On the Relation of Mythology and Psychoanalysis 1. Mythology and Psychoanalysis: Uncanny Doubles

It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology?” These words, addressed to Albert Einstein, were written by Sigmund Freud in 1932, seven years before his death. In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, published in the same year, the comparison with mythology pops up once more: “The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities magnificent in their indefiniteness”. These statements, made by Freud near the end of his life, seem to be his final word on a problem that had occupied him at several instances of his career: the relationship of psychoanalysis and mythology. Both fields have always shared a special connection and not only because the myths of Oedipus and Narcissus proved so useful to Freudian theory. Like literature and art, mythology was one of the first cultural fields to be explored by applied psychoanalysis. But what sets mythology apart from other fields is the fact that it in many ways re-