I

INTRODUCTION

1Anyone who can read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams without being outraged by the novelty and seemingly unjustified boldness of his procedure, and without waxing morally indignant over the stark nakedness of his dream-interpretations, but can let this extraordinary book work upon his imagination calmly and without prejudice, will not fail to be deeply impressed at that point¹ where Freud reminds us that an individual conflict, which he calls the incest fantasy, lies at the root of that monumental drama of the ancient world, the Oedipus legend. The impression made by this simple remark may be likened to the uncanny feeling which would steal over us if, amid the noise and bustle of a modern city street, we were suddenly to come upon an ancient relic—say the Corinthian capital of a long-immured column, or a fragment of an inscription. A moment ago, and we were completely absorbed in the hectic, ephemeral life of the present; then, the next moment, something very remote and strange flashes upon us, which directs our gaze to a different order of things. We turn away from the vast confusion of the present to glimpse the higher continuity of history. Suddenly we remember that on this spot where we now hasten to and fro about our business a similar scene of life and activity prevailed two thousand years ago in slightly different forms; similar passions moved mankind, and people were just as convinced as we are of the uniqueness of their lives. This is the impression that may very easily be left behind by a first acquaintance with the monuments of antiquity, and it seems to me that Freud’s reference to the Oedipus legend is in every way comparable. While still struggling with the confusing impressions of the infinite variability of the individual psyche, we suddenly catch a glimpse of the simplicity and grandeur of the Oedipus tragedy, that perennial highlight of the Greek theatre. This broadening of our vision has about it something of a revelation. For our psychology, the ancient world has long since been sunk in the shadows of the past; in the schoolroom one could scarcely repress a sceptical smile when one indiscreetly calculated the matronly age of Penelope or pictured to oneself the comfortable middle-aged appearance of Jocasta, and comically compared the result with the tragic tempests of eroticism that agitate the legend and drama. We did not know then—and who knows even today?—that a man can have an unconscious, all-consuming passion for his mother which may undermine and tragically complicate his whole life, so that the monstrous fate of Oedipus seems not one whit overdrawn. Rare and pathological cases like that of Ninon de Lenclos and her son² are too remote from most of us to convey a living impression. But when we follow the paths traced out by Freud we gain a living knowledge of the existence of these possibilities, which, although too weak to compel actual incest, are yet sufficiently strong to cause very considerable psychic disturbances. We cannot, to begin with, admit such possibilities in ourselves without a feeling of moral revulsion, and without resistances which are only too likely to blind the intellect and render self-knowledge impossible. But if we can succeed in discriminating between objective knowledge and emotional value-judgments, then the gulf that separates our age from antiquity is bridged over, and we realize with astonishment that Oedipus is still alive for us. The importance of this realization should not be underestimated, for it teaches us that there is an identity of fundamental human conflicts which is independent of time and place. What aroused a feeling of horror in the Greeks still remains true, but it is true for us only if we give up the vain illusion that we are different, i.e., morally better, than the ancients. We have merely succeeded in forgetting that an indissoluble link binds us to the men of antiquity. This truth opens the way to an understanding of the classical spirit such as has never existed before—the way of inner sympathy on the one hand and of intellectual comprehension on the other. By penetrating into the blocked subterranean passages of our own psyches we grasp the living meaning of classical civilization, and at the same time we establish a firm foothold outside our own culture from which alone it is possible to gain an objective understanding of its foundations. That at least is the hope we draw from the rediscovery of the immortality of the Oedipus problem.

2This line of inquiry has already yielded fruitful results: to it we owe a number of successful advances into the territory of the human mind and its history. These are the works of Riklin,³ Abraham,⁴ Rank,⁵ Maeder,⁶ and Jones,⁷ to which there has now been added Silberer’s valuable study entitled "Phantasie und Mythos.” Another work which cannot be overlooked is Pfister’s contribution to Christian religious psychology.⁸ The leitmotiv of all these works is to find a clue to historical problems through the application of insights derived from the activity of the unconscious psyche in modern man. I must refer the reader to the works specified if he wishes to inform himself of the extent and nature of the insights already achieved. The interpretations are sometimes uncertain in particulars, but that does not materially detract from the total result. It would be significant enough if this merely demonstrated the far-reaching analogy between the psychological structure of the historical products and those of modern individuals. But the analogy applies with particular force to the symbolism, as Riklin, Rank, Maeder, and Abraham have shown, and also to the individual mechanisms governing the unconscious elaboration of motifs.

3Psychological investigators have hitherto turned their attention mainly to the analysis of individual problems. But, as things are at present, it seems to me imperative that they should broaden the basis of this analysis by a comparative study of the historical material, as Freud has already tried to do in his study of Leonardo da Vinci.⁹ For, just as psychological knowledge furthers our understanding of the historical material, so, conversely, the historical material can throw new light on individual psychological problems. These considerations have led me to direct my attention more to the historical side of the picture, in the hope of gaining fresh insight into the foundations of psychology. In my later writings¹⁰ I have concerned myself chiefly with the question of historical and ethnological parallels, and here the researches of Erich Neumann have made a massive contribution towards solving the countless difficult problems that crop up everywhere in this hitherto little explored territory. I would mention above all his key work, The Origins and History of Consciousness¹¹ which carries forward the ideas that originally impelled me to write this book, and places them in the broad perspective of the evolution of human consciousness in general.

1 The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 260-61.

2 He is supposed to have killed himself when he heard that his adored Ninon was really his mother.

3 Wishfulfilment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales.

4 Dreams and Myths.

5 The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.

6 “Die Symbolik in den Legenden.”

7 On the Nightmare.

8 Die Frömmigkeit des Grafen Ludwig von Zinzendorf.

9 Also Rank, “Ein Traum, der sich selbst deutet.”

10 [I.e., after 1912, the date of the original publication of the present work.—EDITORS.]

11 His subsequent publications, Umkreisung der Mitte and The Great Mother, may also be included in this category. [Three of the essays in the former work were translated in Art and the Creative Unconscious.—EDITORS.]