ABSTRACT
The fantasies that depth psychology speculates might exist in the minds of infants or young children are actually attested to in the recorded literature of Indian adults. Thus the Hindu stories seem to corroborate Freudian hypotheses about infant sexuality. The hermeneutics of suspicion—the belief that a text can mean something other than what the author thinks it means, a hermeneutic derived directly from Freud—prevents us, however, from simply asking members of the culture what they think the symbol means. The gloss offered from within the culture must be accepted as a truth, but only a partial truth. There is the famous anecdote about Freud: upon being reminded by a disciple that to smoke cigars is clearly a phallic activity, Freud, cigar in hand, is said to have responded, “Sometimes a good cigar is just a good cigar.” The major respect in which Hindu myths differ from Freudian stories is the fact that Hindu myths, by and large, have happy endings.
