Abstract

Despite its loss of intellectual respectability in the nineteenth century, the myth of the fall still haunts modern religion and thought like an unquiet ghost. Discredited in its role as an historical account of human origins, it has retained its vitality as a ‘psychological’ myth, an inexhaustible metaphor for the brokeness and fragmentation of the human spirit. The myth of the fall surfaces in the twentieth century in the form of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, who would not normally spring to mind as someone sympathetic to the myth. Freud is perhaps the most famous ‘demythologizer’ of religion. He traced all religion and myth, including the myth of original sin, back to non-spiritual psychological processes. But although he clearly wished to deconstruct all traditional myth, myth plays an indisputable role in his own psychological theories. Some of his psychological constructs, such as the ‘Oedipus complex’ and the concept of ‘narcissism’, are inspired by Greek myths. Others, like the theory of the death instinct, are founded on scientific speculations which clearly resemble myths. The myth of the primal horde in particular draws its rhetorical power from its similarity to the Biblical account of the fall. Both the Biblical account of the fall and the psychohistorical ‘myth’ of the primal horde attribute the conflicts and imperfections of the human condition in part to an inherited guilt, an inherited guilt which stems from a decisive and fateful historical event in the past