Psicología, psicoanálisis y mitos

Abstract

This paper deals with different theories in the study of myths. Interpretations of myth were offered earlier in ancient Greece. The development of social sciences in the 19th century, together with ethnological discoveries in the 20th, established the main contours of mythology, the science of myth. Since the Romantics, all study of myth has been enriched; Sir James Frazer and Durkheim talk of ritual and social force of mythology. Levy Bruhl, emphasized the ways myth fulfills common social functions. Claude Lévi- Strauss and other structuralists have compared the formal relations and linguistic patterns in myths throughout the world. One of the most celebrated writers about myth from a psychological standpoint was Sigmund Freud. Freud put forward the idea that symbolic communication does not depend on cultural history alone but also on the workings of the psyche. Thus Freud introduced a transhistorical and biological conception of man and a view of myth as an expression of repressed ideas. Carl Jung extended the transhistorical, psychological approach with his theory of the “collective unconscious” and the archetypes, often encoded in myth, that arise out of it.