The Shape of Culture and Self

Like self and language, the structure of myth is made by the combination of two modes of thought. Myth is not, as the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham supposed, ‘a fragment of the superseded infantile psychic life of the race’. Jung cited this remark in order to contradict it. ‘Myths’, he said, are ‘the most mature product of that young humanity . . . myth-making and myth-inhabiting man was a grown reality and not a 4-year-old child.’ ¹