ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, mentioned myths both in passing and as brief digressions in his writings, but he never devoted an extended methodological or theoretical discussion to the topic. He left only scattered remarks concerning an interpretive method that he occasionally applied to myths. Freud announced the theory behind the technique in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, dated December 12, 1897:
Can you imagine what “endopsychic myths” are? The latest product of my mental labor. The dim inner perception of one’s own psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside and, characteristically, into the future and the beyond … Meschugge? Psycho-mythology.
(Freud 1985, 286)