Meg Harris Williams
Coleridge formulated the importance of symbol‐formation in promoting the mind’s innate “principle of self‐development”; following Plato, the getting of wisdom was a matter of “becoming” rather than of possessing knowledge (Coleridge 1812, I. 473). This corresponds closely with the modern (post‐Kleinian) psychoanalytic view of development as taking place by means of an evolutionary dialogue between the nascent personality and its internal “objects.” Identity is constantly in formation, and is built step by step, through symbolizing the “facts of feeling” and metabolizing them into thoughts (Bion 1970).1 The psychoanalytic definition of thinking sees it as dependent on the orientation to internal objects, as distinct from purely analytical or discursive reasoning. This may be said to constitute a myth of its own – one that has analogies with the nature of reception, as the vital and ever‐changing dialogue with classical myth and culture is now understood. To incorporate classical myth as part of one’s own personality development entails a process similar to the psychoanalytic, in terms of the symbolic enrichment of the relationship with the internal “objects” that enable the mind to develop emotionally, ethically, aesthetically, and indeed logically.
Characteristically, in the case of poets, the story of self‐development is presented by means of a myth or combination of myths that illustrate the relation between poet and muse. “The creative must create itself” as the Grecophile Keats said so simply (Gittings 1970, 156), while being well aware of the complexities of “the creative,” and the dangers and seductions of the pseudo‐creative. Indeed, the myth that underlies all the other myths of antiquity (and probably all durable myths) concerns this very story of creativity as a principle that endows the universe with meaning for humans, in a way that is distinct from but complementary to scientific investigation of its physical qualities. The ancient gods in their capacity as “figures of thought” (Langer 1946, 196) enact conflicting aspects of this human story on behalf of confused and struggling mortals who are searching less for a solution than for a model through which to contain and understand their predicament.
I would like to consider some ways in which myths can illustrate developmental crises, while at the same time having a flavor of some specific stage of personality development – oedipal, latency, puberty, adolescence, maturity, midlife, or senescence – whether or not this is the overt subject of the narrative. My main examples will be taken from Shakespeare, sublime mediator of classical myths (including even those he may never have directly read).2 I shall begin with one that goes to the heart of all developmental problems, hence its adaptation into psychoanalytic jargon: the story of Narcissus. In Richard II, Shakespeare inverts the source myth, so it becomes the story of how Richard overcomes his narcissism and moves from a “paranoid‐schizoid” orientation to a “depressive” one (in Kleinian terms). Richard is often thought of as a poet‐king. As Gaunt prophesies in the play, he is “possess’d to depose [him]self” (II.i.108); indeed he “masterminds” his own deposition (Nuttall 1988); and it is his poetic impulse that deposes him. This begins to be mobilized when he prevents the duel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke – not from sheer arbitrariness as might appear, but because a feeling‐fact is pushing at his consciousness, demanding to be formulated. Mowbray’s blood would be a waste of an expensive upbringing; instead, he extracts from him a verbalization of what “banishment” from his idealized object (his mother‐country, that “little Eden”) really means and feels like. Mowbray describes how his tongue is imprisoned, “doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips” (I.iii.167); his capacity for self‐expression and symbol‐formation has been sealed off; both cutting and its kissing capabilities are closed down.
The sentence pronounced by Richard brings into the open a new awareness of the preciousness of the speaking object, which will provide a pattern for his self‐deposition or self‐development. Here Bolingbroke dances to Richard’s tune, while Richard analyses the brassbound hollowness that he is bequeathing to his successor:
Allowing him a little breath, a little scene,
To monarchise, be fear’d, and kill with looks; […]
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable […] (II.ii.169–170).
Power – the unchallengeable possession of the object of desire – is a delusion, a “hollow crown” bound by a toothlike brass circle. Searching for an alternative container for his identity, Richard looks in the mirror:
O flatt’ring glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me. Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? (IV.i.279–283)
The narcissistic type of self‐recognition is a “brittle” glory as easily shattered as the glass, a false reflector of inner life, true only to appearances. Through this tableau he exposes and analyses the delusion of his own kingly beauty; he is no Helen of Troy to attract men or ships like the rays of the sun. Kingship has become a narcissistic veil that needs to be stripped, its hollowness exposed.
As a consequence of this recognition that unlike Narcissus, he is not his own love‐object, there follows the tender scene in which Richard achieves a rapprochement with his wife Isabel, on his way to the Tower. The Queen has previously associated herself with a type of mental pregnancy, heavily ripe with “unborn sorrows” resulting from “no thought”:
As, though on thinking on no thought I think,
Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink. (II.ii.31–32)
As his object or Muse, container of thoughts, she laments the end of “the model where old Troy did stand” (11) – the old Richard whose “heart” she fears Bolingbroke has “deposed.”3 But her fears energize Richard, who sees a solution to her heaviness if she converts it into telling his story – “the heavy accent of [a] moving tongue.” She will be united with him in his new poetic identity. The old type of Troy‐king may tumble down, but it was only “Richard’s tomb” not his inner soul. The deposition of his narcissism means in fact the rejuvenation of his creativity; despite his physical imprisonment, the idea of a male‐female internal object is born that recalls Isabel’s own words and contrasts with the portcullised spiritual prison imagined by Mowbray at the beginning:
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still‐breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world… (V.v.4–10)
The brain is now free to create symbols. In this way Richard becomes a working poet: his solitariness is not that of narcissistic fixation, but a feature of his new‐found capacity to people his mind with thought‐characters, in identification with his wife as a container whose thoughts are no longer stillborn or hollow but “still‐breeding.” The Echo aspect of the myth is reversed also: Richard can hear the female voice in his soul; and his poetic contemplation was indeed echoed by Keats in his “Ode to Psyche” (whose “wreathed trellis of a working brain … breeding flowers will never breed the same”). The echoing song traversed the centuries, as did so many whose genesis lies in classical myth – still‐breeding, yet never the same.
“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”: the state of kingship is often, in Shakespeare, a metaphor for a mind that has reached a state of stasis or complacency. Development then requires some kind of Pythagorean “catastrophic change” (in Bion’s term) that will shake the personality, yet enable it to move forwards to a new phase of being. It is a humble, yet essential, type of Ovidian metamorphosis, “death to the existing state of mind” (Bion 1970, 79). As an example of such a “death” I will take King Lear, which makes use of the myth of Ixion (Root 1903, 78), and also has an Oedipal substratum, manifest in the nuances of poetic language. In terms of deep narrative, Lear is a baby on the point of weaning, whose reign over his mother‐daughters (in the form of part‐object breasts) has come to a natural end. His self‐knowledge, in the beginning aptly judged by Goneril to be “slender” I.i.293), brings him ultimately to the crux when he finds himself bound on a “wheel of fire,” in a new passionate dependency in relation to his good object or internal mother, Cordelia.4
Initially this king‐baby, sensing the approach of weaning, had split his maternal object into good and bad parts (Cordelia, versus Goneril and Regan) in an attempt to keep control of the inevitable process of dethronement. He made “centaurs” of his daughter‐mothers – angels above the waist and devils below (the centaurs being offspring of Ixion and a cloud‐woman). During the storm scenes he was assailed both by somatic inflictions (stinging, burning cold and wet, like the baby by his own bodily excretions), and by mental confusion – “madness.” As Meltzer has pointed out, Klein’s discoveries made it abundantly clear how every aspect of the young child’s daily life (eating, sleeping, playing, urinating, defecating, learning, being bathed, dressed, and so on) is fraught with anxieties, whose qualities can nonetheless be “modified by play […] altering the meaning of the outside world” (Meltzer 1973, 30–31).
Yet Lear is never alone in his “madness”; throughout his ordeal, some contact is maintained with the spirit of his mother in the form of Kent, the Fool, and Tom (the “wise Athenian”), who help him to construct a “philosophy” from this experience of abandonment, bringing him progressively closer to rediscovering his internal good object. When this happens, the bringing together of heaven and hell feels like Ixion’s punishment, a form of torture:
LEAR:
CORDELIA:
LEAR:
Lear, like another of its classical models, Oedipus, narrates the story of how a passionate (“wrathful”) infant’s quest for self‐knowledge is bound up with a quest for knowledge of his mother and he must “stay the course.” The death of the breastfeeding mother is coextensive with the death of his infancy. The infant protagonist struggles with emotional ambivalence in relation to the internal object that both gives and takes away (Meltzer’s “aesthetic conflict” [Meltzer and Williams, 1988]); his achievement is to integrate these conflicting aspects of the object, driven by the “epistemophilic instinct” (Klein 1957). Out of this conflict the philosopher‐king Edgar is born, in the context of a new view of kingship which is defined in terms of bearing “weight” (the depressive position) rather than of wielding willpower.
In the latency period, however, the emotional turbulence that underpins all such developmental changes may appear absent. Bion makes use of the myth of Palinurus, as related by Virgil in Book 5 of The Aeneid, to consider this absence. It is one of six myths that Bion chose to attempt the construction of a schema that could standardize the underlying nature of prototypal situations of emotional turbulence. He saw the death of Palinurus as presenting the smooth reversibility of omnipotence–helplessness in a way particularly characteristic of the latency state of mind (Bion 1989, 11, 29). In this, he takes latency not only as a stage in development, but as a continually recurring vertex in any live thinking activity, such as that within the psychoanalytic consulting room:
When we disperse to the loneliness of our respective consulting rooms and offices, I suggest that what is there is turmoil. It may appear in a form revealed in verbal expression; it may appear in a form that would seem more appropriately called “latency phase.” Palinurus is described, at the end of the fifth book of the Aeneid, as saying that Somnus must think he is very inexperienced if he can be led off course while steering his fleet on the calm and beautiful surface of the Mediterranean. This is something we should not forget; we should not be misled by the superficial and beautiful calm which pervades our various consulting rooms and institutions.
(Bion 1987, 236)
It is through confronting and understanding such moments of turbulence that the personality develops. Bion’s point is that the myth applies not only to the analysand, whose conflicts are the official subject of the dialogue, but also to the analyst via the countertransference aroused by the patient’s inner life, which is hidden in the same way that primitive or somatic eruptions may be hidden by the smooth surface of a beautiful sea. The myth of Palinurus reminds us to beware of calm weather in the narrative of our self‐development, and to sharpen our observation to detect even minimal signs from the stormy unconscious.
By contrast with Palinurus is the resurgence of infantile and Oedipal conflicts that characterize adolescent sexuality: a developmental period that finds mythical nourishment in Hamlet. Hamlet used to be viewed as a play in which the hero is so obsessed with thinking that he is unable to act. In psychoanalytic terms however, it is a play in which the fantasy of violent intrusion interferes with the capacity to think and to achieve reciprocal relationships. The simmering atmosphere of incipient violence results from the clash between the forward thrust of development and the urge to repress it owing to the accompanying pain and confusion. It is this that makes adolescents appear neurotic and unpredictable, and according to Meltzer, is best understood in terms of the violation of the object’s internal spaces, signifying the urge to possess and control the object from within (Meltzer and Williams 1988, 7–33). This is an intrusive way of knowing: characterized by a belief that knowledge is a “secret” being withheld from the adolescent by the parents (or internal parents).
Hamlet, “crawling between earth and heaven,” knows there are “more things in heaven and earth” than he and Horatio have learned at college between the covers of books (III.i.128, I.v.174). His object – primarily his mother, but also her younger embodiment in Ophelia – appears tantalizing and ambivalent: beautiful on the outside, but “breeding maggots” within (II.ii.181). In his search to discover the object’s inner meaning, which contains his own meaning, he is driven by projective identification with a childhood image of a father (the Ghost) that exists no longer, has “died” and turned into a sensual beast – from “Hyperion to a satyr” – in response to his own sexual upsurgence. Meanwhile the adult (courtly) world conducts a parallel mission to manipulate the “heart of his mystery.” The failure of communication and reciprocity exacerbates his sense of mental imprisonment.
In this drama of projections concerning the inside and outside of the object, Hamlet calls on the heroes of Ilium to both justify and exorcise his daimon (the paradoxicality being part of the adolescent condition). In Hamlet the classical references are associated with extravagant language and histrionic pseudo‐emotion, with false art rather than the true art that aids self‐reflection.5 His departed father has taken the idealized form of a classic hero, by contrast with the current sensual version embodied in Claudius: “Hyperion to a satyr” (I.ii.140). Lamenting that he is himself no “Hercules” (153), Hamlet seeks for an identification that will set him on the glamorous path of classical heroism, making mindless vengeance easy; and he uses the Player King as a demonstration model to incite the appropriate feelings in himself:
The rugged Pyrrhus, like th’Hyrcanian beast –
’Tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus –
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in the ominous horse… (II.ii.442–450)
Theatre can be used as a drug, as well as a route to self‐knowledge. Black‐clothed Pyrrhus is one of those alter‐egos whom Hamlet uses both to justify his violence, and also to expose to his more thoughtful self the absurdity of “action” – which in this play always means violence. The violent part of Hamlet seeks for a heroic model that reflects his Ghost‐father in Fortinbras, Laertes, and fictional figures such as Pyrrhus.6 The thoughtful part identifies with a “pause” in action (the famous “Pyrrhus’ pause”) and with the quiet all‐observing Horatio; it is in search of the “undiscovered country” of his future mental landscape – the more developed adult self whose shape is yet unknown but which will not be modeled on the tale of Troy.
The “ominous” Trojan horse is an image of intrusive curiosity, manipulating the object (the city of Troy) from within. Troy, Gertrude, Ophelia, and the play‐within‐a‐play are all representations of an internal mother‐object whose meaning is hidden from him, and which fails to aesthetically contain his own meaning. There is no reciprocity between Hamlet and the “other” – only a series of female mousetraps which rebound back on himself and throttle his development. The play‐within‐a‐play becomes one of these because Hamlet – much as he loves theatre – abuses the players, in a way parallel to his misuse of a classical education. He sets up a false pageant where emotionality is not artistically contained, but rather, caricatured: “What’s he to Hecuba, or Hecuba to him, that he should weep for her?” Yet at the same time, another part of himself is capable of analyzing his own “madness,” and its correspondent “sickness” in the mind of Denmark as a whole; and the play‐within‐a‐play helps him to do so. In Hamlet and its companion play Troilus and Cressida, the classical heritage (in terms of both myth and rhetoric) is used to help expose the “lie” that results when art or classical myth are used in a despotic way based on projective identification. It is a message that applies analogously to modes of literary criticism and modern classical reception: we may either manipulate the text, or learn from it.
Every growing‐point of the personality takes us back to adolescence and to the infantile conflicts that lie behind it. One of Shakespeare’s most delightful plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, uses its classical setting to define the nature of mature or maturing love, in relation to that of adolescence. On the point of marriage, Theseus the Duke of Athens is apparently stable in mind and circumstance, his youthful adventuring over: he appears to have “won” Hippolyta. But from the beginning a shadow is thrown across their relationship, cast by the adolescent lovers who reflect unconscious features of the older lovers; and it appears that the Duke’s classical robes are scant covering for inner adolescent confusions and misconceptions – the communal “dream” of the main body of the play. At the heart is “Bottom’s Dream,” which teaches Theseus‐as‐Oberon love’s humility, after his despotic sentence on Hermia in the opening scene, which put him in danger of losing Hippolyta‐Titania. Theseus was known in Shakespeare’s day by his unheroic abandonment of Ariadne – not the most promising model for a tale of true love, but for Shakespeare, an interesting challenge to be pursued through the Demetrius‐and‐Lysander aspect of Theseus.
For in this play Theseus is prepared to learn; acknowledging that he must wed Hippolyta “in another key,” more subtle than winning by the sword. Although the plot tells us that Bottom’s Dream is masterminded by Oberon, the poetry tells us it is masterminded by Titania, who seeks out the hidden gentlemanly quality in the male love‐object. It is Titania who dreams of a different type of hero – an Apuleian golden ass nested in Botticellian nature myth, folklore, and Pauline revelation: “The eye of man hath not heard[…]” (IV.1.210). The fusion of sources is well known – how the Bible is “translated” by a fertile admixture of the pagan,7 in a way analogous to the way the characters themselves are translated by their dreams. The ultimate test for Theseus comes with his reception of the mechanicals’ rendition of Pyramus and Thisbe. In his famous Platonic speech on the reality of the imagination, he struggles with its absurdity, yet – remembering the constancy of the “story of the night” – finally acknowledges “the forms of things unknown” (V.i.15). This enables him to perceive the “welcome” in the play’s “silence” (the silence of its capacity to artfully deceive). As a result, the humble performance shows him something about himself, and about being a lover, that he did not “know” before except unconsciously, when he had Bottom’s Dream and saw what the eye could not hear.
Thus, the classical narrative in the play‐within‐a‐play has a function opposite from that in Hamlet. Instead of being hijacked as propaganda it is a dream‐breeder, making the palace a “hallow’d house” not a graveyard or a ruined city. There is a fertile union between the classical past and the folklore that represents the homely wisdom of contemporary life. Like Theseus we, the audience, are happy to accept Puck’s invitation to be mere Cave‐dwellers; it may be a “tedious” and “lamentable” condition by comparison with the sphere of the gods but it allows for the operation of imagination and hence the growth of the personality. In this way Shakespeare revises the classical definition of a hero, to show how a warrior becomes a lover, slightly modifying thereby (as in Antony and Cleopatra) the sequence of his “seven ages.”
In the later romances, Shakespeare investigates the paradoxical possibility that the mind may continue to develop even when the brain and body are deteriorating. What happens to the psyche‐soma when the cloud‐capp’d towers melt into the mist? The Cave like the womb ultimately ejects its contents, forcing more urgent consideration of the philosophical question: where is the relationship with the object now? It is not strictly a new question: Cordelia harrowed hell like Christ‐Orpheus when she appeared to Lear from the spirit‐world; so did Cleopatra when, abandoning her lazy tyrannical ways, she raised Antony (“dying, dying”) to the fields of Elysium by her own physical efforts. It is what Hamlet failed to achieve when he leaped into Ophelia’s grave. This kind of drawing‐forth of the personality from its sojourn in Hades merges with the Narcissus or Marsyas types of myth (“tearing me from myself”), which have been interpreted by poets and visual artists (for example Titian) in terms of flaying the narcissistic layers of the personality to reveal a readiness for new growth. It is a continual, underlying progression relevant to all phases of life: retelling the way the self needs to perpetually remake its relationship with the object – just as we remake ourselves via rereading the classics. The most the personality can hope for is to be rescued from Hades (Meltzer’s “claustrum” [Meltzer and Williams 1992]) and restored to the Cave of shadows which can reflect self‐knowledge through symbol‐formation.
The myths of Orpheus, and of Ceres and Proserpine – all favorites for exploring the poet’s relationship with the Muse – underlie The Winter’s Tale, where artistic creativity becomes specifically a model for self‐development.8 The traditional poetic concern with posthumous fame is already inbuilt in classical narrative, hence the link with reception (see Porter 2011, 473); it is through his art that the poet will live beyond himself, so his example needs to become receivable. This intensifies the need to focus on truthfulness in the communication between self and object. Time will sift the truth‐tellers. Is truth believed to be hidden away within the aesthetic object (person or artform) like a secret hermeneutic code, or is it appreciated as a mystery to be felt on the pulses, that may even change one’s life? In The Winter’s Tale Leontes’ mind stops developing as a result of the lies invented by his pseudo‐scientific brain, believing he detected the treachery of his love‐object Hermione. His observation is impeded and colored by narcissism; thus, he banishes his object and enters a Hades‐like “winter” in which the artist‐therapist‐mother Paulina flagellates his conscience in “storm perpetual” (III.ii.211). While his analytical and misconceiving brain hibernates, Leontes dreams of summer and fertility myths, and subterraneously “recreates” himself. The theme of time is emphasized; for any deep or lasting reunion with the developmental spirit cannot be hurried.
As in other plays, the return of the vital spirit of self‐development is associated with music. Paulina, who calls for the music, is – as she makes clear – merely a facilitator in reuniting Leontes with his object Hermione, who is herself an earthly representative of “great creating nature” – the force that brings to life her “statue” as soon as it is recognized by her husband. Nothing has been invented or constructed, but everything is seen differently. Perdita‐Proserpine cannot be possessed without the possessor reverting to an identification with dusky Dis – something which momentarily tempts Leontes in the statue scene. The flicker of desire for the younger version of the love‐object (once lost, now found) indicates a return of narcissistic possessiveness, but is corrected; for as Meltzer writes: “Desire makes it possible, even essential, to give the object its freedom” (Meltzer and Williams 1988, 27). Hermione’s tense and drawn‐out release echoes that of Leontes, in close reciprocation of his mental movements. When he is free, so is she: but it is the paradoxical type of freedom that acknowledges dependence on the object. This is the internal developmental constellation achieved after 16 winters – the time needed for the mind to recognize the cast‐out “baby” that embodies its meaningful future, and that lives beyond its progenitor. Indeed, the play’s structure indicates that this seasonal rhythm within the mind has a certain inevitability, like the oscillation between paranoid‐schizoid and depressive orientations in psychoanalytic terminology. Shakespeare suggests, in effect, that it may not be possible for the self to kill its object, only to sever meaningful links – something that Bion would endorse in his theory that development stalls as a result of “attacks on linking” rather than as a result of hate or envy as dominant emotions in themselves.
Creativity in both artwork and in personality development therefore takes the form of tuning into the inevitable thrust of the quest for the unpossessable truth, and aligning the self with it, an actively passive process. Self‐development is a process of eternal “becoming” and rests on the capacity to tolerate the unknown: which in itself requires a certain depressive faith in the internal object and its powers of rejuvenation, despite attack by projected infantile emotions. It demands that design and prediction be relinquished in favor of “negative capability,” in Keats’s famous reformulation of Socrates’ advice in the Phaedrus to concentrate on “knowing oneself” rather than on the monsters of the myths. In placing this credo inside a group discussion which is itself a fiction,9 Plato raises the complementary possibility that the internal monsters may be part of the real business of self‐knowledge.
Bion, placing psychoanalytic thinking firmly within the Platonic tradition, calls this alignment with “O” – the object, the unknown, the Platonic Form of the good or beautiful, the Kantian noumenon, the “central feature” of the analytic situation (Bion 1970, 88). It involves eschewing memory and desire – slavery to past ruminations and future intentions. This type of knowing is very different from anything paraphraseable, or from the idea of finite significance in a literary text or myth. All poets and philosophers in this tradition recognize the truth is unattainable and needs “falsification” to enter into a sensuous domain, such as that of an existing mind – this is the function of myths, conveying truths not susceptible to analytical or reductive reasoning alone.
This is where the modern psychoanalytic theory of personality development coincides with the critical methodology of classical reception. All forms of reception, from fictional to analytical, face the psychological test of whether to colonize and possess the aesthetic object (the myth or text), or to introject its “meaning.” Either authoritarian or solipsistic modes may be colonizing in intent, if the reader or receiver takes possession of the text as container of meaning and supplants it with an interpretation or an ideology.10 It is not a limitation, but an advantage, that neither the pseudo‐objective nor the purely subjective interpretation is a viable means of assimilating the “truth” of the classic. This is precisely what enables us to learn from the narrative, in the psychoanalytic sense of “learning from experience” (Bion, 1970). What is required is to recognize in the narrative’s structure an aesthetic object that can serve as a model for our own development, through dialogue and identification – the antithesis of Hamlet’s mousetrap.11
This means (in psychoanalytic terms) a “depressive” rather than a narcissistic attitude to the classic object, like that worked out by Keats in his reading of a Grecian Urn. Thoughts begin with “pre‐conceptions” (Bion 1970, 15), initially felt on the pulses; developing them requires a complex process of identification with a generative, internalized object. The object, like the self, is in a state of evolution, but “contains” more knowledge. In psychoanalysis, the transference‐countertransference communication mirrors this dialogue of object relations and evokes symbols that contain the meaning of the emotional situation, leading to growth of the personality through self‐knowledge. In reading, every reader seeks a soulmate for some pre‐conception that thereby finds a context, in which thinking about his emotional condition can take place.12 The classical myths, being generative, continue to perform this service for us if we relate to them aesthetically, linking our pre‐conceptions with their metaphorical structures in a way that allows them to play a part in an evolutionary dialogue between self and objects.
For a comprehensive survey of Greek myths and their reception in the areas of philosophy and psychology see Graf (1996); on types of reception study see the collection by Hardwick and Stray (2011). For the function of mythmaking in relation to the development of thinking and symbol‐formation in both culture and the individual see Langer (1946), the introduction to the work of Northrop Frye by Russell (1998), Barker and Warner (1992), and Lianeri and Zajko (2008). Focusing on the world of the unconscious is Dodds’ (1951) classic study on the internalization of gods. For a modern psychoanalytic view of personality development see Bion (1970); Meltzer (1973); Meltzer and Williams (1988). On identification, the reader’s developmental experience, and the parallels between poet and muse, and self and internal objects, see Williams (1988, 2005), essays in Zajko and Leonard (2006), and Martindale and Thomas (2006). In specific relation to Shakespeare as a mediator of classical myth see the early study by Root (1903) and the modern essays in Taylor (2000) and Martindale and Taylor (2004).