Chapter 14. Elements of Psycho-Analysis

In Chapter 3 I described personal myth as an important tool in psychoanalytic work. In Chapters 11 and 12 I attributed augmented though similar significance to the Oedipus myth because it has public and racial, as opposed to private, status. The advantages of transition from private to racial myth are analogous to the transition from private to public communication.1

The Oedipus myth will be differently read by different people, but the measure of agreement makes it a channel of public communication as Freud's use of it has shown. I shall use the myths of the garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel to reinforce the expression, already implied by the Sphinx in the Oedipus myth, of attitudes of a god inimical to the gaining of knowledge by human beings whose search is felt to imperil his supremacy.

In the garden of Eden, possessed by the Father, eating of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil is forbidden. The serpent, or Satan disguised, incites the woman to defy the ordinance of the Almighty. The revelation of disobedience is associated with guilt and nakedness. The outcome is banishment as it is in the Oedipus myth. In the Babel myth the use of the tower is to effect an entry into realms regarded by Jahweh as his own – heaven. The outcome is exile, as in the garden of Eden and Oedipus myths, but an important precursor is the destruction of a common language and the spreading of confusion so that co-operation becomes impossible.

The components of these myths that I wish to use are those which pictorialize, in the sense of internal pictures or symbols that we make

for ourselves, features that might turn out to be the psychoanalytic elements that I seek.

1. There is a god or fate, omniscient and omnipotent though modelled anthropomorphically. This god belongs to a moral system and appears to be hostile to mankind in his search for knowledge, even moral knowledge.

2. In all, p