Editorial: The Secret Code

Address to the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies Athens, 15 May 1996

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear colleagues and friends,

It is a particular honour for me to welcome you to Athens and to address a few words to you at the beginning of the International Conference on Mythology and Psychoanalysis. And particularly in Greece, which holds a special place in the explorations of humanity for its original identity, maybe not only from the perspective of European civilization. And particularly in Athens, which is not only an immense cosmopolitan city, but also a site of archaeological learning of utmost importance. Archaeology and mythology and psychoanalysis have something in common, and it is this invisible common factor, maybe, that has brought me here. I am not a member of your Society, not even of the Finnish Therapeia Society, but I work here in Athens, at the Finnish Institute, which is an archaeological school.

We come to understand the mythological basis of our existence by a great number of routes, but our global visions must always find their validity in the mythologies created by certain cultures at a certain time and place.

Greece was one of those sites where the mythical models of universal significance were created, and in this sense, too, each of us has made a mythical journey to come here, from long distances and from different parts of the world. When we go on a journey, what happens, in Nietzsche's words, “we invent for ourselves the major part of experience”, “wir erdichten”, become creators of fiction quite unwittingly.

Tonight I shall discuss some general themes concerning mythology, and leave the more obscure paths, such as myths of Kerambos or Arakhne, for another occasion.

In the ancient world, and I am thinking of the times of Homer, that is the time of the composition of the oral poems by a poet or poets known as Homer (between the 8th and 6th centuries B.C.), the course of human existence was often expressed in terms of a cyclical progr