Myth and the Unconscious

Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis probably made the single most valuable contribution to the interpretation of myth: the first serious exploration of the unconscious life of the mind and the earliest articulation of its importance to consciousness. Myths, for Freud, were the products of the first era in human culture, in which an animistic picture of the world had dominated, but details of the relationship between myths and animism seem to be unexplained in some essential respects. In his evolutionary scheme, myths originally celebrated the spirits of the dead. As the dead were deified, myths came to celebrate the spirits or gods of nature.