Schaeffer, Jacqueline <br/><br/>
Myths of Love, Love of Myths 

 -  2004.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 28 
<br/><br/> Establishing a dialogue between psychoanalysis and anthropology helps us to think of myths as dramatized expressions of drive-related issues, resembling in this respect infantile sexual theories and primal scene fantasies. When the ego is shaken to the core by libidinal impulses, it sets up defences that aim to negotiate, repress or accept these urges; similarly, when the socius is called into question by love, it creates social contracts and religious decrees in an attempt to channel such relationships. Anthropology shows how myths dramatize the violence of sex and love that so disturbs organized society, and how rituals are set up to codify and domesticate it. The civilizing hero tries to find solutions. A relationship in which sex and love are so closely intertwined confronts human beings with their primary cathexes and identifications, and obliges them to face up to the implications of the difference between the sexes. Perhaps then, we could think of the creation of myths as a king of collective sublimation.