What is psychoanalytic myth, today? The answer to this question is not simple, for in speaking of psychoanalysis we are necessarily drawn into a series of representations that concern us, each of us. And psychoanalytic myth structures and reproduces itself through a variety of media in such a way as to pull us into it even when we do not speak about it explicitly, or, we might say, ‘consciously’. We first need to draw into the open the thought that psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice.

Psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice

Of course, it is a type of speech, but this representational practice operates through the symbolic forms that make our speech possible so as to induct us also, at the very same moment we speak, into the position of a reader. We become, as we speak within psychoanalytic myth, a reader not only of the unconscious lives of others, but of our own speech as it seems to reveal to us something of the secrets that inhabit our own inner lives. This mode of reading, including reading what lies in our own speech, is, at one level, conscious, a consciousness encouraged and facilitated by a psychoanalytic vocabulary that has circulated throughout the world at an incredible rate in the last century.