Psychological Approaches to Greek Myths
Introduction
One of the most important figures in the study of Greek mythology is Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis. His general theory of psychology is summarized elsewhere; here we will be concerned chiefly with the central element in his theory of psychosexual development, namely, the Oedipus complex.
Carl Jung, a student of Freud, has had an arguably greater impact on the study of myth than Freud himself.
Freud and the Oedipus Complex
Problems with Orthodox Freudianism
The universalizing ideas of Freud beg many important questions
about the nature
of myth. In the first place, his account of human sexuality notoriously privileges the experience of the male over that of the female. In the second place, Freud obviously expressed himself in terms of canonical
Western European
culture. For him Sophocles' rendition of the Oedipus myth was a timeless
expression of a
trascendent truth, an insight into the human condition that was
applicable to all cultures.
Not that he neglected to allow for variations; indeed, his comments on
the Oedipus myth in
The Interpretation of Dreams illustrtate his belief that the
motif occurs in a
wide variety of disguised forms. Nevertheless, it is his opinion that the
form of the myth
familiar to the Greeks and dramatized by Sophocles reveals the reason for
its power and
universality, dealing openly as it does with feelings of violence and
aggression towards the
father and of erotic longing for the mother that Freud regarded as
universal elements of
every child's experience.
Jung and the Collective Unconscious
For Jung, the pattern represented by the Oedipus story was only one
important pattern
among the many that inform human experience. Understanding that the
"universality" of
the "Oedipus complex" really applies only to male experience, he posited
an "Electra
complex" as a complementary female version, basing himself on the
behavior of Electra in
Aeschylus' Oresteia, who shuns marriage after the murder of
her father
Agamemnon and helps her brother Orestes to avenge the murder upon their
mother
Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Recognizing that Freud and,
especially, Freud's
followers put too much emphasis on the Oedipus myth alone, Jung posited
the existence of
many patterms, which he called "archetypes," within the "collective
unconscious" of all
people. Besides recognizing the inability of the Oedipal archetype to
account for female
experience, he also understood that ancient Greek culture was only one
among many world
cultures, and should not be regarded as the unique repository of all the
archetypes that
might exist within the collective unconscious. This led Jung to look
especially to the
classical civilizations of Asia in his effort to describe a universal
mythology of the human
psyche.
created 4/15/96; modified 2/4/97