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The origin of the interpretation of myth from the psychoanalytic viewpoint coincides historically with the creation of psychoanalysis itself. Freud discovered the Oedipus complex and decoded the central meaning of the Oedipus myth, which he reported in his letters to Fliess of 15 October and 5 November 1897, and 15 March 1898 (Masson, 1985). Since then, the development of applications of psychoanalysis to the study of myths and folklore has enjoyed a brisk and absorbing development (Rank [1914] and Reik [1946] come to mind immediately).
Richard Caldwell's book represents an attempt at a complete, formal, truly psychoanalytic methodology of myth interpretation, and it is a fascinating and worthwhile one. Not only does it contain a methodological scheme, based on an adroit amalgam of basic Freudian and post-Freudian theory, but it also offers a rich harvest of examples of the method in the