Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/115

Rh unwittingly, by slaying the father. The persecution mainly takes the form of attempts to destroy the hero's life just after his birth, by orders that he is to be drowned, exposed to cold and starvation, or otherwise done away with. A good instance of this simple form is the Œdipus legend, in which the underlying motive is betrayed by the hero subsequently marrying his mother; the same occurs in the many Christian variants of this legend, for example, in the Judas Iscariot and St. Gregory ones. The intimate relation of the hero to the mother is also shewn in certain types of the legend (for example, the Ferdun, Perseus and Telephos ones) by the fact that the mother and son are together exposed to the same dangers. In some types the hostility towards the father is the predominating theme, in others the affection for the mother, but as a rule both of these are more or less plainly to be traced.

The elaboration of the more complex variants of the myth is brought about chiefly by three factors, namely: an increasing degree of distortion engendered by greater psychological "repression," complication of the main theme by other allied ones, and expansion of the story by repetition due to the creator's decorative fancy. In giving a description of these three processes it is difficult sharply to separate them, but they will all be illustrated in the following examples.

The first disturbing factor, that of more pronounced "repression," manifests itself by the same mechanisms that Freud has described in connection with normal dreams, psychoneurotic symptoms, etc. The most interesting of these mechanisms in myth formation is that of "decomposition" (Auseinanderlegung), which is the opposite to the "condensation" (Verdichtung) mechanism so characteristic of normal dreams. Whereas in the latter process attributes of several individuals are fused in the creation of one figure, much as in the production of a composite photograph, in the former process various attributes of a given person are disunited and several individuals are invented, each endowed with one group of the original attributes. In this way one person, of complex character, gets replaced by several, each of whom possesses a different aspect of the character that in a simpler form of the myth was combined in one being; usually the different individuals closely resemble one another in other respects, for instance in age. A good example of this process is seen by the figure of the tyrannical father becoming split into two, a father and a tyrant. The resolution of the original figure is most often incomplete, so that the two resulting ones stand in a close relation to each other, being indeed as a rule members of the same