Changes

For Freud, myth indicates the path every child will have to travel as an individual. Certainly, the legend of Oedipus provided him with an opportunity to " 'fictionalize' a mental truth" (Assoun, 1997). The myth of the murder of the father of the horde arguably constitutes a kind of distillation of the Yahweh myth, which Freud called the "Christian myth" (1912-1913a) and Lacan called the "myth of the apple." The hypothesis that the murder of the father is criminal is in fact well suited to accounting for the primal fault (Freud incorrectly referred to it as "original sin"), which can be understood as a tragic split between humanity and God the Father resulting from the human wish to usurp God's place. The discovery of correspondences between the mental life of savages and that of the early Jews makes it possible to identify the hidden origins of the oedipal myth in the stories of Genesis. But above all, this Freudian myth serves to confirm the relevance and universal nature of the finding that Freud summed up in the axiom that where there is prohibition, there is a wish. Original guilt implicates the subject not in the primal fault but in desire itself.