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Myths are tales of unknown origin handed down by [[tradition]], sometimes orally and sometimes by written [[word]]. The stories are set in a primordial period during which the [[order ]] of the [[present ]] [[world ]] is established. They tell the story of the [[origin of the world]], of [[human ]] beings and [[animal ]] [[species]], of [[death]], and of the [[relationship ]] between man and supernatural beings.

Until the fifth century BCE, the Greek word mythos was a synonym for [[logos ]] (word). With Pindar and Herodotus, it came to mean [[words ]] of [[illusion]]; rumor; the [[speech ]] of [[others]]; [[irrational]], barbarous, even scandalous speech (Détienne, 1979). For better or worse, Western mythology inherited this opposition between [[rational ]] [[thought ]] and [[mythical ]] thought.

When ethnologists realized that the [[social ]] organizations of the peoples they studied were significantly related to their mythologies, they helped move the study of myths from the [[impasse ]] that nineteenth-century authors had become stuck in. Claude Lévi-[[Strauss ]] saw myths as books without authors, their messages "coming, properly [[speaking]], from nowhere" (1969-1981). Studying native American myths in their own [[terms]], he demonstrated that they are transformations of each [[other ]] and that their different [[codes ]] express an underlying [[logical ]] [[structure]]. In fact, myths are not only speculations [[about ]] social organization but also, and above all, they reflect the structure of the human [[mind ]] ([[Lévi-Strauss]], 1969-1981). Georges Dumézil ([[1968]]-1973) laid bare the underlying principles of social organization in ancient Indo-European mythologies, particularly regarding the functions of [[sovereignty]], war, and fecundity.

[[Freud ]] related [[psychoanalytic ]] [[theory ]] to mythology in the broad [[sense ]] of the term (myths, tales, sayings, [[jokes]]): "It is extremely probable that myths, for [[instance]], are distorted vestiges of the wishful [[fantasies ]] of [[whole ]] nations, the secular [[dreams ]] of youthful humanity," Freud wrote in 1908 (p. 152). In 1909 Karl [[Abraham ]] developed this [[idea ]] in Dreams and myths (1913) by showing that myths use the same mechanisms as dreams (figuration, [[condensation]], [[displacement]], and secondary revision), and that they are the realization of desires. They can therefore be [[interpreted ]] in the same way as dreams (see ).

While Abraham used the Greek [[myth ]] of Prometheus for his demonstration, Géza Róheim, a [[psychoanalyst ]] and field anthropologist, directly studied Australian aborigines. For [[them]], mythical [[time]], the time of the primordial ancestors, is "[[dream ]] time." These aborigines' [[notion ]] of "eternal dream beings" enabled him to show "how the typical [[mechanism ]] of all dream [[construction ]] operates at the heart of mythology and aboriginal [[rituals]]" (Róheim, 1952).

Jean-[[Paul ]] Valabrega (1967, 1992, 2001) devotes considerable attention to the [[epistemological ]] question of the relation between myths and the [[unconscious]], between myths and [[fantasy]]. For Valabrega, myths, which are neither [[individual ]] nor collective, tend to metamorphose (as shown by the many different versions available) yet remain eternal and perpetually regenerate, in both respects like the unconscious. Moreover, myths are related to fantasies in that they both [[represent]]. Myths are made from the stuff of fantasies, and fantasies are made from the stuff of myths: there is a circular relationship between them in which neither is primary. "[[Psychoanalysis ]] was practically [[born ]] entirely out of a myth—Oedipus— . . . that Freud rediscovered by analyzing the dreams and fantasies of his first [[patients]], as well as by analyzing his own dreams and fantasies" (Valabrega, 1994). There is also his use of mythical [[figures ]] like [[Narcissus]], [[Eros]], and [[Thanatos]].

The loose use of the term myth, encouraged if not created by Roland [[Barthes]]'s [[work ]] (1970), is more a matter of [[ideology]]. This usage, Valabrega (1994) claims, preserves the "function of myths" and the "structure of [[symptoms]]." In this usage, words without an [[author]], productions that borrow the anonymity of myths and a few contemporary elements of [[content]], bear [[witness ]] to the persistence of a [[discourse ]] that is both intimate and foreign to the [[self]].

See also: [[Anthropology ]] and psychoanalysis; "Claims of psychoanalysis to [[scientific ]] interest"; Death and psychoanalysis; Dream and myth; [[Drive]]/instinct; Group [[psychology ]] and the [[analysis ]] of the ego; [[History ]] and psychoanalysis; Mythology and psychoanalysis; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; [[Partial ]] drive; Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality; [[Totem ]] and [[Taboo]]; "Why War?"[[Bibliography]]

Further [[Reading]]