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In a footnote in Civilization and Its Discontents (p. 50), I expressed more or less incidentally a conjecture which might be made, on the basis of psychoanalytic material, as to how primitive man had acquired fire. Albrecht Schaeffer's contrary opinion1 and the surprising allusion in Erlenmeyer's paper2 to the Mongolian edict forbidding urination on ashes,3 lead me to return to this theme.4
My assumption that the control of fire could be gained only after man had renounced the homosexually tinged pleasure of extinguishing it with urine, can be confirmed, I believe, by an interpretation of the Greek myth of Prometheus, taking into account the fact that the content of the myth shows such distortions as we might expect. These distortions are of the same type as, and not greater than, those we recognize daily, when, from the dreams of patients, we make reconstructions of their repressed, but none the less significant, childhood experiences. The mechanisms employed in dream distortion are: representation by means of symbols, and transformation into the opposite. I