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Psychoanalysis has more or less from its inception been in dialogue with the ancient myths, with the Oedipus myth as the prototype. The IFPS conference in Athens in 1996 prompted a considerable amount of thinking on myths. We have published a number of the articles that were presented there. Also in this issue you will find a couple of papers sprung from this endeavour.
The value of the myths for psychoanalysis has to do with the nature of what we are devoting our interest to understanding. Bion has formulated “thinking about emotional thinking” as a central concern, and that is in a way what myths are about. In his paper in this issue Biancoli states “…that they come out of the depth of the human psyche and speak the universal language of symbols”. I think what gives them vigour is that they speak the universal language in a personal, poetic tongue.
The interplay between “the individual” and “the universal” or “the collective” arouses endless confusion both in analysts and analysands and therefore demands continuous attention.
In a posthumous essay on the human dialogue (1), David Bohm puts forward as a key assumption that we have to question whether thoughts are our own individual thoughts. He asserts that thought originates in the whole culture and pervades us and spreads like a virus. Each one of us nourishes that virus. We tend to think that we know a vast number of things, e.g. on bacteria, gravitation, South Africa, instincts, objects and so forth. Instead knowledge itself moves autonomously and knows all that content, “but it does not know what it is doing” (Bohm's italics). An often used term in psychoanalysis for a specific instance of such spreading of thoughts is “projective identification”. “Projective identification” also does not know what it is doing, and brings about a lot of confusion in those involved in the operation.
Another basic tenet in Bohm's reasoning is that “thought”, which is the past participle of thinking, emerges from memory, the past, bu