Myth Religion and Mother Right:—Bachofen's Influence on Psychoanalytic Theory

IN THIS PAPER, I WOULD LIKE to assess the impact of J. J. Bachofen and matriarchal theory on four important psychoanalytic theoreticians. Although this sort of topic is seldom addressed with much energy or enthusiasm anymore, one thing that strikes the psychoanalytic historian is the way in which, among the early pioneers, clinical theory informed, and was, in turn informed by, a wide network of interlacing assumptions about social, historical and intrapsychic reality, in which the nature and meaning of religion figure prominently. The first hint that this is so is possibly in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which Freud declared that religious mythology represents an alienated apperception of intrapsychic processes, which are destined to be unravelled by the psychology of the unconscious (Freud, 1901). Although sharing in this fundamental assumption, Freud's dissident followers espoused different philosophical anthropologies and different philosophies of history, as expressed in their clinical orientations as well as their cultural writings. Due to the essentially comparative nature of this inquiry, I can not do justice to any individual theorist's output. Moreover, as Jung, Rank, Fromm, and indirectly, Ian Suttie, were all influenced by Bachofen, I have allowed myself to wander somewhat across the historical landscape to make appropriate interpolations and juxtapositions, so as to put Bachofen's influence in proper historical perspective.

An eminent Swiss jurist, and friend and mentor to the then budding philologist, Friedrich Nietzsche, J. J. Bachofen (1815–1881) was an avid classicist and mythographer, and a devoted friend and student to Friedrich Carl von Savigny, a leading spokesman for the Historical School of Law. The Historical School