ABSTRACT
The classical approach to myth addressed the puzzle of myths’ irrationality. The first psychoanalytic writers established that the manner in which myths are irrational is the same manner by which dreams are irrational. Jones (1931) soon cautioned, however, that “one can no longer — as writers have often done — regard the problem as solved as soon as one has simply noted the similarity between dreams and certain myths” (p. 66). Myths use symbols in ways similar to dreams to express similar unconscious concerns. However, given the aversion for psychoanalysis among most anthropologists and folklorists, these basic insights were dissociated from the main body of scholarship on myths. The Culture and Personality school within American anthropology found it necessary again and again to provide introductory lessons on psychoanalysis to other social scientists. Anthropologists as late as Melville Jacobs (1952) and Victor Barnouw (1955) continued to go to the trouble of demonstrating in detail the cross-cultural validity of Freud’s (1905) extension of the concept of sexuality to include oral, anal, and Oedipal manifestations in addition to genitality.
