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April 11, 1967. BISEXUALITY AND IMMORTALITY IN THE DIONYSOS MYTH (Freud Anniversary Lecture). Helene Deutsch, M.D.
The Interpretation of Dreams made it possible for the first time to comprehend the psychological forces responsible for the genesis and subsequent vicissitudes of myths, and in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud pointed to analogies between individual childhood memories and the recollections of nations, as embodied in their sagas and myths. Of the myths of Ancient Greece, Dr. Deutsch believes none is more in need of interpretation than that of Dionysos, and she selects two ruling forces in the development of this mythological personality: bisexuality and the struggle for immortality, and these twin themes are so closely interwoven that they may be considered as one. Applying the same methods used in the psychoanalysis of patients, Dr. Deutsch demonstrates how the mythological data can be made to yield its meanings.
The course of Dionysos' struggle for immortality begins with the mythical history of his multiple births, and is followed by the relationship to his mortal mother, his separation from her, and his final reunion with her. In different accounts, he is referred to as twice-mothered and thrice-mothered; in all of them Zeus is his father. The mother of his first birth is Persephone, the goddess; the mother of his second birth is Semele, daughter of the King of Thebes. The Dionysos of both these versions suffers at the hands of a jealous and vindictive Hera. In the first, when still a growing child, he is destroyed by the Titans at Hera's instigation, but Zeus swallows the still beating heart; in the second, while still an embryo in Semele's womb, through Hera's cunning Zeus unwittingly reduces the mother of the unborn child to ashes and the gestation is completed within the body of Zeus himself. (As appears so often in analytic work with patients, men apparently have always been envious of the division of penis-uterus.)
It is Diony