The Myth of the Birth of the Hero

The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology (Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden: Versuch einer psychologischen Mythendeutung), Otto Rank's second book after Der Künstler, appeared in 1909 as the fifth number of Freud's series Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde. In a prefatory note dated Christmas 1908 Rank credits Freud with suggesting the study. The book sets out to explain why the birth legends of heroes among many peoples resemble one another so closely. Rank begins by reviewing the explanations current in his day: the "elementary ideas" common to all humanity in Bastian's sense, descent from a shared ancestral stock, and the borrowing and migration of motifs. He leaves the question of transmission open and asks instead how such myths arise in the first place. He rejects the nature and astral mythology of his time, which read heroes as sun, moon or stars, arguing that these schools projected onto the heavens what was offensive in the myths, such as incest and parricide. Following Freud's reading of Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams and Karl Abraham's Traum und Mythus, he treats myths as products of human fantasy that were attached to celestial phenomena only secondarily. The central part is a comparative collection of birth legends retold from their sources: Sargon of Akkad, Moses, Abraham, Karna, Ion, Oedipus, Judas, Paris, Telephus, Perseus, Gilgamesh, Cyrus (after Herodotus, Justin and Ctesias), Kaikhosrav and Feridun, Romulus and Remus, Hercules, Jesus, Buddha, Habis, Wolfdietrich, Genovefa, Siegfried, Lohengrin, and Scef of the Beowulf poem. From them Rank distils a "standard saga". The hero is the child of distinguished, usually royal parents. His conception is preceded by difficulties such as continence, long barrenness or secret intercourse. A dream or oracle warns against his birth, usually as a danger to the father. He is condemned to death or exposed, most often in a box on water. He is saved by animals or by lowly people such as shepherds and is suckled by a female animal or a humble woman. Grown up, he finds his noble parents, takes revenge on his father, is acknowledged, and attains greatness and fame. The interpretation rests on a contribution by Freud, printed within the book, on what he calls the family romance of neurotics; it was later published in English as "Family Romances". As the child grows, comparison with other parents and feelings of being slighted lead it to imagine that it is a stepchild or adopted and that its real parents are of higher rank. Once it learns that paternity is uncertain while maternity is certain, the fantasy elevates only the father and imagines the mother in secret love affairs. Yet the exalted parents are drawn from memories of the real ones. The fantasy therefore expresses longing for the early years, when the father seemed the strongest of men and the mother the loveliest of women. Rank equates the hero with the ego of the child. The two couples of the myth correspond to the real and the imagined parents of the family romance, and at bottom they are identical. By the symbolism of dreams, exposure in a basket on water represents birth through its opposite: the water is the water of birth and the box is the womb, as the water dreams of Cyrus's mother and grandfather show. The father's hostility, announced by the oracle, is the son's own hostility, which arises from rivalry for the mother and is projected onto the father. This projection, together with the splitting apart of figures fused in fantasy, leads Rank to call the myth a paranoid formation. Rank traces a progressive softening of the conflict across the myths. First the father is himself the king and persecutor. Then the persecutor is the grandfather, often bound by jealous love for his daughter. In the virgin-birth myths the father becomes a god. Finally the persecutor is wholly unrelated to the hero, as Herod is to Jesus. Rank reconstructs an earlier form of the Moses legend and argues that the nurse who is in fact his mother points back to the humble couple as the real parents. The same mechanisms explain doubles such as Harpagus and Artembares in the Cyrus story, the helpful nursing animal, and twin and brother myths. Myths are not made by heroes. They are made by adults who, as Freud argued in "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming", fantasize back into childhood and lend the hero their own childhood story. The myth thus justifies the ordinary person's childhood rebellion against the father while also expressing tenderness and gratitude toward the parents. Rank compares the myth with the delusions of descent of paranoiacs, who openly claim to be the hidden children of royalty. He also compares it with the anarchist who kills a king, a revolt against the father displaced onto a ruler. He ends at the border where childhood fantasy, neurosis, myth-making, insanity and crime meet. A second, enlarged edition appeared in 1922. An English translation in 1914 made the book a founding text of psychoanalytic mythology.