Mythic consonance and dissonance in the vicissitudes of transference*

I recently completed an empirical research study involving systematic thematic analysis of the fantasy productions of subjects manifesting obsessive versus hysterical personality traits. The statistically significant results of the study indicated important differences in the Weltanschauungen or “personal myths” held by obsessives versus hysterics—differences in the characteristic manner in which obsessives versus hysterics interpret causality in the world. These findings shed some light on clinically observed transference phenomena shown by obsessive and hysterical patients in psychotherapy.

Essentially, the study indicated that the obsessive tends to interpret causality according to a personal myth in which exaggerated causative power is attributed to the subject's own volitional acts. In contrast, in the hysteric's personal myth the ultimate loci of causality reside in powerful external forces which at best can be seduced into making a beneficent nod in the subject's direction. In their extreme forms, it would seem that what is common to both the obsessive and the hysterical personal myths is a regression to an archaic, prelogical belief in sympathetic magic or action at a distance. The research study has lent empirical confirmation to Freud's suggestion that the obsessive tends to ascribe magic omnipotence to his own thoughts, feelings and wishes, and to overestimate their causative power to effect changes in the external world at a distance. Yet the regression to a magic view of causality seems no less a part of the hysteric's phenomenal world. The difference is that it is not the hysteric himself who aspires to and possesses magic omnipotence, but rather the powerful others by whom he believes himself to be sympathetically influenced and buffeted about, pawn-like, on the sea of life. For the obsessive the “mana” resides in himself; for the hysteric, in the powerful other. In their extremes, both myths are permeated with magic.

What are the implications of the ab