Heather Tolliday
Myths are not case studies. Classical myths and psychoanalytic case studies both feature characters that capture readers’ imaginations because they speak to people’s most fundamental anxieties – living and dying, loving and hating, understanding and misunderstanding. But whereas characters in classical myths – Oedipus, Tantalus, Eurydice, Narcissus among many – survive because of the wealth of ways in which their identities might be understood, characters in psychoanalytic case studies – The Rat Man, Dora, Richard and the Mrs. As and Mr. Bs of contemporary psychoanalytic case studies – are of interest because they are the subject of a process designed to restrict the patient’s identification to a consistent experience of their behavior.
While there are differences, however, in the use to which characters are put in myths and case studies, classical scholars and psychoanalysts find each other’s work mutually beneficial. Classical scholars, especially those working in the reception theory tradition, have adopted psychoanalytic concepts from Lacanian, Freudian, and object‐relation traditions to develop the understanding of myths. Sigmund Freud adopted the Oedipus myth because it encapsulated his thinking on the generational and sexual conflicts being unconsciously expressed in the behavior of many of his patients. It is the most celebrated instance of a classical myth reflecting psychoanalytic thinking, but it is not the only one. There are others – for instance Melanie Klein’s use of the Oresteia (Klein 1988) and Andre Green’s contrast of Ajax’ shame with Oedipus’ guilt (Green 1983).
This cross‐fertilization, however, can lead to difficulties. Concepts derived from and used in a relationship between a psychoanalyst and a patient cannot function in the same way when used in a relationship between a reader and a text. Clinical case experience in a case study is the description of two minds – one mind belonging to the psychoanalyst (who is also the author) and the other to the patient – engaging in a process to discriminate truth from lies, reality from delusion, understanding from misunderstanding. In classical myths as they are most commonly encountered today, however, there is one mind and there are words on paper, describing events not personally experienced. Readers are free to make differing identifications with any character. Peter Brooks ignores this fundamental difference when he claims that the “difficult, agonistic, and productive encounter” between patient and psychoanalyst is also “true of the reading of texts, where we interpret, construct, building hypotheses of meaning […] seeking both to work on the text and to have text work on us” (Brooks 1994, 72). Whereas patients and their analysts are able to protest if either is attributing motives and associated meanings to the other that they do not recognize, words cannot protest that they are being misunderstood. Sophocles could not protest, any more than Oedipus could, when Freud restricted his attention to the severe difficulties the character of Oedipus had in managing his love and hate in generationally appropriate ways.
Wilfred Bion, a psychoanalytic successor of Freud, practicing in the middle years of the twentieth century and founder of post‐Kleinian psychoanalysis, enriched and deepened his predecessor’s understanding of Oedipus’ character. Freud and Bion had different backgrounds. Bion was a tank commander in World War I before training as a psychoanalyst, while Freud started his career as a doctor in nineteenth‐century bourgeois Vienna. They had different case‐loads; Bion’s focusing on psychotics while Freud’s largely comprised of neurotics. And, perhaps most importantly, their knowledge bases were significantly different. Freud was the father of psychoanalysis and Bion a beneficiary of Freud’s pioneering work in, among other things, the complexities in the human capacity to love and hate. He also benefitted from Klein’s concept of projective identification as infants’ nonverbal means to satisfy their instinct to want to know. Bion’s experience of his men evading and denying the truth of traumatic experiences, and his psychotic patients’ firmly‐held delusional beliefs, focused his attention on people’s conflicted relationship with their capacity to know. And it was that which Bion found so brilliantly explored in the character of Oedipus, an attribute that had not captured Freud’s interest to the same degree. Bion’s Oedipus did not invalidate Freud’s but enriched it, just as Duncan Kennedy believes that the “infinite possibilities of as yet unthought‐of‐interpretations” of classical texts need not imply a liberation from the past but a deepening of knowledge (Kennedy 2006, 293).
To Freud’s focus on love and hate, Bion added this new component, knowledge, as a constant factor in human intercourse. He also emphasized the function of all three as both positive and negative links in human behavior (Bion 1962, 42–43). His post‐Kleinian psychoanalysis encompassed a more complex understanding of the nature of the human mind than had previously been possible. He developed theories about the construction of the human mind and its use – whether in fostering or impeding the instinct to know.
At the core of the case study is an exposition of the processes involved in establishing fundamental truths about human existence. A common feature in all case studies, though, is the tracking of fluctuations in commitment to discovering the truth of experience and in denying it, primarily in the patient and occasionally in the analyst. Why is staying with the truth so difficult? Post‐Kleinian psychoanalysis and classical myths suggest the answer lies in people’s innate fear of chaos, a return to the state of mind of the newborn child who, without adequate holding by another person, falls into a terrifying world where nothing has meaning – the “gaping void” of Greek myth. Infants are not born with minds. While human infants share with other mammals an instinct to link mouth to nipple to promote physical growth, humans have an additional instinct – to make unconscious emotional links to promote mental growth. Infants’ minds have to be built through experience that they can unconsciously evacuate their overwhelming and chaotic sensations, as they are buffeted by internal and external experience in their strange new world, into another mind where they may be made meaningful. This works if a more mature member of the species, ideally the birth mother – for she has a facility (which exists for a short period after birth) for a higher sensitivity to her infant’s psychic state than exists in any other human relationship. Donald Winnicott called this emotional attunement “primary maternal preoccupation” (Winnicott 1977, 302). If mothers are sufficiently mentally resilient, they receive unconsciously the emotional impact of their babies’ states and, if they are then also able to find a reflection in their own minds of their babies’ suffering, they then return to their babies their chaotic experience in modified, because meaningful, form. Psychoanalysts call this process projective identification. Gradually, the infants’ confidence grows that their experiences are neither particular to them nor delusional. Sufficient satisfactory experience subsequently helps them to tolerate suffering and confusion and to build a space (their own mind) in which to structure internal experience. They also develop awareness that a world exists, separate from them, in which they can find forms which help to give meaning to their experience. And that is why we make links to characters from classical myths, not only because they entertain but also because they may help us to define who we are and, possibly, to aspire to be someone better. As Donald Meltzer, a post‐Kleinian psychoanalyst, says: “Our minds are full of characters in search, not of an author, for we ourselves are the authors, but of players to fit the parts” (Meltzer and Williams 1988, 38). Equally, though, these linkings may help to consolidate the delusional and distorted identifications that are such a feature of psychoanalytic case studies. The richness of classical myths lies in their receptivity to diverse projections. That is a strength but also a weakness. While mothers and infants have the emotional capacity to check for congruity between the internal state and the external form framing it, readers cannot look to words on paper to let them know if they have made a realistic rather than an illusory linking of self to a character in a myth.
Freud’s belief that the unconscious is the repository of the truth of experience continues to underpin psychoanalysis. If, as is often argued, classical myths survive because they make the unconscious truth of human existence accessible, it is unsurprising that classical scholars and psychoanalysts find resonances in each other’s work. The more we engage with our unconscious, the more effectively can we define and differentiate self and other, truth and lie, internal and external. And yet evidence from both the consulting room and everyday life is that we are reluctant to embrace the unconscious life of the mind – a fact of human life that Virgil represents in Cassandra’s fate; never to be believed even though her prophesies turn out to be true. Our sense of ourselves in our world is so precarious that engaging with prompts from the unconscious threatens to throw us back into confusion because they herald a redefining of what we know, and so we tend to cling rigidly to the personal myth developed in infancy to make sense of our experience. We use it to structure our lives, however much that leads to limitation or distortion or denial of possibility. As Meltzer says “We see the external world as a reflection of internal relations from the point of view of meaning and significance” (Meltzer 1978, 311). But the unconscious goes on registering our experience and prompting us, through the myths it constructs in our dreams, to notice disparities between the truth and what we are doing. Virgil uses a vision, a form of dream, to remind Aeneas of his true identity: “This vision stunned Aeneas, struck him dumb;/his terror held his hair erect; his voice/held fast within his jaws.” (Virgil 2004, 19: BkIV, 373–375). Heroes can use dreams, no matter how terrifying they are, to engage with the truth whereas ordinary mortals frequently reject their help. Similarly, we are intolerant of the prompts that the unconscious gives us in our waking lives – Freudian slips, double‐entendres, unexpected fleeting images – that a different myth to the one we are currently acting out is possible. Breaking through our habitual resistance to engaging with the unconscious life of the mind, such prompts surprise and disturb, suggesting the unconscious is capricious – whereas it is our capacity to engage with the unconscious that is capricious.
Giving up certainty in favor of waiting for a formulation of experience is inherently uncertain. It creates disruption and suffering. Will the internal experience be amenable to thought? And, if it is, will the thought that forms prove to be welcome, enriching rather than diminishing the sense of self? Letting the suitors in through the doors of Odysseus’ palace brings nothing but complacency and destruction. Letting the beggar/Odysseus in, by contrast, proves reparative and developmental after much suffering and uncertainty. Forming a thought to encapsulate the truth is an arduous and uncertain experience that is hard to sustain, and even more so because the desirability of the outcome is also uncertain.
The recognition by psychoanalysts of this fundamental truth of human existence – our ambivalence towards our unconscious – finds expression in the classical tradition of hospitality towards strangers. Strangers must be looked after, however disturbing their presence may be. Such an injunction suggests the instinctive response to strangers would be to reject them and, with them, their potential to enrich their hosts with their difference – the fate of prompts from the unconscious in our everyday lives. In Book XVII of The Odyssey, the swineherd, Eumaeus, invites Odysseus into his cottage to eat and sleep, while Antinous refuses to give him food, hitting him with a stool so that he withdraws to the threshold of the great hall. The story of Odysseus’ return to his own home as a stranger may be taken also as symbolizing an eternal human truth. Those, like Eumaeus, who are able to take in and entertain the disturbing stranger (prompt from the unconscious) facilitate growth and development while those, like Antinous, who fear difference and shun the unknown, misunderstand and fail to thrive. The myth tells us the stranger at the gate is Odysseus. He needs to be at home (mindful) if the destruction wrought by the suitors (representing mindlessness and complacent parasitic habits of mind) is to be stemmed and if developmental relationships with his wife and son are to be reinstated. He needs to get back to his firmly rooted olive tree bed – a place where new life (a baby or a thought) can be conceived through engaging with the firmly rooted truth of his unconscious mind.
Bion considers the unconscious mind‐building relationship between infant and breast (the first transference/external object) as fundamental to understanding emotional experience and the basis of all mental development, as well as its deterioration. Klein’s psychoanalytic work with small children reveals an internal world furnished with primitively split internal objects; for instance the good breast representing gratifying experiences and the bad breast frustrating ones (Klein 1988, 2). Homer’s two contrasting wives, Penelope and Clytemnestra, make this point. Such sorting of experience into good and bad is necessary throughout life if the meaning of experience is to be worked out, but the splitting must subsequently be modified if a reality of human existence is to be recognized – the good breast and the bad breast are two aspects of the same breast, just as a wife can be both loyal and murderous. Homer not only understands this but also how volatile experience of the other is. In Book VI of the Iliad, he movingly depicts the rapid oscillations in Astyanax’s state of mind when his mother, Andromache, takes him to the battlements with his nurse to plead with the armored Hector not to go into battle. Having rejected his wife’s pleas:
/shining Hector reached down
for his son – but the boy recoiled,
cringing against his nurse’s full breast,
screaming out at the sight of his own father,
terrified by the flashing bronze, the horsehair crest,
the great ridge of the helmet nodding, bristling terror ‐
so it struck his eyes. And his loving father laughed,
his mother laughed as well, and glorious Hector,
quickly lifting the helmet from his head,
set it down on the ground, fiery in the sunlight,
and raising his son he kissed him, tossed him in his arms,
lifting a prayer to Zeus and the other deathless gods
(Homer 1991, 556–567).
The child turns away in terror from a father who has become impermeable to his projections, encased as his head is in the shiny metal helmet with the distracting horsehair plume. Astyanax is doubly fortunate, though, because he has the accommodatingly full breast of his nurse to bury his head in and he also has a father who can take in his son’s projection of terror and adjust his behavior accordingly. Astyanax discovers that the “bad breast” is the same breast as the “good” one. He shows he has a trust in a thinking mind being available to him because he feels it is worthwhile to scream for the help that he finds in the arms of his nurse. So fortified, he is then able to risk further engagement with his father.
Resilient babies, like Astyanax, make their need to be understood more forceful if the first response is inadequate – a strategy which may or may not succeed. But where there is enough experience of a containing mind, the infant’s trust in the value of engaging with the unconscious life of the mind survives, albeit with some distortions and lacunae. No one can ever know whether they have the mental resilience to bear all experience. However, disaster occurs if steadiness of mind is overwhelmed by the violence of infants’ emotional turmoil; then infants’ projections are rejected and returned to them, not only unmodified but intensified by terror which belongs to others. This is a catastrophe Bion calls “nameless dread” (Bion 1967, 116). It impairs the infant’s contact with reality because it fails to make terrifying experience thinkable and thus compromises growth of the mind.
David Taylor illustrates patients’ difficulties in allowing the life of the mind to unfold because of fear that to open up to it will lead to experience of “nameless dread” rather than the relief from terror which comes from finding that what had seemed unthinkable can be thought. He describes an episode where, having been told by the analyst that he had become more open in his contact, his patient acts out a deadly attack:
A’s response was to fall silent for an inordinate time. I now did not know what was happening […] I then noticed that he did not even seem to be breathing […] I made myself wait. Gradually the tension diminished. I found myself musing about other feelings that might be coming to the surface in A […] After a long time […] A spoke: “I just don’t know how to respond to you here […]” There was a devastating tone to this. I felt a withering sense of failure opening up before me.
(Taylor 2011, 112–113)
Sophocles understands this well. Oedipus symbolizes the child whose mother, unable to bear the impact of her child’s projection, forces it back, intensified by her own terror. Such a child cannot risk wanting to get to know the truth of experience, lest the truth prove to be unthinkable because it is too horrific for the mother to face. After Jocasta has hanged herself, Oedipus blinds himself with his mother’s golden brooches:
Could I want sight to face this people’s stare?
No! Hearing neither! Had I any way
To dam that channel too, I would not rest
Till I had prisoned up this body of shame
In total blankness. For the mind to dwell
Beyond the reach of pain, were peace indeed
(Sophocles 1947: 64)
Growth of the mind through accessing the truth of experience may also be compromised in those infants who, even though they have mothers capable of metabolizing their unbearable experience, reject maternal understanding rather than unconsciously taking it in through what psychoanalysts call introjective identification because they cannot tolerate their envy of their mothers’ mental steadfastness.
Elizabeth Spillius, in a case study on envy, gives some clinical material from a session with a patient, Mrs. B. In the previous session, she felt her patient had been helped by her understanding. Mrs. B said she had dreamt but was not going to talk about it:
The atmosphere was heavy with resentment […] then she said “[…] here it is. I’m with my grandmother. She was dancing with me in a lively fashion. I was half enjoying it but half afraid she would have a heart attack and die” […] [Spillius] then said that, like her grandmother in the dream, I thought my patient felt I was unaware of the danger I was in […] idealizing my energy and my dancing partnership with her. Then she said […] “You’re right […] It’s about your garden. It makes me think you’re silly […] you don’t care about being overlooked […] so long as you only had a mess out there it didn’t matter, there was nothing to see. But now you’ve put in grass and plants.” […] I said the garden was her analysis. So long as it was barren and a mess, she could overlook it […] But now I was aspiring to grow things […] it made her furious […] and she dealt with it by thinking she was the one overlooking me, superior. I was unaware of this and silly.
(Spillius 2007, 154–155)
One way of understanding something of the cruelty in the encounter between Odysseus and Cyclops is that, as well as being motivated by revenge, Odysseus is envious. In such a reading, the son who has neglected the care of his home, his wife and his child cannot tolerate the father‐figure who stays at home, lovingly tending what he has. Instead of taking Cyclops’ care as inspirational, Odysseus, like Mrs. B, attacks the envied individual’s capacity to nurture. This is Homer’s description of Cyclops’ husbandry:
There were flat baskets laden with cheeses; there were pens filled with lambs and kids, though these were divided among themselves – here the firstlings, there the later‐born, and the youngest of all apart again. Then, too, there were well‐made dairy‐vessels, large and small pails, swimming with whey.
(Homer 2008, IX, 218–224)
And this is how Odysseus describes Laertes’ husbandry in book XXIV:
His father he did find – alone in that well‐tended plot, levelling the soil round a tree [….] “Everything here is tended well; not a thing that is growing in this plot, not a vine or fig‐tree, not an olive‐tree or pear‐tree or seed‐bed is left uncared for.”
(Homer 2008, XXIV, 242–247)
Envy is one form of distortion of the human instinct to want to know; arrogance is another:
If tolerance to frustration […] is too great to bear dominance of the reality principle, the personality develops omnipotence […] This involves the assumption of omniscience as a substitute for learning from experience by aid of thoughts and thinking. There is therefore no psychic activity to discriminate between true and false.
(Bion 1967, 114)
Cassandra tells the truth because she has been given the gift of prophecy by Apollo. She is in touch with her unconscious. However, even when there is evidence in the external world which might corroborate what she says, no one wants to listen – not even Coroebus who loves her:
[…] four times it stalled
before the gateway, at the very threshold;
four times the arms clashed loud inside its belly.
Nevertheless, heedless, blinded by frenzy,
we press right on and set the inauspicious
monster inside the sacred fortress. Even
then can Cassandra chant of what will come,
with lips the gods had doomed to disbelief
by Trojans.
(Virgil 2004, II. 335–343)
Distinguishing understanding from misunderstanding is a perennial problem for human beings. Why should the psychoanalyst’s understanding of the patient’s story be preferred over the one the patient brings? Is it possible to differentiate among varying interpretations of classical myths based on their fidelity to the original author’s intentions? Problems in translating from one language to another to establish a shared text are familiar to classical scholars. Pantelis Michelakis talks of the problems created by “centuries of copying and interpreting” of ancient texts (Michelakis 2006, 222). While less of a problem for psychoanalysts, it exists. Patrick Mahony, for instance, casts doubt on Strachey’s translations of Freud (Mahony 1987). But, for psychoanalysts, the translation of unconscious to unconscious communication and then into a conscious form with the use of words is even more fraught.
Clinical experience in a psychoanalytic case study demonstrates the process of two people working together to come to one mind about the truth of their experience. But that truth can only be finally tested and refined through being put into words. These words pre‐exist the internal experiences to which they give external form, and they come with associations through others’ use. Their meaning can never be entirely unambiguous. Even when words are being consciously used to promote mutual understanding and not to deceive, there can never be an exact fit between the unconscious experience and the words used to frame it. Bion describes such an incident over the meaning of one small word between two people in intimate and sustained personal contact. How much more difficult must it then be to differentiate truth from falsehood in the understanding a reader derives from reading a text by a writer who is not present at the time of reading?
The patient complained that he could not sleep. Showing signs of fear, he said “It can’t go on like this” […] Referring to material in the previous session I suggested that he feared he would dream if he were to sleep. He denied this and said he could not think because he was wet. I reminded him of his use of the term “wet” as an expression of contempt for somebody he regarded as feeble and sentimental. He disagreed […] From what I knew of this patient I felt that his correction at this point was valid and that somehow the wetness referred to an expression of hatred and envy such as he associated with urinary attacks on an object.
(Bion 1959, 307–308)
Bion proposes an answer to the problem for psychoanalysts of differentiating individual stories for their truthfulness. It lies in his recognition that mothers’ and infants’ communication through the unconscious interaction of projective and introjective identifications is the bedrock of the truth of experience in all human life. Such communication is, however, largely unacknowledged in adult life in favor of verbal communication, which is considered to be a more controllable and a less emotionally fraught communicative form. Unconscious communication between mothers and babies, essential to the growth of the infant mind, can remain unconscious to a much greater degree than is possible between analysts and patients. Physical intimacy between mother and child allows understanding to be communicated and received through minute physical adjustments and accommodations. Psychoanalysts and patients, while having some access to physical pointers to unconscious meaning (changes in posture, tone and pace of utterances for instance) have to rely much more than do mothers and babies on the translation of their unconscious‐to‐unconscious communication into conscious form through words if fluctuations in reciprocity between their two states of mind are to be tracked (see Tolliday 2013). Also psychoanalysts, unlike mothers of infants, are not naturally attuned to their patients’ unconscious states, but they develop unconscious attunement through their training and consulting‐room disciplines. Freud and Klein worked within the transference – that is, with the unconscious identifications patients make to their analysts from internal structuring of experience. They considered their own emotional reactions (their counter‐transference) an impediment to understanding patients’ states of mind. Bion disagreed. He valued his countertransference experiences, seeing them as manifestations of the unbearable emotional disturbance patients need to have made thinkable, just as a mother values the disturbance created in her by her baby’s projections for its communicative potential. Through attending to his countertransference experience, Bion developed a means to discriminate between truth and lies in his patients’ speech and behavior in the consulting room.
Through this “binocular vision” – suffering his emotional disturbance (unconsciously based countertransference) while also reflecting, rather than acting, on it (consciously based thinking) – he could discern when behavior was in the service of understanding or misunderstanding – whether his unconscious and conscious perceptions of the patient correlated. Tragically, the Cyclops Polyphemos is able to hear and consciously formulate Odysseus’ reply when asked his name but is unable to receive his unconscious emotional response to the impact of the pace, timing, and timbre of Odysseus’ delivery to allow him to know that something is amiss – Odysseus’ answer is a lie. Interestingly (when we consider “binocular vision”) Cyclops has only the one eye.
Spillius, in a case study illustrating Bion’s emphasis on understanding through the emotional impact of the countertransference, tells of Linda who came to her at the age of three because she had stopped speaking nine months earlier after the birth of a sibling and her parents’ move to a one‐room flat:
As the sessions went on she soon began playing with the toys I had provided and much of her play involved making things. When I said I thought she was making a baby the way her mother and father had, she looked at me rather contemptuously as if to say, “Why would you need to say something so obvious?” It was clear that her understanding was intact in spite of her not talking.
(Spillius 2007, 193)
At a later session Linda, humming “I’m the King of the Castle,” jumped on top of Spillius, shocking her.
After I had made sure that neither of us was hurt, I said she was being the daddy and leaping on my back the way she thought her daddy did to her mummy when they were together in bed and made babies. She looked a bit sobered. Then she nodded. Shortly afterwards she began to speak, first at home and then in her sessions. […] she was giving me a graphic demonstration of how violent and persecuting she felt her parents’ intercourse was and how frightened and resentful she felt at constantly having to witness it […] Unconsciously she was trying to evoke in me her own feelings of shock and outrage – an example of the communicative potential of projective identification, of transference viewed as enactment.
(Spillius 2007, 193–194).
Linda did not need words to communicate her plight; she enacted it. In the clinical material quoted earlier, Taylor “reads” his patient A’s silence as it evolves through his countertransference experience, making the silence more eloquent than words. Printed words, except perhaps in the hands of the most skilled of poets, cannot evoke such delicate shifts of experience to help readers to follow the changing meaning of characters’ silences. How should we interpret the silence of Alcestis on her return from the underworld? Heracles attributes it to “her purification from her consecration to the gods below” (Euripides 2008, 32). But is that explanation self‐serving? Heracles’ reputation for potency as a rescuer would suffer if Alcestis, like Hilda Doolittle’s Eurydice (Sword 1995), does not wish to be dragged back into the world of the living – a world where words are used to deceive and to make promises which are not honored. Alcestis’ mutism may be elective, like Linda’s – a rebuke to Admetus for so grossly devaluing words by failing to keep his word never to replace her.
Psychoanalysts too may resort to using self‐serving interpretations in circumstances where the pressure to make sense of what is happening in the consulting room becomes too great, just as mothers may try to stop their infants’ screams by offering dummies or by distracting them when they feel it is impossible to work out why their infants are so distressed. David Bell describes a dream which a patient, with whom he worked while training as an analyst, brought to him: “A man goes away and comes back wearing second‐hand clothes, claiming that they belong to him.” Bell initially suggests that the man in the dream is his patient, presumably because of the tendency of patients and, indeed, people generally to take on the desirable attributes of others through introjective identification to obscure aspects of their own personality which they find difficult to face. But on exploring his patient’s associations and his own feelings and thoughts, stirred up by his countertransference reactions, Bell feels uneasy about this interpretation and the thought comes to him that he, and not the patient, is the man in the dream. He reflects that in an earlier session he has “known,” but has not wanted to acknowledge the truth that an interpretation he made arose, not out of experience in the session but out of some comments his training supervisor had made about the patient. His patient brought the dream, produced by his countertransference awareness that the words his analyst had used in the previous session were not his own (Bell 2011, 96).
Psychoanalytic clinical case material is a story, fundamentally, of cooperation between psychoanalysts and patients to refine the validity of their patients’ assumed identities against the reality of their emotional experience. But because psychoanalysts are people and despite their own analyses and training are potentially susceptible to the frailties of human nature, both patients and a'nalysts must be vigilant in ensuring appropriate identification of what belongs to whom. This is not just a question of whether the Emperor has clothes, but of which clothes fit patient and analyst, which do not and never will, and which ones they might reasonably aspire to grow into. This is done through a conversation, embedded in the emotional immediacy of their encounter. Psychoanalysts are committed to conduct this conversation with mental rigor and vigilance to ensure that, as far as human frailty allows, it is in the service of, and not at the expense of, knowledge of the truth of the patient’s reality. The conversation between a long‐dead poet’s words and the reader cannot emulate this. However, to the extent that classical myths are found to encapsulate the truths of human experience revealed by psychoanalytic practice, the interaction between myth and case study must enrich both.
Nicholson (2015) argues that classical myths grew out of a Greek civilization that resulted from the fusion of two different worlds around 2000 BCE. Psychoanalysts make abundant use of stories that have found an enduring home in people’s imaginations. These are not confined to classical myths nor is introducing myths into the psychoanalytic encounter the sole preserve of the analyst – patients too use their own identifications with myths to help them to express the nature of their difficulties. O’Shaughnessy (2015, 201) shows how a young male patient explicitly used an identification with Frankenstein to encapsulate his solution to his difficulties. It is well known that Freud and other psychoanalysts use Shakespeare’s stories and characters to give a culturally familiar form to their thinking but it is worth taking special note of Rusbridger’s (2013) paper on Shakespeare’s play, Othello and Verdi’s opera, Otello.
Other myths might equally well have been used in Myth as Case Study. See Meg Harris Williams’ (2005) reading of the mediaeval myth of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a story of the function of the post‐Kleinian concept of the internal combined object, or Frances Vargas Gibbons’ (1998) slant on the same myth. For an exploration of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Bettelheim (1991) demonstrates how these myths resolve, consciously and unconsciously, conflicts created by id pressures in ways that are consistent with ego and superego requirements.