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From the material discussed it should now be possible to detect a pattern that remains unaltered in apparently widely differing contexts. It would be useful to isolate and formulate the invariants of that pattern so that it could be communicated.
Freud's formulations do just that. Thinking, developed through psychoanalysis, has led to discoveries that were not made by Freud, but that reveal configurations resembling those in discoveries he did make. Can his formulations be replaced by others that reveal as nearly as possible all the configurations that are similar and not merely those instances that his formulations were intended to illuminate?
If his Oedipus theory is used in conjunction with the Eden myth, the Babel myth, and a version of messianic expectation, it can continue to illuminate the mind's workings as it does now and to display elements of an underlying configuration that widen significantly the area illuminated. The deity's hostility to curiosity remarked by Milton's Satan (Book IV, Paradise Lost) can be matched in Babel by the attack on speech (the infliction of confusion of tongues); in Oedipus by Tiresias and his warning; in the messianic story by the attack on the son by the father. The same pattern is reflected in the self-inflicted punishments of the Sphinx and Oedipus. Each version emphasizes a different facet; together they suggest a common configuration. The attempt to differentiate emotional elements is curiously unsuccessful. Thus ‘omnipotent good’, ‘evil’, ‘pursuit of knowledge through curiosity’, ‘impending disaster’, ‘arrogance’, and so on, each attempt seems to weaken the impact that the elements have when they are part of the narrative as a whole; they undergo a transformation similar to that undergone by the dream upon being consciously recalled, or by a work of art when it is replaced by a reproduction. The transformation
depends on a change of vertex. The vertex of the myth-maker is not mine as I attempt this reformulation; the ver