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The river, more precisely, the Columbia, Snake, Clear-water river system, plays a highly significant role in a large number of Nez Perce myths. In many of them it supplies what might be called the directional plane of development; that is, the stories may develop “up-river” or “down-river.” The river as a plane of directional development is particularly common in a series of Coyote myths, although the development is not confined to these stories. Such development, when a tribe is located on a riverine system, is probably not unusual. The Essay of Erik Homburger Erikson which deals, among other things, with the river-orientation of the Yurok is well known.1 More interesting than the observation that the myths in general follow the river is the fact that the river seems to have a fairly consistent psychologically symbolic value for Nez Perce mythology, an ambivalent psychological bipolarity which differs from the monopole-oriented value of the Klamath River for the Yurok that is described by Erikson.
There are certain fairly elementary Freudian assumptions important for this paper. The first assumption is from Freud's work on the symbolic nature (i.e., the primary process) of dreams and the unconscious causal factors to be found in these symbols. He has discussed various common symbols in dreams, and among them he mentions dreams of water. In The Interpretation of Dreams he says, “A large number of dreams, which are frequently full of anxiety, and often have for content the traversing of narrow spaces, or staying long in the water, are based upon phantasies concerning the intra-uterine life, the soujourn in the mother's womb, and the act of birth.”2
Otto Rank's The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, presents this principle again and again, relating it to myths of various Western gods and heroes. In these it is also seen as the suppressed desire of the child in our culture to disavow its own parents for a fantasy of a “higher” origin.
Another psychoanalytic concept important