The Myth of the Birth of the Hero Revisited: Disasters and Brutal Child Rearing

Freud and Rank stated that the Oedipus complex and narcissistic woundings generated the underlying motifs of the myth of the birth of the hero. This essay proposes a different key to the myth of the hero who transcends the society's attempts to abandon and kill him: the harsh child-rearing practices of a group that has suffered catastrophes. The distressed society requires effective leaders to direct adaptive responses to its formidable problems. Nevertheless, group members occupying parent roles are drawn to repeating the experiences of community disasters in the relationships with their children. As a result, the children suffer deformities and are disabled to become leaders. Society searches for a way out of the quandary.

The myth preaches that childhood traumas can be offset. It pleads with the child to come to peaceful terms with the society. The child's vindictiveness is to be employed only in changing the child-injuring trends in the society. Counteracting damaging origins and their psychic sequela is demonstrated by the hero. He contests the necessity to do over the traumas suffered as a young child. Further, the society offers the image of the hero to its members to be introjected. The group member eagerly reaches beyond the impaired parents to incorporate the hero in order to fill voids in his/her psyche that would otherwise impede development. As a caring and inspiring internal imago-structure, the hero is to aid the group member to neutralize unnerving affects. Especially requiring detoxification is the dysphoria that inevitably appears when the experience of a historic group catastrophe, which has found institutionalization in the group's child-rearing practices, is not compulsively reproduced.