You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
DEAR DR HAYLEY,
'Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth …' (Genesis, 11:9).
I wish to address only a few aspects of Mr Samuels' letter which I believe may contain substantive disagreements between us. The terminological problems are probably easily resolved without further debate.
I subscribe to the two related tenets of psychoanalytic psychology identified by the terms 'overdetermination' (Freud, 1900) and the 'principle of multiple function' (Waelder, 1930), as they are applied to dreams, slips, neurotic symptoms, and myths. Mr Samuels' interpretation of the hero theme is one which seems to state (in Freudian language) that it represents a regression from oedipal conflicts with the mother and the father to pre-oedipal ones, with the mother alone. He does not, however, appear to acknowledge the oedipal component openly—at least not in his letter—but suggests that the primary impetus of the mythic theme is an ego problem, namely the conflicts and failures surrounding separation from the pre-oedipal mother. The result of the failure in achieving rapproachement (and, eventually, object and self constancy) produces an identification with the mother, an identification which is sufficiently different from 'fusion' with her to allow for the defensive reaction of hyper-masculinization. In my paper, and in my subsequent letter to you (IRPA, 1982: 485–6), I sought to emphasize that it is possible to interpret a myth from many viewpoints, and that the various interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but rather represent the overdetermined nature of such productions. A problem posed in a myth, the solution of which may most obviously be interpreted in oedipal terms, nevertheless may contain, either within its stated content or only by implication in the content of the antecedent or derivative myth, aspects which can be interpreted pre-oedipally, developmentally, or structurally (i.e. id—e