The Myth of Psychoanalysis - Freud, Lacan and Levi-Strauss

The Myth of Psychoanalysis

Freud, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss

Yehuda Israely

Introduction and first chapter from a book to be published by Rutledge in 2025

Introduction - Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and the Creature That Dwells in Language

In 1942, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, and linguist Roman Jakobson met in New York.  Both were Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe and both had gained strong insights into the nature of language better than most people before them.

It was Jakobson to whom the secrets of language first revealed themselves.  He discovered from reading Ferdinand de Saussure that meaning evolves from arbitrary and meaningless elements, such as the sounds of a language, its “phonemes”: it is only when these elements are combined into a word that they might yield significance. And even then, it is only when words, or “signifiers”, join to make up a sentence that a context emerges in which these words gain meaning.  He saw that “things” are conceptualizations arising from opposites, in the same manner as temperature is defined based on the contrast between heat and cold. Jakobson found that the most elementary opposition is that between presence and absence: cold is, in fact, nothing but the absence of heat. Any object, or feature, that doesn’t seem to have an opposite “other” is therefore defined on the basis of its presence rather of its absence. The opposite of a “table”, therefore, rather than being defined as a “chair” would be a non-table.

         Once he defined the nature of “things”, Jakobson turned to probing the mental process that charges them with meaning  - which led him to discover that “meaning” is the outcome of a comparison between “things”, a comparison, that is, of pairs of opposites. Meaning is tantamount to saying about something that it is like something else. The meaning of blue, for instance, inheres in an analogy between opposites: heat opposes cold, like red opposes blue. Like stone stands to water, reason stands to feeling. Only when we put together four elements – two pairs of opposites, between whom there is an analogy – only then each element will gain its meaning from the context of the remaining three.

Riveted by his friend Jakobson’s structural way of thinking, Lévi-Strauss put it to use when looking at phenomena he had encountered in his work as an anthropologist.  Lévi-Strauss discovered that all human-cultural activity – i.e., the subject of anthropology – has a language-like structure, something that is not limited to spoken or written language alone. In the culinary domain, for instance, a dessert consisting of apple strudel served with salted caramel ice cream, involves opposites or contrasts that give distinct meaning to the combination – the cake’s crispiness is set off against the softness of the ice cream; the former’s warmth contrasts with the latter’s cold, while sweetness is accentuated by a salty edge. The coldness, saltiness and softness of the ice cream, in isolation, remain meaningless like isolated phonemes until they are contrasted with their opposites.   For Lévi-Strauss, the distance from looking at illustrations deriving from the culinary domain and the arts, to similarly elucidating tribal myths, was only short. These latter he interpreted by treating their core images strictly like phonemes - the in-themselves meaningless units of sound in language - and by considering the interrelations between these elements of the myth as well as in their context. Anthropologists of the functional school before Lévi-Strauss had referred to the imagery of myth as having inherent meaning. To illustrate, think of a scholar of ancient languages who approaches a hieroglyph as though it were an icon, an image whose meaning is intrinsic. In so doing, the scholar fails to realize that the hieroglyphs constitute senseless characters, exactly like the phonemes that constitute speech, which only achieve meaning once they come together in a word.       

Language consists of arbitrary elements deriving from the surroundings. In the case of spoken language, these consist of the arbitrary vowels and consonants produced by voice and mouth. In myth, there are various elements, like animals, trees, stars or heavenly bodies, which become arbitrarily associated with a variety of roles. So for instance the totem, which serves as an arbitrary element representing the tribe, might be an armadillo or jaguar, but the unit of meaning composed out of arbitrary elements will be the myth, and here both armadillo and jaguar will feature. The unit of meaning consists of the relations among the totems, the relations, that is, among the different tribes represented by the totem.

The myth about the armadillo and the jaguar who struggled until they made peace, construes the peaceful relations between the tribe whose totem is “the armadillo” and the tribe whose totem is “the jaguar”. Lévi-Strauss argued that functionalist anthropologists sought meaning in the totem only, assuming that a jaguar supports identification with an attacking force, while an armadillo suggests a defensive force. There are, similarly, approaches in psychology that believe it is possible to use ready-made lexicons to uncover the meaning of dream imagery. One example of this is the idea that a snake necessarily has phallic connotations. Lacanian psychoanalytic hermeneutics, by contrast - and similar to Lévi-Strauss’s approach to mythological imagery - assumes that we cannot know anything about images in a person’s dream unless we know something about their relations with other images in the dream in question.

Between the Language of Myth and the Language of the Symptom

Lévi-Strauss’s discovery matched Freud’s in both depth and modesty. In the ability to read the language of symptoms or myths and understand and even identify with the mentally ill and the native. Some decennia earlier, Freud had made a similar move in relation to “the language of the mind”, when he learned to read the logic of hysteric symptoms by approaching them as a form of speech, a certain way of using language, and hence having an internal logic. In the case of Anna O., for instance, he learned to “read” her symptoms in their context, finding out that Anna’s paralyzed arm was the arm with which she had nursed her dying father: its paralysis communicated, among other things, feelings of guilt she had around her caring.

And here is a personal example illustrating how a symptom’s meaning only emerges within context. As I was driving my car, one day, my neck suddenly cramped – just a random, physical event, it might seem. But suspecting it might be a symptom – an expression of the unconscious, that is – I began to ponder the chain of thoughts that might have led up to my neck getting stuck. A few moments earlier, the radio had reported on the death of two people in a terror incident. This reminded me that earlier that morning I had heard a man I knew had died of cardiac arrest. On hearing this, I had thought he wasn’t all that old and that it could happen to any one of us, without warning, just like that, out of the blue. My next thought had been that knowing we can die any moment is “like a knife at the throat”. Remembering this thought led to the immediate release of my neck. So, with hindsight, this must have happened: Probably intolerable, the thought “knife at the throat” became swiftly repressed. With the fear of death repressed, the unconscious represented the intolerable knowledge about death encapsulated in the expression “knife to the throat” in the real body rather than in consciousness. But once the curiosity to understand the symptom forced me to face my mortality again, the symptom of the cramped neck vanished (Israely, 2018).

We can say that much like in the myth’s narrative, where nature and the mythological animals serve as metaphors articulating the tribe’s social life, the human body and the names of its organs constitute a metaphor for psychic life and its drives. Prior to Freud and Lévi-Strauss, both mental symptoms and tribal myth were inaccessible, appearing as a whole lot of unintelligible nonsense. Freud normalized the pathological and made the symptom understandable as if it were speaking in a proper language. Lévi-Strauss, from his side, may have made the greatest contribution toward questioning  western arrogance and superiority when he recognized the mythic logic of native peoples, managed to decipher and interpret it for others.

Arbitrariness, Context, and Identity

It wasn’t merely his sharp intellect that made Lévi-Strauss into the great interpreter of the logic of myth he was. From an early age, he reported, he had not had a sense of subjectivity. He would read reality as if it were an impersonal algorithm, generating the identity of “Claude Lévi-Strauss” as a function of context, of the narrative into which he was born. He considered the idea that a person could choose who they were a fantasy. Lacan says about this that we find ourselves in solidarity as subjects of language – whether we are natives or “savages”, modern people, psychoanalysts or analysands. Any notion of autonomy, or of being self-made, flies in the face of this fact.

The first domain Lévi-Strauss transposed into language, to observe how language-based rules govern the life of the individual was that of kinship relations. Similar to the manner in which a word consists of letters which gain meaning only in relation to one another once they appear together in that word, humans are defined in terms of their functions within the family: father, mother, brother-in-law, daughter or son. These are all definitions that emerge based on their respective positions in relation to other members of the family: they mutually define each other. This definition by family position underlines how arbitrary reality accrues meaning only in relationships; humans are no more than “letters” in the “words” or “sentences” produced in the interrelations among family members and this is how they find themselves situated vis a vis them.

At the end of World War II, Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss traveled to Paris, where they were joined by Jacques Lacan. “Infected” by the structuralist approach, Lacan took it to his revision of Freudian psychoanalysis. His statement, “the unconscious is structured like a language” reflects the idea that like language and culture, the psyche too consists of arbitrary signifiers arranged in a structure that renders them meaningful. And much like language and culture, the psyche also operates under logical rules. For Lacan, the fact of our being desiring creatures is the outcome of our being characters in a story, driven by its plot. Our desires originate in the narratives into which we are born, and in our parents’ desires, who themselves participate in the narrative. This is the source of psychoanalysis’ healing potential as well as serving as the basis of one of the most important therapeutic objectives in clinical work. The more familiar a person is with the narrative in which they live, the better able they are to change it.

The Common Object of Psychoanalysis and Anthropology

This book explores the condition of the subject who-lives-in-language – a dodgy issue due, especially, to the fact that the object of investigation, here, is the same as the investigating subject, leading therefore to quite a few paradoxes. Paradoxes stem from insufficient dimensions and perspectives. This is why in this book I seek to bring to bear the perspectives of Freud, Lévi-Strauss, and Lacan, like beams casting their joint light on the same object from different angles, in an attempt to gain a better understanding. What is the object that psychoanalysis and structural anthropology have in common? To approach this question we shall revert to the foundational myths Lévi-Strauss collected on his travels in the Amazonian rainforest, and look at Freud’s mythical cases.  

         The first common denominator consists of repressed materials and the psyche’s way of dealing with them. The tribal myths of the natives are replete with regressive contents of the kind Freud identified as having become repressed in the modern adult and often leading to neurosis. These myths can be seen to start off more or less consistently with themes associated with primary processes, whether bodily secretions or incestuous or cannibalistic relations. Regressive extra-cultural or proto-cultural images of this kind are much more transparent and exposed in native myth than in the analysand’s free associations. But dreams are the exception: in them analysands, in the privileged position of not having to identify with the dream, report on regressive events in a much less censored way. They can tell themselves: That’s not me, it’s just my dream. Freud interprets the well known phenomenon of the nested dream, or “dream within a dream”, as a double defense against identification with the dream content.

         Another point of intersection between tribal anthropology and Freud’s psychoanalysis touches on something more fundamental and structural than meaning-related issues. The study group Lacan and Lévi-Strauss set up was interested at the joint object of anthropology, psychoanalysis and the social sciences in general: art, economics, and any singularly human activity. It might be more accurate to call these “the sciences of all creatures living in language”. Linguists and sociologists, anthropologists and psychoanalysts – they can all be considered not only to be using the same investigative tools, but also to be studying the same phenomenon: the way in which language structures human reality. Taken from this perspective, language, in the case of linguistics; exogamy in anthropology, and trade in economics, all fulfil the same function, namely: exchange. Language, by allowing things to be “like” something else, enables various kinds of communication between humans. The process of replacement typical of language – any language – is what makes it possible for us to agree that the word X replaces a certain thing, and hence to speak with and understand each other. In the case of trade, trust in the value of a coin replacing the thing possessing value of good or service. Exogamous exchange relations engender peace because wives and husbands are like grammar templates into which subjects can be placed and linked.. Lacan and Lévi-Strauss’s study group aimed to investigate how each domain could cast light on the others.

         “The way we exchange gifts among families and brides among tribes, is the way you exchange words all the time.” This is how the native people explained to Lévi-Strauss what they perceived as western people’s need to talk all the time. It is through exchange that people interrelate. All social domains – kinship relations, economics, and the exchange of ideas – are rooted in language’s fundamental unit of meaning, the word. Exchange occurs on the basis of an existing structure. So for instance the structure “coin” enables changing Japanese Yens into US dollars, while the “subject, object” structure makes it possible to replace words and change the meaning of a sentence. This is why Lévi-Straussian anthropology came to be known as “structural anthropology". Rather than studying cultural contents, which is the domain of ethnography, it applies itself to the language in which these contents are set down, and to the structure of this language which is reflected in the relations between its “words” and the various elements that constitute the language.

         We may for example look at a cultural study concerning masks. The ethnographer will catalogue the different types of masks and will study the unique features of each specimen. The cultural anthropologist, by contrast, will ask: “Which elements of the mask serve as part of a language generating meaning?” The height of the eyebrows on a Maori mask, for instance, may indicate intimidation. All cultures have their vocabulary and syntax, as well as their own definition of family membership and rules of marriage. Inter-cultural difference is expressed in different vocabularies and in the different syntactic rules of the spoken and written language, or in the rules of association in the language of kinship rules.

         The affinity between structural anthropology and psychoanalysis, or between Lévi-Strauss and Lacan, has another major expression: Lévi-Strauss and Lacan agree on the importance of signifiers as pivotal, definitive elements affecting humans in a not necessarily conscious manner. And both have their doubts concerning Cartesian “thinking man” or the existentialist “choosing individual”, à la Sartre. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan are “anti-essentialists” in so far as the self rather than some positivistic entity, is a meaning emerging in language. In his The Savage Mind (1966), Lévi-Strauss argues that whoever sticks to obvious definitions of the self will lose his bearings because this self, after all, is already an invention, or myth. We may reflect on the importance of such a point of departure for psychoanalysts, who find themselves confused between the ego, namely the isolated and imaginary self, and the subject which forms a point of encounter between signifiers, a figure in a story whose desires are determined by plot.

         Still, despite these reciprocal influences and inspirations, there are differences between psychoanalysis and anthropology that must be mentioned, here, at the outset. While the anthropologist studies and describes culture, the psychoanalyst deals with a person with a real body, who experiences pleasure and pain, and wishes to be healed. The structural anthropologist, moreover, discusses the way in which language forms the basis of culture but does not have to explain phenomena that demonstrate the breakdown of culture, like psychosis, trauma, or sociopathy. These differences will keep showing up at various points throughout the book.

Why “The Myth of Psychoanalysis”?

The words myth and psychoanalysis interrelate in several ways that are addressed here.

The first of these is clinical: What can we, psychoanalysts, learn from structural anthropologists? What are the cultural phenomena from which we as psychoanalysts may learn something about individual-psychic processes, and what are the limits of such an exercise? Freud was directly engaging with this when he compared unconscious contents in little Hans’ dreams and fantasies to similar motifs in myths like that of Oedipus. Or when, in Totem and Taboo, he identified the inhibition of Oedipal drives as something from which the family emerges, as well as culture. Throughout the book, we will be looking at the question of how Lévi-Strauss may contribute to psychoanalysis, especially where it comes to the analysis of myth or kinship relations, and how psychoanalysts can find inspiration from, and enrich their conceptualizations by the conceptual tools with which structural anthropologists study cultures.

         Another way of connecting between psychoanalysis and myth is to ask whether psychoanalysis itself, perhaps, might be a myth, with different versions appearing in the course of history, from Freud, through Lacan, to Lévi-Strauss. Psychoanalysis, much like any other theory, is a story we tell, and it has mythical elements, mythemes. For Lacan, who defined four social discourses  - master discourse, university discourse, hysterical discourse, and psychoanalytic discourse – the latter distinguishes itself by being the only one who is conscious of its mythical nature while the others confuse the myth with the real. Within the psychoanalytic discourse there is an awareness that it is a  social contract between subjects – a discourse that is pure myth. Considering Lévi-Strauss’s theory as helpful in enhancing Freud’s insight, Lacan was more specific in pointing out parallel theoretical concepts between these two approaches. He expanded this thinking by defining the order of the symbolic itself as something that simultaneously connotes a person’s social belonging in a culture – i.e., the domain of anthropology – and the structure of their unconscious – the realm of psychoanalysis. The name he gave to these two phenomena was “Other”, with a capital O, which we may translate, with some liberty, into “the Big Other”. The Big Other is the unconscious as well as culture. In the transference relations occurring in the clinic, the Big Other is associated with the analyst, in the sense that the analyst is believed to have knowledge about the patient’s unconscious, as well as being a socializing agent acting on behalf of culture.

         A third manifestation of the link between the two terms – myth and psychoanalysis – is that this book too is a story, adding another layer to the vast amount of already existing myths. It consists of a weave of native myths from all over the world and mythemic elements of psychoanalysis, while dwelling on Freud’s paradigmatic cases: we look at Freud himself in the dream about Irma’s injection; the traumas of Emma, Dora, the Ratman, little Hans, as well as Freud’s interpretation of the autobiography describing Daniel Paul Schreber’s psychosis.

         And on a more personal note, as I approach the end of this introduction: a story cannot be told other than by a subject, who cannot keep himself outside the story. In this book, therefore, I will be telling about myself, in my own voice, about the experiences that formed my perspective. I spent the first four years of my life among native people, the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria and the Bobo people of Burkina Faso, and to a considerable extent I feel I belong with them. The experiences I have accumulated as a therapist, too, working with a variety of populations, have greatly influenced me. Helen Keller’s testimony about her encounter with language has been very significant for me and it will feature in the chapter in which I discuss the myth of the subject’s creation. I have often worked with patients with disabilities, some who don’t hear or don’t see, and I know how moving it is for both sides when they manage to feel understood, living together within language.

         As I was writing this book, Freud, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss seemed to be listening to each other inside my head, and proposing different ways of analyzing clinical cases and myths. This is the result. If, here, I manage to clarify something to you, it seems I might have understood.

Chapter 1: Lévi-Strauss and Structuralism

In his probing native myths to identify structures that might help extract their meaning, Lévi-Strauss first of all had to address the following question: What is structure?

          In Lévi-Strauss’s basic definition, structure consists of a system characterized by mutual dependence and mutual change (1963, 298).  Here I will try to offer an example of such a system in the linguistic domain, pointing out relations of mutual dependence and mutual change within a sentence. Let’s take the following three sentences: “Are you letting go of that rope?”, “Are you letting go of that plan?”, “Are you letting go of yourself entirely?” A change in the final word(s) will seriously affect the meaning of “letting go”, with each sentence carrying an expression with its own meaning. Change in the final word(s) also affects the meaning of the preceding verb which appears in all three sentences. “Letting go” takes on a very different meaning depending on whether it appears before “rope”, a “plan”, or “of oneself”.

          We can shift from the structure of language to that of the family: the family structure consists of a number of elements and when one of them changes, it will affect the entire family. So that when one member dies, marries, divorces, is born, and so on, this influences all. The birth of a first grandchild defines parents as grandparents, the siblings as aunts and uncles.

          If we look further into structures we will see they require a more complex definition: While a structure is a type of system, conversely, for a system to qualify as a structure, it is not enough when the condition of mutual change is fulfilled: the system also has to show a capacity for substitution and prediction. Its elements must be open to substitution and it should be possible to foretell what will happen when the various functions are fulfilled by other elements. The structure of a sentence remains fixed even if the words of which it is made up change. It includes the unchanging functions of subject, object, and predicate. . Myth is multi-layered and undergoes a rewriting each time it is told or read again. One illustration is the myth of Oedipus, to which I will dedicate an entire chapter below: Lévi-Strauss’s reading of this myth adds another layer to the existing versions. Sophocles’ Oedipus, too, was just another such layer.

          The first beginnings of the structuralist approach can be traced back to the work of the Russian ethnographer, Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy, who founded what came to be known as Russian Formalism. His work is an example of European anthropology’s ethnocentric colonialism. A genius and wunderkind, Trubetzkoy began his scientific studies aged 13.  He was fascinated by Russian folktales, and took a special interest in how motifs from these tales had found their way into Finnish folklore. A Russian aristocrat and patriot, he sought to show how the wisdom of the Finnish folktales had Slavonic-Russian origins. In what sense did he resemble Lévi-Strauss? Both investigated how mythemes - myth’s building blocks or units of meaning – circulate between cultures. Lévi-Strauss studied myths across the Americas. from Vancouver to the Amazon and found they included similar motifs in different variations. But Trubetzkoy, a racist, nationalist, and imperialist, wanted to show that the roots of culture were to be found in Russia, from which it then spread elsewhere.  Lévi-Strauss’s work does not engage in this type of search for a “first” culture, and it shorn of any narcissistic motivation. Whether he started up north in Vancouver and moved southwards to the Amazon, or vice versa – he felt there was no “originary culture” of which all the other cultures were more or less weak derivatives. For Trubetzkoy, structuralism was based on four principles: First, the analysis shifts away from conscious to unconscious phenomena (in this he preceded Freud’s reference to the conscious and unconscious). Second, the object of study, rather than elements or objects of study as such, are their interrelations; in the domain of linguistics this means that the investigated phenomenon is not phonemes – the sound units of language – but rather how they come together into signifiers, i.e., units of meaning.  Third, the system consists of mutually dependent elements in covariance: when one of them changes, so do the others. The fourth, and final, principle of structuralism is that it should be possible to formulate consistent rules, and by consequence to predict outcomes.

The desire of the structuralist;Structure as Fate

What must the anthropologist or the psychoanalyst have experienced to develop the ability to consider their objects study from a structural perspective? Or more specifically, on the strength of what desire were Lévi-Strauss, Freud, or Lacan prompted to study language – each in their respective domain – from a structural, systematic, and contextual point of view.

          If we would ask Lévi-Strauss, he’d answer it was a matter of humility and the belief that things carry meaning. And if we would then ask what inspired him to observe native people and their myths from an equal footing, assuming they carry meaning and follow a logic that are not inferior to western people’s culture, he may well have replied that he had looked at Freud who thought of pathological and nonpathological mental cases as sharing the same psychic structure. If, then, we went on to ask Freud himself who was the source of irresistible desire informing this position of human solidarity, he would credit Charcot. Freud admired Charcot’s humble, respectful attitude to his patients – which contrasted starkly with the arrogance with which he treated his medical colleagues.

          Freud and Lévi-Strauss both had an exceptional attitude to their surroundings, in the way they accepted and respected the subjects they studied, without superiority.  In Freud’s case, he caused an uproar when he argued one did not have to be crazy to experience Oedipal urges.  He believed we all have an unconscious, and participate in the psychopathology of everyday life, as well as in infantile sexuality. Freud’s choice to listen to what his patients were telling him, and to assume these things could shed light on their symptoms – while his surroundings did not encourage such an approach - reflected great humility.

          Another aspect of Freud’s modesty was his willingness to expose himself: he used his own experiences to examine the psychic structures he identified. He believed that if the Oedipus was universal, he should be able, first and foremost, to observe it in himself and in his internalized relations with his parents.  He and Lévi-Strauss considered clinical and cultural superiority a defense mechanism. They both believed that this served to ensure our narcissistic pleasure by telling ourselves “it’s got nothing to do with us” (Lévi-Strauss 1964). Alienation, arrogance and lack of humility are not only triggered by our fellow human’s pathology, the patient, too, can take a superior attitude with regard to their unconscious, claiming their full control over their fate, as if unconstrained by the symbolic structures (and the unconscious mechanisms that render these structures) into which they were born.

          Lévi-Strauss seems to have been “born” with a recognition that our  fate is, to a considerable extent, determined by the “narrative” into which we were born, an insight more usually gained towards the end of a psychoanalysis. He had, he reported, from early on not experienced himself as having agency – i.e., as an initiating and choosing subject – but rather as being influenced and prompted into action by his surroundings and events. He was not inclined to take pride in what others might claim as their own achievement or talent. This awareness of himself as a subject emerging from a context was formative of his thinking. This was the inner structural logical at the root of Lévi-Strauss’s quest after the meanings of tribal myths and it helped him refute the racist, colonialist approach dominant in university departments of anthropology. Indeed, racist politics earlier advanced through missionary activities, were, in  Lévi-Strauss’s time and well before it, propagated and backed up to no small extent by departments of anthropology.

          We can learn something about how Lévi-Strauss thought of the parallel between solidarity with the native and with the neurotic patient from an experience he had, prior to his trip to Brazil, at St Anne  psychiatric hospital in Paris, which he had probably been invited to visit by Lacan. He interviewed a patient and later commented she had been  one of the most fascinating “natives” he had ever interviewed. It was his view that he was studying human beings, whether they were psychotic or neurotic, people living in the modern west or in  tribal cultures.

          Lévi-Strauss’s early inclination to think structurally also appears in the way in which he apprehended and processed new information. He recounts how he learned to read at the extremely young age of two, because he perceived structural elements in language. He figured out that the words boulangerie – bakery – and boucherie – butcher shop -  began with a common element he managed to identify: bou and he associated the sound with the written letters. Later he was to formulate this idea as the principle of repetition: the search for the stable, unchanging element in variations. Structural fate is fixed, while individual freedom occurs in the variations where the subject can choose and interpret.  In the introduction to Myth and Meaning (1978) Lévi-Strauss mentions that he forgets what he has written once he is finished writing, and that this is probably the case because the book writes itself through him. The individual lives in myth without being aware of it and similarly, without being aware, ideas pass through Lévi-Strauss as he writes. This is how he perceives myths – in contrast with novels or history, they write themselves of their own accord.

          Psychoanalysts, too, look for the motif of a dream or a symptom, without knowing its meaning. One might say that what drives the psychoanalyst, their desire, includes a structural element. The analyst’s finest moment occurs when he or she identifies the recurrent expression in the patient’s account and repeats it to her or him: without knowing its meaning, much like Lévi-Strauss zoomed in on – bou. The point of this act by the analyst is to raise to consciousness the repressed thing that is linked to the same signifier. As for the nature of the connection between the two appearances of the signifier – this the psychoanalyst leaves to the patient. An example would be a patient who draws out a particular sound when pronouncing certain words, especially rude ones. So he may express anger at a certain person and say: “That ffffffucker…”. At another time he comments a certain situation “sssstinks”. The interpretation will only point out the recurrence of fffff or sssss, on the assumption that these long drawn-out consonants are signifiers. The patient’s reaction reveals he has figured out the shared signified: “It’s great, saying it this way” – an encounter, that is, with the pleasure or jouissance of it.

          Lévi-Strauss, as said, treated myth as something that writes itself. This is the reason why we perceive such similarity between different myths and find, say, creation myths that repeat themselves in diverse cultures. We don’t consciously initiate that kind of perception, but it is the way the mind we all share operates: this is how it works spontaneously, without the subject’s conscious intention. It is, for the patient in psychoanalysis, similarly, not the point to reflect on the consciously chosen elements of their statements but to become aware of speech by way of a spontaneously emergent phenomenon, without agent. In the analytic setting, the same is also true for the therapist: the intervention emerging from her or him, too, has the quality of something that erupts spontaneously. Rather than deliberately triggering a process, the psychoanalyst rather trusts their role in the structure, which is larger than they know, and they invite the patient, too, to take this type of position.

Lévi-Strauss’s Methodology: A Journey in Space and Time Between Myths

In his study, Lévi-Strauss had built a huge mobile consisting of strips of paper on which he wrote the names of myths and the mythemes of which they consisted, like “twins” or “cleft rabbit’s lip”, about which he understood only later that they shared the notion of “splitting”.

          Having studied hundreds of myths, he had to somehow keep all of them in his mind simultaneously. Only in this way would he be able to observe their interrelations and figure out how a mystifying detail in one myth gains meaning from another myth originating from a geographical region on the other end of the world. Because he had to organize all these items and their links, and in the absence of the computers we would have at our disposal, he stuck all this knowledge in the form of paper notes on a mobile. He looked at scores of variations on the same myth, appearing across centuries-long periods. From the Amazon to Vancouver, from Patagonia to Alaska, and from 17th century Peru to myths which had changed their shape after contact with western culture.

          Overwhelmed by data, Lévi-Strauss feared he might not complete his project. He knew what had happened with Saussure, the Swiss linguist, whose research, from sheer overload of data, collapsed without seeing the light of day. He worried he would lose his way in this labyrinth of myths, the endless possibilities teeming in his mind. He had already written four hefty manuscripts with analyses and interpretations of myths, but more and more variants kept presenting themselves, delaying their publication. The web of connections among the myths’ shared mythemes grew ever thicker.

          XXX It was from Freud that Lévi-Strauss learned about “floating attention”, and this eventually helped him with his own research. Based on the insight that culture is structured like a language, he tried to expose himself to all the signifiers that came his way and sense what struck him as worth looking at. When doing field work he would gather information without reference to any prior pattern: this allowed him to observe things he was not expecting. The structural system may be either conscious or unconscious. When telling a myth a native may be either conscious or unconscious of the meanings of its signifiers. Lévi-Strauss sought to isolate the myth’s arbitrary elements – like phonemes in spoken language – and thereby learn how to read the [described] events as though they were words: after all, they become meaningful through the combination of their phonemes. He acted as if he was learning a new language – a student exposed to a flow of sounds from which he would have to identify the language’s meaningful sound units, and where its words and syllables began and ended. Only this would enable one to get to the words’ meanings.

          Unlike Trubetzkoy, whose project it was to show that folktales originated in Russia in order to underpin the superiority of Russian culture, Lévi-Strauss did not believe myths could be reduced to one source. They sprang up simultaneously across the Americas, spreading every which way. Hence, for him, there was no point in trying to isolate one origin. Rather than the linear thinking espoused by Trubetzkoy and others, Lévi-Strauss’s approach was rhizomatic. A typical rhizomatic structure is that of grass, which rather than developing vertically, grows laterally or sideways. While trees for instance grow in a very distinct, upward direction:  roots – stem – branches – leaves/fruit, the rhizome’s roots interconnect laterally. There is no linear hierarchy in the rhizome and each bit of root may connect to any other bit of root. The fig tree behaves like this too: its aerial roots both interlink and connect to the tree trunk from which they sprout. Something like this can be said about myths: you can pinpoint neither first nor last. This, too, was how Lévi-Strauss thought of tribal modes of exchange or influence. He believed it was why myths tended to be so basically similar – provided, that is, we can look through their variants. Since myths are rhizomatically related, the choice of one myth as a starting point while considering other myths as variants is rather arbitrary. When dealing with particularly inaccessible parts of a myth, Lévi-Strauss would first look at nearer by communities, but if this did not yield an explanation, he would turn to communities further afield.

          Still, given the linear, sequential nature of writing and speech, Lévi-Strauss had to start with one myth in order then to map its connections to others.  The myth he selected for that purpose was about the origins of the fire used for roasting meat (Lévi-Strauss, xx), while describing adjacent myths as variants. He studied them from a synchronic perspective: how does a myth change shape while preserving its idea across geographic distances. He also considered them diachronically, namely how a myth in one geographic location changes over time. When we place concepts sequentially, we put them in diachronic order, and when, by contrast, we arrange them, say, like patches of different colors simultaneously observed on a canvas, the ordering principle is synchronic. How did Levi-Strauss express what is a myth? The matrix of all possible variarions of the mythemes, which can be combined to infine number of narratives,  within a consistent structure. That is the myth. myth evolve? . Myth is the archive from which linear stories can be construed. That a narrative will take the shape of one word following another reflects the fact that despite the rhizomatic nature of our perception of information, we must, for the sake of communication – as speech and listening occur on the temporal axis - arrange it in linear sequence. We give our knowledge about the world the shape of stories.  Prior to the invention of writing, constrained by the nature of speech, information would have had to be presented in linear fashion, with concepts following each other in sequence. Since we cannot say more than one word at a time, concepts must appear in a sequence following the order of speech.

          One illustration of an archive  organaized narratively, or diachronically in a process unfolding along the axis of time, even though it aims to render an a-temporal principle, is the following: Plagued by a cruel southerly wind, the Vancouver natives could not go out to sea. Then the fishermen turned to the skate fish, a type of fish that is black on top and white underneath.  They asked the skate to intervene on their behalf with the southerly wind. After long, arduous negotiations, the skate managed to persuade the wind to settle: it would alternately blow one day and abstain the other.

          This narrative is an expression of the principle of the binary. It is only presented in the form of a story that unfolds temporally: first the natives addressed the fish, next the fish turned to the southerly. But what we really have here is information about a principle.

          And here is a clinical illustration to show how useful it is to extract the principle that is represented in  the narrative. A patient tells that he has a, perhaps irrational, fear that once everything will be all right – work, his relations with his partner, the children – cancer is sure to present itself. This is a narrative form of presenting Freud’s pleasure principle: absolute pleasure equals the absence of tension, homeostasis, nirvana, or, in other words: death. The patient fears the narrative effects of the formula, as if the latter took place on the axis of time and will at some point catch up with him. There is no real danger of nirvana breaking out once things at work settle down, but the wish for absolute peace equals the death drive.

The Myth about the Origin of the Cold

The myth about the origin of the cold which we shall now consider offers a good example of how Lévi-Strauss analyzed geographic links between myths to find their meaning:  In the wake of a spell of extreme cold, the shaman of a Peruvian tribe announced the following three groups of tribe members to be guilty: twins, those who were born with a harelip, and those were delivered bottom or feet first, in a breech birth. They had to atone for their sins to save the rest of the tribe. When Lévi-Strauss read this myth he wondered about the connection: Why exactly these three groups? In search of a clue he  went on reading other myths in hopes they would help him understand. In another Peruvian myth, a woman became pregnant from a man who pretended to be her husband. Upon discovering she was pregnant, she rushed to have intercourse with her husband. The myth tells that the twins who were born were the offspring of two fathers, and like their fathers, one was born good, and the other sly. In another myth, from Vancouver, two sisters were given false promises of marriage, leading to the birth out of wedlock of two cousins. Even though these two boys were cousins rather than twins, they are a variation on the mytheme of a pair of fraudulently begotten children. If we look at the Peruvian myth’s reference to harelips, it seems to pick up the Vancouver myth: When a rabbit peeped at the sexual parts of one of the sisters who gave birth out of wedlock, it was punished by being hit on the nose, leading to the hare’s cleft upper lip. The third feature – that of the breech birth – derives from another myth: This myth recounts a case of sibling rivalry, with the twin brothers struggling for the right of primogeniture. It is the brother who is in the greatest rush to be first, who is born feet first. This myth about the twin brothers, Lévi-Strauss (XX) found among the Tupinamba tribe, from the Atlantic coast of Brazil.

This is one example of the methodology Lévi-Strauss used to map a myth. The mythemes “deception”, “peeping”, and “stealing the right of primogeniture” – or “rivalry in the family” – are variations on the breaking of a taboo. The more abstract mytheme is the principle of splitting: twins in the womb, two fathers – one each for each child – and the splitting of the hare’s lip which initiates a splitting of the entire body (Lévi-Strauss, xx). All this imagery shares the concept of splitting, and it runs through all three narratives. What, then, is the shaman’s message to his community if we translate it into the language of logic? The reason for the cold spell lies in division, a split among the group members. And those whose role, in the myth, symbolizes splitting will have to make amends for the taboo’s breach. They will have to heal division. If Lévi-Strauss had not studied myths from the farthest corners of the Americas, the shaman’s instructions would have remained incomprehensible.

Lévi-Strauss constructs the story of the myth out of a whole lot of other myths, rites and rituals, and like him, the psychoanalyst makes sense of the patient by looking at symptoms, dreams, and other expressions of the unconscious. And just like in anthropology these symbols or signifiers will derive from a variety of places, something like this must be the case with the analysand. In psychoanalysis we do something similar when we shift attention to another domain of the patient’s life seeking to find meaning for what remains unintelligible in the original context. For example, a patient was obsessively preoccupied with the thought her husband was cheating. In the absence of any indications, it was a riddle why she was so obsessed. At the same time, she had a sexual fantasy about a man and two women. The fantasy, thus, casts light on why she carries this obsessive thought; she carries it while unaware that she is the one who produces it, and this is the source of her jealousy. Jealousy, then, takes a ride on the pleasure she takes in her fantasy.

Influences on Lévi-Strauss

Like the myths he studied, Lévi-Strauss’s own theory, too, emerged from many different influences. It was not just his natural way of thinking that led him to his insights. He was inspired by the work of many others, not just Freud and Jakobson.

          Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Post-Colonialism

Franz Boas, an American anthropologist of German-Jewish origins, was open about his envy of linguists. Lévi-Strauss met Boas, among the most prominent of US anthropologists of his time, when he arrived in New York as a refugee in 1939. Until then he had been mainly exposed to European colonialist influences. Boas more than once mentioned to his student Lévi-Strauss how he envied linguists; their discipline’s structural nature. Such comments may have sharpened Lévi-Strauss’s attention when, later on, he encountered Jakobson.

          Boas upheld an ethics that honored pluralism and difference. While criticizing ethnocentrism and racism, he did not, like Lévi-Strauss, look for the universal rules under which all human beings are equal, nor the solidarity of language. His object of study was the singularity of specific cultures. Boas’ s tendency was towards the ethnographic more than the anthropological. His inquiry was aimed less toward the essence of human society and more toward the particularity of specific societies. Nevertheless we may say he helped Lévi-Strauss formulate his question: What can we, as anthropologists, learn from linguists?

          Margaret Mead was one of Boas’s star students, and like Lévi-Strauss, she too was strongly influenced by Freud.  Psychoanalysis, said Freud in Civilization and its Discontents (xx),  comes to heal the damage done by civilization. Mead turned western racism upside down. Taking a liberal perspective, she interpreted Freud’s position as western puritanism while idealizing Samoa’s native culture. From her research in Samoa she concluded that members of native cultures are sexually much freer, having to struggle with less sexual frustrations and therefore with less of their fallout. Lacan disagreed with this interpretation of Freud. Freud, he argued, had been thinking of all language-using creatures, which is to say that the sickness from which we suffer is language as such – and not western language alone. Every speaking being, who lives within language, and uses phonemes and signifiers, is cursed and cast out of the paradise of non-mediated reality. Humans dwell no longer in the world of the Real and have to make do with symbolic substitutes. This is the damage done by civilization.

          Durkheim and the Social Collective

In his sociological investigations, Durkheim reached the conclusion that “Protestants commit more suicide than Catholics”. Over and beyond the individual component in someone’s wish to put an end to their life, may there be a more specific cultural effect involved in their choice ?  This was one of the research questions Emile Durkeim formulated. The first to define a social phenomenon as a scientific object, Durkheim is considered the founder of modern sociology.

          The approach to the collective as a type of creature was initiated by Durkheim and transferred into anthropology by means of his admiring nephew, Marcel Mauss. All this formed the background to Lévi-Strauss’s eventual insight that the totem functioned as signifier of the collective. He understood that, like in Durkheim’s approach, the natives, too, treat the collective as an entity.  This helped him decipher kinship relations and myths and how they suggest the interrelations constituting the collective, as well as the links between clans within the tribe, on the one hand, and between tribes on the other.

Marcel Mauss – Social Order and the Individual Unconscious as the Great Other

Mauss had a great impact on Lévi-Strauss. It is from him he took the idea of there being unconscious powers that determine people’s social-cultural behavior. But Mauss seems to have left his marks on Lévi-Strauss emotionally too, communicating his passion. That passion took the shape of a wish to analyze cultural phenomena with the tools and exactitude of linguists. Structuralism, as such, emerged in response to this desire. Lévi-Strauss wrote the introduction to Mauss’s seminal work “The Gift”,  (xx), he learned from him, and eventually eclipsed him.

          Mauss believed that unconscious desires, whose expressions Freud identified in slips of the tongue, symptoms, and dreams, are how the collective affects individuals, who – nevertheless – perceive themselves free of unconscious social influence. It was in this spirit, that Lévi-Strauss analyzed the behaviors of native people, without expecting them to be necessarily aware of their role in the structure. Picking up this line of thought, Lacan defined language as the point of intersection between unconscious desires and the social order behind them. He created the notion of the “big other” or “the Other” which he related to both language as the collective domain  and the personal unconscious.

          At a later point, Lacan added into this equation the psychoanalyst’s position in the transference: The psychoanalyst is the Other in the sense of being ascribed knowledge about the patient’s unconscious. Thus in the psychoanalyst the internal unconscious and the external social collective come together. The psychoanalyst in the clinic represents the authority collective norms have vested in her or him; at the same time, the analyst is believed to have knowledge about the unconscious of the patient who says to himself: “You probably know better than I what’s going on in my mind.” The Other is the unconscious by way of an internal language system guiding the subject’s actions without the latter’s awareness, but at the same time it constitutes the vocabulary the subject owns: the dictionary to which the subject, and not they alone, is exposed. This is the symbolic Other – not the imaginary other who will be a certain persona, usually attributed parental or divine qualities.

De Saussure – On the Arbitrary and the Ability to Stop

Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist, is responsible for highlighting the arbitrariness that became key to Lévi-Strauss’s approach to research. For de Saussure, the signifier is arbitrary – in contrast with onomatopoeia, where representation resembles the thing represented.  The word fizz, for example, corresponds to the sound it represents: bubbling or frothing; the word clink reproduces the sound of glass ringing against glass.  But these cases, and onomatopoeia as a whole, are rare. They really are the exception that proves the rule: The arbitrary signifier does not take its meaning from its sound, but from a context formed by other arbitrary signifiers. This approach enabled Lévi-Strauss not to be distracted: whether the tribes were represented by either the armadillo or the jaguar totem was wholly unrelated to their actual possession of shields or claws. The totems’ meaning inhered in their joint appearance in a myth in which the two tribes make peace: the myth settles the groups’ interrelations in this manner. The jaguar might have been substituted by a tapir – as long as it makes peace with the totem of the other tribe. In de Saussure, we might say, we can identify the beginnings of contextuality in Lacan’s sense. But Lacan is more radical and severs signifier from object. The signifier does not represent the object – it creates the signified. Meaning inheres not in the signified, but in the signifier.

          Another way in which de Saussure was a source of inspiration for Lévi-Strauss, involved the latter’s awareness of the former’s failure, something I mentioned earlier. It was said about Saussure that he was so bent on mapping everything that he got lost in the details and never published his magnum opus. Lévi-Strauss’s nightmare was that a similar fate was awaiting him. At some stage during his research, he realized he had to stop collecting data and start organizing and summarizing them. The result was four thick tomes, the Mythologies, bringing together thousands of key mythemes. Lévi-Strauss could well have continued collecting myths, analyzing and compiling many more such volumes. For us, psychoanalysts, the idea of imposing a halt is important too. A patient may talk ad infinitum, moving between myths, mythemes, and signifiers, and it is up to us, psychoanalysts, when to bring this to a halt and cut the session, or, alternatively, to interpret one idea suggested by the patient’s dream while foregoing others.

References:

Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and its Discontents (J. Strachey,Trans.). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21, pp. 64-145). London: Hogarth Press.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural anthropology (C. Jacobson & B. G. Schoepf, Trans.). Basic Books.

Levi-Strauss, C. (1964). Totemism. London: Merlin Press.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1978). Myth and Meaning. (J. E. Hochberg, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1987). Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss (F. Baker, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1990). The raw and the cooked (J. Weightman & D. Weightman, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1964)