Parallel Myths (45 page)
Authors: J.F. Bierlein
Janet, French psychiatrist and philosopher, was a friend of the American psychologist and philosopher William James and of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was born in the same year as Janet. Bergson, in particular, had an impact on Janet, and vice versa. Janet, like his friend James (author of the celebrated
The Varieties of Religious Experience)
, considered religion and mythology vital keys to understanding the human psyche. Although Janet was one of the most celebrated and respected men of his time, he is all but forgotten today, overshadowed by such contemporaries as Freud, Jung, and Adler. Freud never acknowledged any debt to Janet, who was even angrily denounced by a key Freud disciple and biographer, Ernest Jones.
Janet, like Jung after him, felt that the key to understanding many forms of human behavior was to understand the spiritual nature of human beings. Janet believed that spirituality was an essential part of being human and not merely a phase in human cultural development to be “outgrown” and supplanted by “scientific thinking.” This latter view was held by Freud. Janet began by studying spiritualist mediums and, later in life, with the cooperation of the Catholic authorities, he studied “Madeleine,” a woman who was seized by flights of religious ecstasy. “Madeleine” even had the stigmata, actual physical wounds in the form of the imprints of the nails on Christ’s hands, as was said to have happened to many saints throughout history. He diagnosed such flights of religious ecstasy as a very unique form of hysteria, but saw this as a possible key to the mythic functions of the mind.
(Janet, raised in the Roman Catholic faith, was reticent about his own religious ideas and was variously reported to be agnostic and a practicing Catholic. He was, however, deeply impressed by his experiences with “Madeleine.” He made certain that his own children were raised in the Protestant faith, though he himself was to be buried in the Catholic faith.)
Janet viewed the functions of the mind as “economies.” In other words, he viewed the mind as working to allocate mental resources in the most efficient manner possible in a healthy individual. For example, a person who was coldly logical at the expense of his or her emotions was not well; the converse, in a person whose emotions were dominant, was also true. He believed in a function of mind that he called the
Fonction fabulatrice
, an identifiable thinking process through which myth and fables were composed.
Janet had definite views on the development of myth and religion. Human beings, at the most primitive level, perform rites, which are, in his words, “complicated conducts in which the least details are rigidly fixed.” These rites may be “transactional” in nature (for example, sacrifices to a rain god to ensure rain), and after the rites are performed for a time, then myths are composed to justify them and ensure that they are continued. This is a point of view also expressed by Robert Graves. In this stage of religious thinking, animism, the practice of investing natural features such as rocks, lakes, and so forth with a soul, or personifying them, is characteristic. Janet wrote: “Animism springs up spontaneously the moment you first learn the necessity of distinguishing between the man who talks and acts as if he were a friend, and the invisible, inaudible enemy who lurks behind him.”
According to Janet, societies need religion and myth in order to function. All societies everywhere have had alliances or “covenants” with God or the gods, in his words, “out of fear, the need for morality, or a need for direction and love.” In a society, priests and shamans are a necessity to “make the god speak.” When the god fails to speak, the society abandons the myth. Examples of this can be found in a number of societies, most notably the Greeks and Romans. When the Olympian gods ceased to “speak” to the needs of their societies,
the people sought out Eastern mystery religions, such as the cult of Isis, or Mithraism, until finally the old religion was completely supplanted by these faiths and, ultimately, by Christianity.
The gods speak in many ways. One is through prayer, which Janet believed to be an internal dialogue between the individual and one’s spirit, or between the individual and a neurologically based “god.” Human beings, according to Janet, inherently believe that they have a “spiritual double,” the soul. Likewise, Janet believed that demoniac possession is the reverse of prayer: The spiritual double becomes evil because evil is transferred onto the double to the exclusion of the conscious personality.
Janet also felt that ritual precedes the myth, then myth is exposed to abstract philosophical speculation and becomes religion, which is a systematic dialogue between the individual and the soul, with fixed forms shared by a society.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Sigmund Freud was born in Freiburg, Moravia, in 1856, and he spent nearly all of his life in the city of Vienna. Considered the father of modern psychoanalysis, Freud believed that the study of dreams was the essential element to understanding the human unconscious psyche. Myth, for Freud, was a collective projection of the processes taking place in the unconscious mind, a sort of “shared dream.” Unlike Bastian and Jung, however, Freud felt that these images were the products of repressed individual childhood memories played out in conscious language; they were the products of the individual unconsciousness alone and not the products of any universal myth-producing area of the unconscious universal to all human beings. Freud’s explanation of the parallels in myth was that everyone in the world had a mother and father, and thus the images of the personal unconscious would be similar across cultures.
Freud himself was a devoted student of the myths. In describing the Oedipus complex, Freud’s theory of the infantile erotic love felt by a male child toward his mother, he reached into Greek myth:
Oedipus is a tragic figure who kills his father and marries his mother. Freud reached again into the Greek myths when he needed a term to describe excessive self-love; thus we have the now-common word
narcissism
(from the story of Narcissus).
Freud even used allusions to myth in his personal life. As the promulgator of the Oedipal complex, he referred to his own daughter and professional protégé, Anna Freud, as his “Antigone” (Antigone was Oedipus’s daughter by his own mother, Queen Jocasta). Thus, Freud meant to imply that Anna was closer to him than merely a daughter.
Freud considered myth as a transitional phase toward an “inevitable” scientific worldview. Although raised in Orthodox Judaism (and possibly strongly influenced by Catholic nannies in his childhood), Freud wrote that he was “totally alienated from the religion of his fathers—as from every other.” In his writings, he considered himself an “atheist.” In
A History of the Psychoanalytical Movement
, he wrote:
In my four essays on “Totem and Taboo,” I made the attempt to discuss the problem of race psychology by means of analysis. This should lead us directly to the origins of the interdictions of incest and of conscience.
If we accept the evolution of man’s conceptions of the universe … according to which the ANIMISTIC phase is succeeded by the RELIGIOUS, and this in turn by the SCIENTIFIC, we have no difficulty in following the fortunes of the “omnipotence of thought” through all three phases. In the animistic stage, man ascribes omnipotence to himself; in the religious he has ceded it to the gods, but without seriously giving it up, for he reserves to himself the right to control the gods by influencing them in some way or another in the interest of his wishes. In the scientific attitude toward life there is no longer any room for man’s omnipotence; he has acknowledged his smallness and has submitted to death as to all other necessities in a spirit of resignation. Nevertheless, in our reliance upon the power of the human spirit which copes with the laws of reality, there still lives a fragment of this primitive belief in the omnipotence of thought.
Although Freud did not see the elements of myth as a universal element in every unconscious, nor as an inborn feature of the unconscious, a projection of collective inner images of the unconscious mind of our entire species, he did consider the myths to be an outward projection of the unconscious, albeit the individual unconscious, and he also knew the commonality between the images in dreams and in myths. In so doing, he set the stage for his erstwhile “heir” and later opponent, Carl Jung.
In his history of the psychoanalytic movement,
The Discovery of the Unconscious
, Henri F. Ellenberger suggests a strong connection between the matriarchal theories of Bachofen and the psychological theories of Freud. The connections between mythology and the psychology of the individual were perceived even by Bachofen, and the parallels between Bachofen’s theory on the development of early European culture and the Freudian view of human development are striking.
| Bachofen | Freud |
|---|---|
| Hetairistic period of primitive sexual promiscuity | Infantile sexuality, “polymorphous perversion” |
| Matriarchy: domination of society by the “mothers” | The pre-Oedipal period of strong attachment and complete dependence of the child on his or her mother |
| Dionysian period: a reversion to the orgiastic cults, a “backsliding” into hetairism | The “phallic” stage: the male child becomes aware of his penis and “maleness” |
| The myth of Oedipus: evidence of a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy. The “social stress” of the transition. | The male child experiences the “Oedipal stage,” sexual attachment to the mother, jealousy of the father, and suffers stress |
| Patriarchy: rule by the “fathers” | The genital adult stage: male children now identify with Father, female children with Mother |
| Repression of the matriarchy and hetairism, now available only in the myth | Infantile “amnesia,” where the childhood memories are repressed |
In order to understand the connection between the myth of Oedipus and Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality, it is helpful to read this myth.
THE MYTH OF OEDIPUS
I
aius, the king of Thebes, was married to Jocasta [locaste], but the marriage remained childless. Desperate for an heir to his throne, Laius went to the oracle of the god Apollo at Delphi for advice. What the oracle told him was horrifying: It was for the best that Laius remained childless. For it had been ordained that any child of Laius and Jocasta would grow up to murder his father and marry his mother. Terrified by the prophecy, Laius ordered the confinement of Jocasta to a small room in his palace; she was under strict orders never to sleep with him again.
However, Jocasta was hurt by this and wanted a child; she now plotted how to have intercourse with him. So, with the complicity of their servants, Jocasta saw to it that Laius drank large quantities of wine. The Greeks usually mixed their wine with water to cut its potency. But the servants gave Laius undiluted wine in an effort to intoxicate him. This accomplished, Jocasta seduced her drunken husband and conceived a son.
Remembering the prophecy, Laius took the baby boy, pierced a hole in each foot with a nail, bound the feet together, and left the child to die on a mountain, exposed to the elements.
But the gods had ordained that Laius’s son would live a long life. A shepherd passing by heard the boy’s cries and took the baby home to raise him himself. Looking at the child’s pierced feet, the shepherd named the child Oedipus, meaning “swollen foot.” Later the shepherd took the foundling back to the city of Corinth and presented
Oedipus to King Polybus’s servants. The child appeared to be of royal birth, and it happened that Polybus and his wife, Periboea, childless, needed an heir to the throne. Polybus adopted Oedipus as his own son.
In another version of the story, Laius pierced the boy’s feet, bound them together, and placed the child in a wooden chest that was cast out to sea. When the chest washed up on shore, it was recovered by Queen Periboea. In order to produce an heir to the throne, Periboea took the baby into the bushes and made cries as if she were in childbirth. Her servants heard these cries and soon the word went throughout the kingdom that Periboea had at last produced an heir to the throne. In any case, Polybus and Periboea loved Oedipus and raised him as a pampered prince.
However, while Oedipus was growing up, it was clear from his looks that he could not be the natural child of Polybus and Periboea. Children teased him about this; there was a great deal of gossip about who his real parents might be.
Seeking advice, Oedipus himself went to the oracle to learn who his true parents were. The oracle told him that he was destined to kill his own father and marry his mother. The Pythoness, the voice of the oracle, told Oedipus, “Get away from this sacred place, you horrible wretch—you monster! Get out and do not defile this holy place!”
Shocked by the oracle’s words, and still believing that Polybus and Periboea were his real parents, Oedipus resolved to leave their court at Corinth.
On the road out of the city, Oedipus encountered the entourage of King Laius of Thebes, his true father. Laius called to the boy to get out of the way and let royalty pass. Oedipus answered Laius that he himself was a royal prince and had no betters. Laius ordered his charioteer to advance. Livid, Oedipus threw his spear at the charioteer, killing him. The horses reared up, throwing Laius from the chariot, killing him instantly. The prophecy was fulfilled; Oedipus had murdered his own natural father.
It happened that Laius was on the way to consult the oracle at Delphi on how to rid his kingdom of the Sphinx. This creature had
the head of a woman, the tail of a serpent, the body of a lion, and wings like an eagle, not to mention both male and female genitalia. She stopped every traveler on the road to Thebes and asked a riddle. When the hapless traveler was unable to solve the riddle, the Sphinx killed and ate him. This was ruining trade and depleting the royal treasury of Thebes.