Segmentation of The Mother: Women in Greek Myth

Dream symbolism extends far beyond the dream: it is not peculiar to the dream, but exercises a similar dominating influence on the representation in fairy tales, myths and legends, in jokes and folklore. It enables us to trace the ultimate connection between dreams and these latter productions.

Before and since Freud wrote these lines, many others have noted the similarities between myths and dreams.7b This is not to say that the meaning of myths derives solely from the fact that they may express something of the unconscious, or that myths are unique in revealing unconscious elements of a culture. Rather, like many dreams, especially the ones which resemble daydreams, some myths organize unconscious infantile sexual wishes into a narrative sequence.5b

I propose to offer a psychoanalytic interpretation of some myths which were familiar to the Athenians of the fifth century B.C., a period I have chosen because a great deal of literature with mythological content survives from this time. Here we can see that the Greeks expressed some of their infantile sexual wishes in their myths and that important among these wishes are those associated with the Oedipus complex. Therefore, within the myths there are representations of the incestuous longing for the mother, who appears in disguised form. I suggest that it is for this reason that many female characters appear as segments of the mother, while the whole mother rarely appears. This disguise, which I shall call segmentation, is analogous to the process in dreams in which a single unconscious dream thought “is represented by more than one dream element.”5a

As the chart on the next page shows, I call the segments Erotic,