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This is a tightly written article on the role of the mytho-symbolic, with the suggestion that myth and symbolism represent a sort of hermeneutic of the infant trying to come to terms with ambiguous
messages from adults. With irony, Laplanche remarks that it is Freud's ill fate that he, who never gave up his positivistic requirements, finds himself repeatedly confronted with the accusation of having forged one more myth.
Laplanche proceeds to discuss myth and theory, to which he adds a third element: the romance or narrative. He feels that this is an appropriate category in view of the family romance of neurotics (Freud) and the myth of the individual neurotic (Lacan). That which one can call a romanticization never ceases to arouse psychoanalytic interest. Narration or narrativity, a term much used since the writings of Spence (but also, in addition, in the provinces of Ricoeur, Viderman, and other lesser known authors), has become the theme by which the old but always living term herme-neutic returns to the bosom of psychoanalysis.
Laplanche then considers psychoanalysis as poised between myth, theory, and romance. The central issue for him in this article is to consider why and how mytho-symbolic thought, a major rediscovery of psychoanalysis, has unduly tended to become the “all” of psychoanalysis—at least for its adversaries, and as well, perhaps, for psychoanalysis itself at times.
Freud repudiated all dream keys and focused instead on the associations of the dreamer. The appearance of the theme of symbolism, however, brought with it complex reworkings of Freud's dream book16; Rank's essays on myths were even included in one edition of it. Freud showed much interest in the ethnologists and their discoveries of symbolism and folklore from other societies, and in dreams as reported in folklore.
What is the relation between dream symbols and typical dreams? What does the appearance of a symbol in a dream mean for associations, for the unconscious links to the theme