ABSTRACT
The psychologizing of myth does not begin with Freud or Jung. The recognition that myth involves the projection of human qualities onto gods goes back to at least the pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes. But as a disciplinary approach to myth, the psychologizing of myth begins in the twentieth century, with Freud and Jung. They transform both the literal meaning and the explanatory function of myth. For them, the subject matter of myth is the human unconscious, not the outer world, and the function of myth is to provide an encounter with the unconscious, not an explanation of it. Led by the development of ego psychology, which has expanded psychoanalysis from a theory of abnormal personality into a theory of normal personality, contemporary psychoanalysts such as Jacob Arlow see myth as contributing to normal development rather than to the perpetuation of neurosis. Other psychoanalysts who break partly or substantially with Freud are Rank, Bettelheim, Dundes, and Róheim. The psychoanalyst who, through the concept of play, serves above all to overcome the conventional division between the inner and the outer worlds is Winnicott.
