- By Alfonso Rodriguez, 2
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- Last year around August the Fepal organized the fifth International Symposium on Myths
named Creativity, Eros and Thanatos. Next, I will refer to some presentations that
seem to me worth mentioning. They deal with the general characterization of myths, recent
studies on Latin American myths, and works done in the common field of psychoanalysis and
literature.
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- "We live in a world of myths, and myths live within us" said the Argentine
psychologist N.Yampey, at the beginning of the symposium.
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- The meaning of myths were characterized in some of these presentations. One of them was
the so called Psychoanalysis and Anthropology : analysis of an indigenous Brazilian myth.
- Here we were reminded of some "classic" definitions of myths . The lecturer
Lazlo Avila, insisted on the myth - taken from M. Eliade - as a "sacred",
"excellent" and "significant " story which "provides patterns for
human behavior, and for that reason, renders significance and value to existence".
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- This is the ground work to say that myths justify all human activities and behaviors,
making up so a series of "collective representations" which "express
unconscious desires of the community" - according to the quotation of the Mexican
speaker Héctor Vásquez - as it was emphasized before, it has to do with
characterizations of myths on the line pointed by Freud (6. Rosenthal)) : "myths are
the dreams of humanity, ways to get to the unconsciousness , a field which harmonizes
pleasure and reality".
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- All these characterizations coincide in the myth, "contribute to the construction
of reality", "gives an order to chaos", "reorganizes identity",
"corrects what reality imposes". Therefore, myths are able to turn into the
Latin American case, for example, "a way of resistance".
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- If the myth symbolizes and condenses the "unlimited human desires", the
"nostalgia of the lost of original unity", the "suspicious dark side of
human nature", then all of us, as Freud already said, carry in a personal myth our
internal phantom, our own familiar drama.
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- Several cases were exposed, in which psychoanalysts use the contents of the myths to
analyze , deal with and cure their patients. Hence the necessity, - it was insisted on- to
know the greatest amount of myths possible to use them as maps or guides during
psychoanalitic cure.
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- Insight and transformation of insight.
- "I come from, and I am in myth land "said Hugo Torres , when he started his
"Fromation of the Imaginary" of the Spanish Conquest in the Mexican West. He
advocated for the work betwwen history and psychoanalysis together; and also insisted in
the functiion of myth to change and transform life.
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- Gustavo Corra from the APA made a presentation on his study about the Latin American
myth, whose psychoanalytical explanation is rooted in the explanations of the so called
universal myths. La Pora (La plata ibigüí or the hidden treasure) refers to the common
topic of a buried wealth. Historically explained by the necessity of hiding treasures
during liberation wars, this myth is an "archetype" with the divine mythic
belief in a better further (hidden) life , and a search buried in the mother Earth. It
takes again the " drive of the lost and phallic object", the "castration of
a child before being stroke by the word, or by the law". There would be a treasure in
our lives, that exists but which cannot be reached. It has to do with penetrating, boring
into mother-Earth to obtain the imaginary object, the universal change coin, the
materiakization of pleasure. It also picks up the universal myths told in
"Candid" by Voltaire and the one in "The island of the treasure",
which would be rejoining points among myth, psychoanalysis and literature.
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- The "Incarri" myth tells the story of an Inca head which was cut off and
buried by a Spanish man, but later it grows underground , until the body of the dead
indigenous is completely rebuilt. Alberto Péndola, its presenter, upon organizing the ten
versions of the myth (out of sixteen versions he already knows) , insisted on the
necessity of disciplinary studies on the tyopic.
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- Besides the psychoanalytical meaning of castration, the myth
would symbolize the " spurious identity of Peruvians". "We barely exist, we
are a body with a Spanish head" stated the psychoanalyst". The story would pick
up "the resistance to civilization", the "necessity of reintegration in
front of the invaders", the urgent need to accept our heritage.
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