ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud suggested that mythology consists of projections onto the environment of what are actually divisions within the psychic apparatus. By reversing the projections, that is, by reinterpreting the tales in a reductive, psychologizing manner, metaphysics might be replaced by metapsychology. The extent and content of Freud’s encounter with Romanticism remain unknown, but one matter more must be emphasized. Romanticism was not simply an artistic style and metaphysical philosophy. Freud’s student interest in Romanticism ended in vehement renunciation and a brief turn to radical materialism. Freud may be credited with demythologizing the Romantic conception of the unconscious. Freud’s technique of demythologizing mythology may be implicated in the development of his method of dream interpretation. Freud’s conflict model of the psyche can easily be seen as a scientific secularization of Romanticism’s bipolar metaphysics. Romantics’ close observations of psychic experience were reason to trust psychological reductions of their myths as working hypotheses—but only as working hypotheses.
