hs, sagas, fairy stories] is at present not by any means
concluded, but it is apparent everywhere from myths, for instance, that
they correspond to the displaced residues of wish phantasies of entire
nations, the dreams of ages of young humanity." (Samml. kl. Lehr. II, p.
205.) It will be shown later that fairy stories and myths can actually be
subjected to the same psychologic interpretation as dreams, that for the
most part they rest on the same psychological motives (suppressed wishes,
that are common to all men) and that they show a similar structure to that
of dreams.

Abraham (Traum und Mythus)(1) has gone farther in developing the
parallelism of dream and myth. For him the myth is the dream of a people
and a dream is the myth of the individual. He says, e.g., "The dream is
(according to Freud) a piece of superseded infantile, mental life" and
"the myth is a piece of superseded infantile, mental life of a people";
also, "The dream then, is the myth of the individual." Rank conceives the
myths as images intermediate between collective dreams and collective
poems. "For as in the individual the dream or poem is destined to draw off
unconscious emotions that are repressed in the course of the evolution of
civilization, so in mythical or religious phantasies a whole people
liberates itself for the maintenance of its psychic soundness from those
primal impulses that are refractory to culture (titanic), while at the
same time it creates, as it were, a collective symptom for taking up all
repressed emotion." (Inz-Mot., p. 277. Cf. also Kunstl., p. 36.)

A definite group of such repressed primal impulses is given a prominent
place by psychoanalysis. I refer to the so-called OEdipus complex that
plays an important role in the dream life as also in myth and apparently,
also in creative poetry. The fables (sagas, dramas) of OEdipus, who slays
his father and marries his mother are well known. According to the
observations of psychoanalysis there is a bit of OEdipus in every one of
us. [These OEdipus elements in us can--as I must observe after reading
Imago, January, 1913--be called "titanic" in the narrower sense, following
the lead of Lorenz. They contain the motive for the separation of the
child from the parents.] The related conflicts, that in their entirety
constitute the OEdipus complex (almost always unconscious, because actively
repressed) arise in the disturbance of the relation to the parents which
every child goes t