numbers and so forth—that have been imprinted upon the myths by this transference must by no means be underrated, although the origin of these numbers may also have been psychic in character, so that they were subsequently made the basis of the calendar and of celestial calculations precisely on account of this significance.
The derivation of an essential component from a common human source has already been successfully attempted with one of these legendary motifs. Freud (1900) reveals the connection of the Oedipus fable (where Oedipus is told by the oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother, as he unwittingly does later) with two typical dreams still experienced by many people today: the dream of the father’s death and the dream of sexual intercourse with the mother. Of King Oedipus Freud remarks (1900, 21):
His fate moves us only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him. It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers; our dreams convince us that we were. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is the fulfillment of our childhood wish. 7
The intimate relationship between dream and myth—not only as to content but also as to form and to the motor forces of these and many other psychic structures, especially pathological ones—entirely justifies the interpretation of myth as a “mass dream” of the people, as I have recently shown elsewhere (1907, 36; 1918, 52). At the same time, the transference of the method, and in part also of the results, of Freud’s technique of dream interpretation to the myths seems justified, as argued and illustrated by Abraham (1909). In the cycle of myths that follows, the intimate relations between dream and myth find further confirmation, with frequent opportunity for reasoning from analogy.
In contrast to our psychological interpretation, let us observe what an interpretation in terms of nature mythology has to offer—for example, in the context of the “objectionable” Oedipus fable. Oedipus (who kills his father, marries his mother, and dies old and blind) is the solar hero who murders his procreator, the darkness. He shares his bed with his mother, the sunset, from whose lap, the dawn, he was born. He dies, blinded, as the setting sun (Goldziher 1876, 125). It seems that in their endeavor to discover the original sense of the myths, the investigators who make their interpretation exclusively in terms of some aspect of nature mythology have been unable to get away entirely from a psychological process such as must be assumed similarly for the creators of the myths. The motive is identical and led to the same course for myth creators and myth interpreters alike. It is quite naively uttered by one of the founders and champions of comparative mythology and of interpretation in terms of nature mythology, Max Müller (1869), who comments that “this procedure not only invests meaningless legends with a significance and beauty of their own, but also helps to remove some of the most revolting features of classical mythology, as well as to elucidate their true meaning.” 8 This readily understandable revulsion naturally prevents the mythologist from assuming that such motifs as incest with mother, sister, or daughter, or murder of father, grandfather, or brother, could be based on universal fantasies, which according to Freud, have their source in the infantile psyche, with its peculiar interpretation of the external world and of people. This revulsion is, therefore, only the reaction to the dimly sensed painful recognition of the reality of these impulses, and this reaction impels the myth interpreters, for their own unconscious rehabilitation and that of all mankind, to assign to these motifs an entirely different meaning than they originally had. The same internal repudiation prevents the myth-creating people from believing in the possibility of such objectionable thoughts, and this defense probably was the first reason for projecting these relations into the heavens. The psychological sense of peace gained through such a justification, by projection upon external, maximally remote objects, can perhaps still be sensed, but this is not a scientific argument, and revulsion of this kind, although it may not always be so conscious, is altogether out of place in view of existing facts. One must either become reconciled to these indecencies, if they are perceived as such, or abandon the study of psychological phenomena. It is evident that human beings, even in the earliest times and with a most naive imagination, never saw incest and patricide 9 in the heavens; it is far more probable that these ideas are derived from a human source. How they came into the heavens, and what modifications or additions they received in the process, are secondary questions that cannot be settled until the origin and meaning of the myths in general has been established.
At any rate, besides the astral conception, the part played by psychic life in myth formation must be credited as equally important. This will be amply vindicated by the results of our method of interpretation. With this object in view, we shall first take up the legendary material on which such a psychological interpretation is to be attempted on a large scale for the first time. From the mass 10 of chiefly biographic hero myths, we shall select those that are best known and some that are especially characteristic. These myths are given in abbreviated form, as far as relevant for this investigation, with statements concerning the sources.
