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.
In this scholarly book the author, a professor of literature with a solid background in psychology, attempts a psychoanalytic interpretation of the punishment of the Danaïdes. The myth in its most classical form reads as follows: the fifty daughters of Danaüs were forced to marry the sons of their uncle; during the wedding night, all of the brides but one decapitated their husbands. Their punishment in hell was to fill a pierced jar with water endlessly.
The interpretation of the myth is based primarily on the use of basic dream interpretation techniques, with a heavy reliance on interpretation of symbols: the pierced jar is the deflorated female genital, water becomes semen, and decapitation represents castration. The Danaïdes are phallic, castrating women and their punishment can be seen as a symptom: the endless filling is a repeated coitus where the women—through the mechanisms of condensation and identification—take over the active sexual role of their dead husbands, suffering then from a form of nymphomania.
This interpretation is indeed plausible and adds intelligibility to the understanding of a myth that has stimulated many earlier interpretations at different levels of conceptualization. What might be of more interest to the psychoanalyst, however, are certain rules of myth interpretation described by Jacques. First of all, the author stresses the importance of re-creating the myth in its most classical and purified form. This is done by a painstaking trimming of the multiple additions offered by various poets who have reported the myth through the times. Such work, which demands much scholarly research, bears some similarities to the analyst's efforts at reconstructing original fantasies beyond the screens or 'secondary revisions' that may obscure them.
Jacques also indicates the usefulness of distinguishing between two forms of projections at work in mythmaking: primary projection proceeds from the mythmaker himself, while secondary projection