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This paper discusses the relationship between the psychoanalytic concept of the personal myth and the life and work of Yukio Mishima, the famous and eccentric Japanese writer who committed ritual suicide by seppuku, or hara-kiri, in 1970. This dramatically staged and well-rehearsed death by disembowelment and beheading occurred on the day he finished the last lines of his magnum opus, the four volume work ironically entitled The Sea of Fertility.
In his 1956 paper, Ernst Kris introduced the term the personal myth as an analytic concept. By this he meant to describe a clinical phenomenon wherein some patients invented a story of their lives which contained significant omissions and distortions. The autobiographical self-image served a defensive function in the psychic economy, warding off early anxieties and preventing the intensity of traumatic experiences and of aggressive and libidinal impulses from reaching consciousness. He emphasized the importance of adverse events in the early phallic phase of development in the psychogenesis of this particular syndrome. However, in the three cases he discussed, problems in identification and in the evolution of the self-concept are also prominent.
In describing these patients, Kris also noted that the personal myth “was not only … an essential part of their self-representation but [became] a treasured possession to which the patient was attached with a peculiar devotion,” and he went on to say that “this attachment reflects the fact that the autobiographical self-image has become the heir to important early fantasies, which it preserves” (p. 654). In other words, the myth derived part of its psychic investment from a repressed