2 Psychologizing myth

From Freud to Winnicott

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 Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes, who, writing in the sixth century BCE, observed that Ethiopians imagine their gods to be swarthy and flat-nosed, where Thracians visualize their gods as fair-haired and blue-eyed. Most famously, Xenophanes asserted that if lions, horses, and oxen had gods, their gods would look like them. Jung in particular is eager to trace a psychological understanding of myth all the way back to ancient Gnostics and to medieval alchemists. Going beyond—and against—Xenophanes, he claims that ancient myth makers themselves often recognized the psychological meaning of their myths.

Nevertheless, for Freud and Jung alike, the key intellectual accomplishment of modernity has been the disentanglement of the psychological from the physical and the metaphysical—the disentanglement of the inner from the outer. Projections onto the outer world, which had taken the form of gods, have largely been withdrawn. The outer world has come to be recognized as a natural rather than a supernatural domain, to be explained by impersonal scientific laws rather than by the decisions of gods. For both Freud and Jung, the rise of science has spelled the fall of religion. Freud writes,

Jung writes, “Only in the following centuries, with the growth of natural science, was the projection withdrawn from matter and entirely abolished altogether with the psyche… . Nobody … any longer endows matter with mythological properties. This form of projection has become obsolete” (Jung 1968, p. 300).

Most remaining projections are onto other persons, not onto animals, plants, or stones. With the fall of religion has come the fall of myth, or at least myth as it had traditionally been taken: as a story about a god acting in the world.

Unlike Freud, for whom religion is altogether harmful, Jung laments that the loss of religion as an explanation of the world has simultaneously meant the loss of an effective means of tending to the unconscious. But Jung no less than Freud praises the triumph of the scientific explanation over the religious one.1

There have been varying responses to the challenge to myth by science. The most straightforward response to the challenge is simply to surrender myth to science. This response is, typically or stereotypically, that of the nineteenth century, and it reflects the common assumption of the nineteenth century that science and religion are at odds (see, for example, White 1965). The theorists of myth who epitomize this response are the pioneering English anthropologist E. B. Tylor, whose chief work, Primitive Culture, first appeared in 1871, and the Scottish classicist and anthropologist J. G. Frazer, the first edition of whose main opus, The Golden Bough, was published in 1890. (Their views are discussed in chapters 1 and 8 of this book.)

No more than nineteenth-century theorists of myth have twentieth-century theorists challenged the supremacy of science. But they have taken either the function or the subject matter of myth to be other than that of science. For Freud and Jung, neither the function nor the subject matter of myth is scientific-like. For both, nineteenth-century theories, by restricting myth to a literal explanation of physical events, fail to account for the array of other functions and meanings that myth harbors. The telltale evidence is that myth survives. If Tylor and Frazer were right, myth would by now long be dead.

Observing that Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex still stirs present-day audiences, who do not believe in Fate, Freud argues that the story must therefore be about something other than the impact of the supernatural on our lives. Were Tylor and Frazer right, moderns, no less than ancients, would attribute Oedipus’s behavior to determinism from without rather than from within, and moderns, no longer believing in Fate, would be unmoved by the myth. That moderns are still moved means, for Freud and also for Jung, that the myth must be taken as other than a literal, or religious, explanation of Oedipus’s behavior. For both, the subject matter of myth is the unconscious, and the function of myth is to provide an encounter with the unconscious.

Classical psychoanalytic theorizing about myth

Just as Tylor and Frazer take their cue to myth from science, so Freud and Jung take their cue from dreams. While Freud analyzes myths throughout his writings, it is fitting that his key discussion of his key myth, that of Oedipus, occurs in The Interpretation of Dreams (1953):

On the surface, or manifest, level the story of Oedipus describes that figure’s vain effort to elude the Fate that has been imposed on him. Latently, however, Oedipus most wants to do what manifestly he least wants to do: he wants to act out his “Oedipus complex.” The manifest, or literal, level of the myth hides the latent, symbolic meaning. On the manifest level Oedipus is the innocent victim of Fate. On the latent level he is the culprit. Rightly understood, the myth is not about Oedipus’s failure to circumvent his ineluctable destiny but about his success in fulfilling his fondest desires.

Yet the latent meaning scarcely stops here because the myth is not ultimately about Oedipus at all. Just as the manifest level, on which Oedipus is the victim, masks a latent one, on which Oedipus is the victimizer, so does that level in turn mask an even more latent one, on which the real victimizer is the myth maker and any reader of the myth smitten with it. Here the myth is about the fulfillment of the Oedipus complex in the male myth maker or reader, who identifies himself with Oedipus and through Oedipus fulfills his own kindred yearnings. At heart, the myth is about oneself. It is not biography but autobiography.

In whom does the Oedipus complex lie? To a degree it lies in all adult males, none of whom has fully outgrown the desires that first arose in childhood. But the complex lies above all in neurotic adult males who are stuck, or fixated, at their Oedipal stage. For many reasons they cannot fulfill their desires directly. Their parents may no longer be alive or, if alive, may no longer be so intimidating or so alluring. Furthermore, the parents would not readily consent. Anyone who succeeded in the act would surely be caught and punished. And the guilt felt for having killed a father whom one loved as much as hated, and for having forced oneself upon a resisting mother, would be overwhelming. But the biggest obstacle to the enactment of the complex is more fundamental. One does not know that the complex exists. It has been repressed.

Under these circumstances myth provides the ideal kind of fulfillment. True, the fulfillment is mental rather than physical, vicarious rather than direct, and above all unconscious rather than conscious. But myth still permits some degree of release. If on the one hand the outer layers of the myth hide its true meaning and thereby block fulfillment, on the other hand they reveal that true meaning and thereby provide fulfillment. After all, on even the literal level Oedipus does kill his father and does have sex with his mother. He simply does so unintentionally. If on the next level it is Oedipus rather than the myth maker or reader who acts intentionally, the action is still intentional. The level above therefore partly reveals, even as it partly hides, the meaning below. The true meaning always lies at the level below but is always conveyed by the level above. By identifying themselves with Oedipus, neurotic adult males secure a partial fulfillment of their own lingering Oedipal desires, but without becoming conscious of those desires. Myth thus constitutes a compromise between the side of oneself that wants the desires satisfied openly and the side that does not even want to know they exist.

When Freud observes that modern audiences, who no longer believe in Fate, are still moved by the play Oedipus, he takes for granted that the myth is not about the external world. When he claims that modern audiences are moved by the destiny of Oedipus only because “it might have been ours,” he takes for granted that the myth is really about us. When he asserts that the “guilt of Oedipus” “compel[s] us to recognize … those same impulses” in us, he takes for granted that the myth fulfills our wishes. Like dream, myth is a fantasy.

Freud ties the function of myth to the meaning. Myth vents unconscious desires by telling a story in which those desires are fulfilled. The fulfillment comes by identifying oneself with the named hero and thereby experiencing the same emotions felt by that hero as the plot—the disguised plot—unfolds.

In Dreams in Folklore (1911), written with D. E. Oppenheim, Freud interprets dreams in folklore, but none of the pieces of folklore considered is a myth (see Freud and Oppenheim 1958). The classical Freudian analyses of myth are Karl Abraham’s Dreams and Myths (1909, tr. 1913) and Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (also 1909, tr. 1914).2 Both Abraham and Rank follow the master in comparing myths with dreams and in deeming both the disguised, symbolic fulfillment of repressed, overwhelmingly Oedipal wishes lingering in the adult myth maker or reader. But Rank’s work is by far the richer and sprightlier of the two. Above all, he presents a common plot, or pattern, for one category of myths: heroes, specifically male heroes. Rank provides a manifest pattern that he then translates into latent terms. Rank later broke irrevocably with Freud, but when he wrote The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, he was an apostle and soon emerged as Freud’s heir apparent.3

For Rank, heroism covers what Jungians like to call the first half of life: the period from birth to young adulthood. This period involves the establishment of oneself as an independent person in the external world. The attainment of independence expresses itself concretely in the securing of a job and a mate. The securing of either requires both separation from one’s parents and mastery of one’s drives. Independence of one’s parents means not the rejection of them but self-sufficiency. Similarly, independence of one’s drives means not the rejection of them but control over them. It means not the denial of drives but the rerouting of them into socially acceptable outlets. When Freud says that the test of happiness is the capacity to work and love, he is clearly referring to the goals of the first half of life, which for him apply to all of life. Classical Freudian problems involve a lingering attachment either to parents or to drives. Either to depend on one’s parents for the fulfillment of desires or to fulfill them in anti-social ways is to be fixated at childhood.

Rank’s pattern, which he applies fully to 15 hero myths, goes from the hero’s birth to his attainment of a “career”:

Literally, or consciously, the hero is a historical or legendary figure like Oedipus. The hero is heroic because he rises from obscurity to the throne. Literally, he is the victim of either his parents or, ultimately, Fate. While his parents have longed for a child and abandon him only to save the father, they nevertheless do abandon him. The hero’s revenge, if the parricide is even committed knowingly, is therefore understandable: who would not consider killing one’s would-be killer?

Symbolically, or unconsciously, the hero is heroic not because he dares to win a throne but because he dares to kill his father. The killing is definitely intentional, and the cause is not revenge but sexual frustration. The father has refused to surrender his wife—the real object of the son’s efforts: “as a rule the deepest, generally unconscious root of the dislike of the son for the father, or of two brothers for each other, is referable to the competition for the tender devotion and love of the mother” (Rank 1914, p. 74). Too awful to face, the true meaning of the myth gets covered up by the concocted story. Rather than the culprit, the hero becomes an innocent victim or, at worst, a justified avenger: “The fictitious romance [i.e., the myth] is the excuse, as it were, for the hostile feelings which the child harbors against his father, and which in this fiction are projected against the father” (Rank 1914, pp. 68–69).4 What the hero seeks gets masked as power, not incest. Most of all, who the hero is gets masked as some third party rather than as the myth maker or reader.

Why the literal hero is usually the son of royalty, Rank never explains. Perhaps the manifest clash thereby becomes even more titanic: it is over power as well as revenge. But power is not a Freudian motive. It is the motive of human behavior for Alfred Adler. When, as in Oedipus’s case, the hero kills his father unknowingly, the conscious motive can hardly be revenge, so that ambition or something else non-Freudian is needed as an overt spur.

Literally, the myth culminates in the hero’s attainment of a throne. Symbolically, the hero gains a mate. One might, then, conclude that the myth expresses the Freudian goal of the first half of life. In actuality, it evinces the opposite. The wish it fulfills is not for detachment from parents and from anti-social impulses but, on the contrary, for the most intense possible relationship to parents and for the most anti-social of urges: parricide and incest, even rape. Taking one’s father job and one’s mother’s hand does not quite spell independence of them.

The myth maker or reader is an adult, but the wish vented by the myth is that of a boy of three to five: “Myths are, therefore, created by adults, by means of retrograde childhood fantasies, the hero being credited with the myth-maker’s personal infantile [i.e., childhood] history” (Rank 1914, p. 82). The adult male myth maker recreates his own childhood fantasy of fulfilling his Oedipal desires, attributes that fantasy to the named hero, and then identifies himself with that hero: “In investing the hero with their own infantile history, they [the myth makers] identify themselves with him, as it were, claiming to have been similar heroes in their own personality” (Rank 1914, p. 81). The myth thus fulfills the desires never outgrown by the adult who either invents or uses it. That adult is psychologically an eternal child: “There is a certain class of people, the so-called psychoneurotics, shown by the teachings of Freud to have remained children, in a sense, although otherwise appearing grown up” (Rank 1914, p. 63). In short, the myth expresses not the Freudian goal of the first half of life but the childhood goal that keeps the neurotic from achieving it. (On Rank after his break with Freud, see chapter 3 of this book.)

Contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing about myth

Like any other theory of myth, the psychoanalytic one is the application of a broader theory. There are no theories of myth per se. There are only applications of theories of culture, society, religion, literature, and the mind. But then as the psychoanalytic study of the mind has evolved, so has the psychoanalytic theory of myth.

Led by the development of ego psychology, which has expanded psychoanalysis from a theory of abnormal personality to 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. For them, myth helps one grow up rather than, like Peter Pan, remain a child. Myth abets adjustment to society and to the physical world rather than childish flight from them. Myth may still serve to fulfill id wishes, but it also serves the ego functions of defense and adaptation and the superego function of renunciation. Myth now offers the psychoanalytic counterpart to Malinowski’s anthropological brand of socialization. Furthermore, myth for contemporary psychoanalysts, as for Malinowski, serves everyone, not merely neurotics. Put summarily, contemporary Freudians take myth positively rather than, like classical ones, negatively. As Arlow characterizes the contemporary Freudian approach,

For classical psychoanalysts, myths are like dreams. Both serve to satisfy repressed wishes. For contemporary psychoanalysts, myths are unlike dreams. Where dreams still serve to satisfy wishes, myths serve to deny or to sublimate them. According to Mark Kanzer, “Where the dream represents the demands of the instincts, the myth tends to perpetuate and represent the demands of society on the mental apparatus for symbolization and acceptance” (Kanzer 1964, p. 32). For classical psychoanalysts, myths are simply public dreams: “The manifestation of the intimate relation between dream and myth … entirely justifies the interpretation of the myth as a dream of the masses of the people” (Rank 1914, p. 6). For contemporary psychoanalysts, myths, because they are public, serve to socialize: “Myths are instruments of socialization” (Arlow 1961, p. 379).

In his book The Uses of Enchantment the well-known psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim says much the same as Arlow and others, but he says it of fairy tales rather than of myths, which he oddly sets against fairy tales and interprets in a classical Freudian way. Classical psychoanalysts tend to see myths and fairy tales as akin, just as they do myths and dreams. It is contemporary psychoanalysts who contrast myths to fairy tales, but usually they favor myths over fairy tales, seeing myths as serving the ego or the superego and seeing fairy tales as serving the id. Bettelheim does the reverse.

To be sure, Bettelheim does not consider myths to be wish fulfillments. In fact, he seems to echo Arlow in maintaining that “myths typically involve superego demands in conflict with id-motivated action, and with the self-preserving desires of the ego” (Bettelheim 1977, p. 37). But for Bettelheim, in contrast to Arlow, the mythic superego is so unbending that the maturation it espouses is unattainable: “Mythical heroes offer excellent images for the development of the superego, but the demands they embody are so rigorous as to discourage the child in his fledgling strivings to achieve personality integration” (Bettelheim 1977, p. 39). For Bettelheim, fairy tales no less than myths preach maturation, but they do so in gentler ways and thereby succeed where myths fail: “In the myth there is only insurmountable difficulty and defeat; in the fairy tale there is equal peril, but it is successfully overcome. Not death and destruction, but higher integration … is the hero’s reward at the end of the fairy tale” (Bettelheim 1977, p. 199).

In myths the heroes, who are often gods, succeed because they are exceptional, and everyday mortals can scarcely aspire to emulate them. In fairy tales the heroes are ordinary persons whose success inspires emulation. In short, myths for Bettelheim wind up hindering psychological growth, where fairy tales spur it.5

The key exception among classical psychoanalysts to the paralleling of myths to fairy tales is the Hungarian anthropologist and folklorist Géza Róheim, who contrasts myths to fairy tales, or folktales, in a fashion that presciently anticipates that of Arlow. For Róheim, myths provide “a more adult” and folktales “a more infantile” “form of the same conflict” (Róheim 1941, p. 279). Folktales are sheer fantasies: “the child obtains a fulfilment in imagination of those unconscious wishes which it cannot yet obtain in reality” (Róheim 1922, p. 181). By contrast, myths “link up phantasy and reality” (Róheim 1941, p. 275). Oedipal folktales end in parricide. Oedipal myths end in submission to the resurrected, triumphant father, who is the real hero (see Róheim 1941, pp. 277–278). In “fairy tales and popular legends dealing with the co-operation between mortals and immortals, the supernatural beings are always deceived; human cunning wins the day” (Róheim 1974, p. 252). In myths “the heroes sin against the gods and must atone for this with an eternal punishment or an eternal task” (Róheim 1974, p. 251). Where in the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk Jack outsmarts the ogre, becomes rich, and lives happily ever after (see Róheim 1941, p. 275), in the myth of Prometheus the hero “becomes the representative of renunciation; and his achievement, the great cultural act of the discovery of fire, is performed with energy, or better libido, that has been diverted from its original aim” (Róheim 1974, p. 260). Moreover, Prometheus is punished by Zeus for stealing fire: “The desire [id] continually returns (the liver) and is continually eaten by the eagle (superego)” (Róheim 1974, p. 261).6

Much like Róheim, who is cited only in passing, Arlow takes fairy tales as serving to fulfill wishes and takes myths as serving to renounce or sublimate them. Just like Róheim, Arlow contrasts Jack to Prometheus and then adds the case of Moses at Mt. Sinai. Manifestly, all three stories describe a hero’s ascent to the domain of an “omnipotent figure resident in the heavens” and a return “with some token of power, wealth, or knowledge” (Arlow 1961, p. 381). Latently, the three stories express Arlow’s favorite theme: “the practically universal fantasy wish to acquire the father’s phallus by devouring it and using the omnipotent organ in keeping with the child’s notions about its functioning” (Arlow 1961, p. 381). Where Jack brashly steals whatever he wants from the ogre, Prometheus fears Zeus and is punished by Zeus. But like Jack, he still steals. In contrast to both, Moses ascends Mt. Sinai as the servant, not the antagonist, of God and relays God’s laws to the Israelites below:

Where Prometheus is put in his place for daring to challenge a god, Moses is elevated to god-like status for deferring to God. Moses thus fulfills his wish to become the father, but not by toppling him.

As for Rank, so for Arlow, the presumably male myth maker or reader identifies himself with Moses and thereby vicariously becomes the real hero of the myth, but now as lawgiver rather than as rebel: “The mythology of religion fosters social adaptation of the individual and integration with the community and its values by virtue of the fact that the individual unconsciously identifies with the idealized qualities of the mythological hero” (Arlow 1982, p. 188). For Arlow, as for Freud and Rank, myth represents a compromise, but not between the open fulfillment of wishes and the sheer repression of them. Rather, myth combines fulfillment with sublimation and renunciation. It satisfies at once the id, the ego, and the superego.

In contrast to classical psychoanalysts—with the exception of Róheim—contemporary psychoanalysts not only distinguish myths from fairy tales but also distinguish one mythic scenario from another. Where Rank finds a common plot for all male hero myths, Arlow spots variations on any common plot: “It is not sufficient for us to be able to demonstrate, with monotonous regularity, evidence of the same id wishes in the text of the myth. By applying our knowledge of ego psychology we obtain insight into the differences between myths, even when these myths deal with the same theme” (Arlow 1961, p. 379).

For Arlow, the differences among Jack, Prometheus, and Moses are more significant than the similarities. By granting variations in plot and in meaning, a contemporary psychoanalytic approach makes the theory applicable to a much larger spectrum of myths.7

The term “contemporary,” or “modern,” Freudian does not mean that all present-day Freudians have spurned the classical approach. One of the pre-eminent Freudians on myth, the American folklorist Alan Dundes (1975, 1980, 1987, 1989, 1997), is defiantly old-fashioned. For him, myth fulfills repressed wishes rather than renounces or sublimates them. According to Dundes, “The content of folklore, I would maintain, is largely unconscious. Hence it represents id, not ego, for the most part. From this perspective, ego psychology cannot possibly illuminate much of the content of folklore” (Dundes 1987, p. xii). Unlike the sober, dour, didactic readings of myth given by “modern” psychoanalysts, Dundes delights in demonstrating the hidden, anti-social wishes vented by myths. Those wishes are as often anal as Oedipal and as often homosexual as heterosexual. Dundes goes beyond most professional analysts, which he himself is not, in using myth as a key to understanding culture and not merely to understanding the mind. At the same time he brings the strictures of folkloristic methods to bear on the interpretations of analysts, who are invariably oblivious to the initially oral nature of folklore, to the existence of multiple versions of any myth, and to the distinctiveness of myth among the genres of folklore. Indeed, for folklorists the story of Oedipus is a tale rather than a myth.8

Psychoanalysis and the world

The telling phrase that applies to all psychoanalysts is, to quote the long excerpt from Arlow, “adaptation to reality.” For contemporary psychoanalysts, no less than for classical ones, myth presupposes a divide between the individual’s wishes and reality. Where for classical psychoanalysts myth functions to satisfy in the mind what cannot be satisfied in reality, for contemporary psychoanalysts myth functions to help one accept the inability to be satisfied in reality. Still, for both varieties of psychoanalysts, myth is not about reality—that is, the external world. It is about the individual, who comes smack up against reality. It is about the clash between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Myth either shields the individual from reality (the classical view) or foments acceptance of reality (the contemporary view). Rather than explaining reality, myth takes reality for granted and responds to it, either negatively (classical view) or positively (contemporary view). To explain reality, one turns to natural science. Myth taken literally is incompatible with science, in the same way that it is for Tylor and Frazer. Myth psychologized is compatible with science because it is no longer about reality.9

Tylor and Frazer have a psychology of their own, and it is incorporated into their theory of myth. But for them myth does not arise from any confrontation between the individual and reality. It arises from the experience of reality, which one wants either to explain (Tylor) or to manipulate (Frazer). Whatever role the individual plays in creating myth, the subject matter of myth is still the world, not the individual. Even though for Tylor, especially, mythic explanations stem from the analogy that “primitives” draw between the behavior of humans and that of the world, myth is still about the world, not about humans. Tylor is not even fazed by the kinship between humans and a deified world. Frazer, for his part, does attribute myth, as part of religion, to the experience of the failure to control the world through impersonal magic. But myth for him too is not about any symmetry between humans and the gods of religion. It is not about how humans experience the world. It is about the world itself.

For Freudians, myths project human nature onto the world in the form of gods—for Freud, largely father-like gods. To understand the world is to withdraw those projections. Just as in magic (and science) for Frazer, so for Freud the world really operates according to mechanical laws rather than the wills of a divine family. There is no symmetry between humans and the world. There is a disjunction. Even myths about heroes, who can be either human or divine, involve projection: the plot of hero myths is the fantasized expression of family relations, with the named hero playing the role of the idealized myth maker or reader. Heroism itself is more fantasy than reality. There are no comic-book heroes in the real world. There are only human beings, some better than others.

For Jungians as well as for Freudians, myths project human nature onto the world in the form of gods and of heroes, who, similarly, can be either human or divine.10 To understand the world is, similarly, to withdraw those projections and to recognize the world as it really is. Jungian projections are more elusive than Freudian ones because they cover a far wider range of the personality. There is an endless number of sides of the personality, or archetypes. Almost anything in the world can be archetypal—that is, can provide a hook for the projection of an archetype.

Unlike Freudians, Jungians have taken myth positively from the outset. For them, the unconscious expressed in myth is not a repository of repressed, anti-social drives but a storehouse of innately unconscious archetypes that have usually never had an opportunity at even unconscious realization, let alone at consciousness. Myth is one means of encountering this unconscious. The function of myth is less that of release, as for classical psychoanalysts, than that of growth, as for contemporary ones. But where even contemporary psychoanalysts see myth as a means of adjustment to the demands of the outer world, Jungians see myth as a means of the cultivation of the inner world. The payoff is not adjustment but rather self-realization. Myth is a circuitous, if still useful, means of self-realization exactly because it involves projection: one encounters oneself through the world. Ordinarily, projections are recognized consciously and thereby withdrawn only in the course of analysis—a point that holds for Freudians as much as for Jungians. If for either Freudians or Jungians myth can still be employed once the projection has been recognized, then the intermediary—the world—has conveniently been eliminated.

Both Freudians and Jungians bypass the power of myth at the conscious, usually literal, level. While both appreciate the need to be moved by the life of the named hero or protagonist, that figure can be fictional. One does not have to accept the historicity of Oedipus to be moved by his saga. Moreover, the named figure is a mere peg onto which to hang the autobiography. The story of Oedipus is moving only because, to repeat Freud, “it might have been ours.” A story that can never be imagined as happening to oneself will not work. In short, myth for Freudians and Jungians alike never takes one outside oneself. No theory of myth is more solipsistic than theirs.11

Winnicott

Does psychoanalysis offer any way of bringing myth back to the world? I think that it does, through the approach of the English child psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott (1982, 1987), who, formally, belonged to the Independent School of British psychoanalysts. Winnicott does not analyze myth, but his analysis of play and of its continuation in adult make-believe provides one road back to the world. Among others who have written on the significance of play, Jean Piaget confines play to childhood, however indispensable childhood play is for establishing lifelong cognitive capacities. Johan Huizinga, author of Homo Ludens, so emphasizes the dependence of adult culture on the “play element” as to efface the line between play and reality. As he writes of myth itself, “Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom, and science. All are rooted in the primeval soil of play” (Huizinga 1970, p. 23). By contrast, Winnicott makes play other than reality. Play constitutes its own reality. It does not merely feed ordinary reality.

For Winnicott, play is acknowledged as other than reality: children grant that they are just playing. But play is no mere escapism. It involves the appropriation of reality for oneself. It involves the construction of a reality that has personal meaning. To pretend that a spoon is a train is to take a spoon and to turn it into a train. Far from projecting oneself onto the world, as for Freud and Jung, play is the construction of a world. As Winnicott continually declares, play is “creative.” Far from confusing itself with reality, play demarcates the difference. Play grants itself the right to treat a spoon as a train, and a parent dare not ask whether the spoon really is a train. Once play is over, the train resumes being a mere spoon.

To use Winnicott’s famous term, play is a “transitional” activity. It provides a transition not merely from childhood to adulthood but also from the inner world of fantasy to outer reality: “play can easily be seen to link the individual’s relation to inner reality with the same individual’s relation to external or shared reality” (Winnicott 1987, p. 145). Play links the realms by taking items from the external world and constructing a reality to fit the fantasy: play takes a spoon and transforms it into a train. Yet play does not deny the difference between the inner and the outer worlds because only during play is the spoon a train. On the one hand play is recognized as make-believe: outside of play the spoon is conceded to be only a spoon. On the other hand the make-believe is taken seriously: within play the spoon really is a train.

As adult extensions of play, Winnicott, in stereotypically English fashion, names gardening and cooking, in both of which one creates a world with personal meaning out of elements from the external world. Winnicott also names art and religion, in both of which as well one constructs a world, though with a far deeper meaning to it:

Winnicott is not, like Huizinga, asserting that art and religion and other aspects of culture are play. Rather, he is asserting that culture is akin to play in the creation of a world to which one has a comforting relationship. Just as the infant ideally has a positive, secure relationship with the mother, so through play does the child create a world that offers the same kind of relationship, and so through culture does the adult create a world that offers the same kind of cozy relationship on a vaster scale. Culture does not merely parallel the security provided by the infant’s mother and by the child’s play but also presupposes them. Without good mothering there can be no play, and without play there can be no culture. Following the sociologist Peter Berger, one might say that religion in particular creates a “sacred canopy,” but for Winnicott that canopy is recognized as a creation, as make-believe. While Winnicott is indisputably concerned with the individual’s relationship to the world, he is also concerned with the world itself.12

A transitional activity or object provides a transition from the known world to the unknown one. The activity or object acts as a guide, offering the security needed to dare to explore the unknown world. Just as a child clings to a physical object—a teddy bear—to create a safe world that then enables the child to explore with confidence the world beyond the mother,13 so does an adult cling to a hobby, an interest, a creed, a value, or, so I propose, a myth that then enables the adult to deal with a much wider world.14 Just as the child knows that the teddy bear is not Mommy yet clutches it as if it were, so does the adult recognize that the myth is not reality yet adheres to it as if it were. Transitional activities and objects do not confuse the symbol with the symbolized, the way that, by contrast, magic does for Frazer.15 On the one hand transitional activities and objects are themselves created out of elements from the world. On the other hand they provide reassurance in exploring the world.

Undeniably, not all myths are entertained as make-believe. Doubtless there is a spectrum. Some myths are taken only as unassailable truths—for example, myths about the coming end of the world. Other myths are taken as make-believe—most obviously, hagiographical biographies of heroes. In between would fall myths that can be taken either way—for example, the belief in progress, ideologies, and world views such as Marxism. Taken as make-believe, these kinds of myths serve as guides to the world rather than as depictions of the world.

The “rags-to-riches” myth, which claims that the United States is a land of boundless opportunity, would fall here. Ironically, the myth is accepted at least as effusively around the world as in the United States itself. Undeniably, the credo can be held as an unassailable truth and can lead to frustration and recrimination when it does not pan out. But it can also be held as “make-believe,” which means held not as a false characterization of US life but as a hoped-for one. Here the United States is seen as if it were a haven of opportunity. Contentions that race, class, gender, or religion impedes opportunity are fended off, rationalized away as excuses for personal failure. The present-day epitome of this myth is Anthony Robbins, salesperson par excellence for success. What, according to Robbins, keeps persons from succeeding? Not trying. Where there is a will, there is always a way. Taking the rags-to-riches myth as make-believe means trusting Tony Robbins, not because he must be right but because one wants him to be right.

Admittedly, Robbins’ myth is only about the social world and not about the physical one. Better, then, are the biographies of those credited with divine-like powers—namely celebrities. Seemingly, film, rock, and sports stars cannot quite cause the rain to fall. Still, is it only coincidental that ever more celebrities are the ones who assume responsibility for accomplishing things in not only the social but even the physical world that whole nations have failed to achieve: not only eliminating poverty, racism, and developing world debt but also ending pollution, curbing global warming, and saving species? Celebrities are credited with a power to get things done that whole nations and even the United Nations cannot match.

Celebrities are like gods. They are “idolized” and “worshiped.” The top ones are even called “gods.” As “stars,” they shine brightly in heaven above. Fans are “star-struck.” They bring religion back to the seemingly secularized modern world. The most revered celebrities are Hollywood stars, on whom see chapter 11 of this book. The keenest expression of their stature is in their films. Their films are their myths.

To view a myth as make-believe is not to dismiss it as a delusion. To do so would be to revert to the present either/or option, according to which myth, to be acceptable, either must be true about the external world or, if false about the external world, must concern instead the mind or society in order still to be true.16 To view myth as make-believe is to allow for a third way. The choice is not just delusion or reality—or, in Winnicott’s terms, illusion or disillusionment.17 Taken as make-believe, myth can still be true about the world once it has been demarcated as make-believe.18

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