Géza Róheim

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

Géza Róheim (1891-1953), a Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist, became the first professor of anthropology at the University of Budapest in 1919 and was active in the psychoanalytical institute of the same city, after having been analyzed by Sándor Ferenczi, one of Freud's closest pupils.

Archetypes of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Psychoanalysis of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

In 1928 Róheim made a field expedition to study natives in Australia from the perspective of psychoanalytic anthropology. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Róheim had to flee to New York, where he spent the rest of his life.

He remained an advocate of the Freudian doctrine of the primal Cyclopean family^[1] and the Oedipus complex, although altering some aspects of it in accordance with his anthropological conclusions. By time, he tended to turn his attention more to the importance of the extended childhood of the human species and its consequences on the human psyche and society.

Primitive Man and Environment

For more purposes than the study of mythology, psychoanalysts have frequently used anthropological sources, though not always sufficiently familiar with that discipline. It is quite refreshing to read someone who was.

Géza Róheim reasons straightforwardly about Freudian concepts and explains them as consequences of biological conditions and not only some mysterious workings of the darker corners of our minds. This can be seen in his 1921 article "Primitive Man and Environment," published in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, where he connects psychoanalytical principles to anthropogeography.

With examples from anthropological reports about natives in Australia and elsewhere, he sets out to show that a number of beliefs are expressions "in the language of unconscious symbolism of the unity which connects human life with Nature."^[2] Therefore, "all myths are true, only we must know the way to read them."^[3]

Some of that reading has to be quite imaginative. Róheim claims that most primitive people unconsciously regarded the world around them as a second womb, which he explains: "If man is born with the concept of space it is natural to assume that he must have derived it from his own prenatal experience."^[4] This influenced mythology:

The cosmogonical myths which relate how in the beginning Father Sky was in close embrace with Mother Earth so that there was no room left for their children, and how these lifted the sky to its present height, contain (besides the Oedipus-complex) an "auto-symbolical" or "functional" account of the origin of the space concept which was first received in the cramped position of the embryo, the experiences of which were then projected into the universe.

This prenatal perception of space Róheim also finds expressed in the use of caves as living quarters, which were "unconscious projections of the womb into the environment,"^[5] and in the fetus-like position of buried corpses. The latter he explains as a belief in reincarnation, so that the dead were returned to a womb of sorts in order to be reborn.^[6] For the same reason, some tribes buried their dead at the place of their birth. Mother Earth was the symbolic substitute for the real mother.

He moves on to discuss the spatial concepts of high and low in the human mind and culture. Some are above and looked up to, often the elders whose privileges stem from "an infantile mental attitude towards the father."^[7] Children look up to their fathers, literally, and this sense of inferiority remains with them. Furthermore, "these same concepts radiate into space and call forth the concepts of a heaven and an underworld (Hell)."

This division of heaven and hell is also expressed in the body of the human being, from the head to the lower cavities.^[8] It can also be seen as the conscious personality and the depth of the unconscious. All is due to the psychological mechanism of reversal:

It is not certain regions of the human body that are under the influence of cosmic regions, it is rather the organism of man which determines, not of course the real state of things in the universe, but man's ideas of the Above and the Below.

Although not all of his conclusions are equally convincing, Róheim's ambition to include the physical basics of the human being and the environment, when explaining the mysteries of the human mind, is commendable.

For example, it is far more conceivable that children's perception of their parents is based on such obvious things as their superior size and might, than oedipal urges. Only by growing up to equal measures are the children able to break free of this inferiority, and it is precisely what they eventually do.

But childhood certainly makes its marks in the memory and the emotions. It is well known to play an important part in how we perceive and relate to the world also as adults.

The Eternal Ones of the Dream

Géza Róheim made frequent use of the Australian natives in his writing on psychoanalytic anthropology, both before and after his field work with them in 1928. Doing so again in 1945 with The Eternal Ones of the Dream, he used both his own findings and those of other writers, who were almost exclusively anthropologists. The book's subtitle is self-explanatory: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Australian Myth and Ritual.

The myths and rituals interpreted by Róheim are the ones relating to the initiation of boys into manhood, where circumcision is at the core. All through the book, the myths are described as subordinate to the rites and lacking meaning outside of their ritual context. By the myths associated with them, the rites are confirmed and explained. Therefore, Róheim's interpretation of those myths is closely limited to their ritual functions. They are interdependent.

His psychoanalytical understanding of these rites and the myths connected to them is the male rivalry described in the Oedipus complex. The boys are removed from the embrace of their mothers to join with the men, at the same time as they are forcefully intimidated, so as not to fight them. The circumcision is a symbol of castration and therefore a threat of it. At the same time, the procedure is in itself a symbolic separation from the mothers.

Róheim's analysis is complicated and the particulars of the rites and their myths are given more than one symbolic meaning, sometimes contradictory. Usually, he sees one meaning more or less apparent to the natives and another unconscious meaning hiding beneath it, of which they are not aware.

Through his text there is a mixture of psychoanalytic and anthropological or anthropogeographical perspectives on the customs of the Australian natives, which are at best possible to see as parallel. But they often raise the question of how far Róheim would come if he had omitted psychoanalysis completely in his interpretation. In such passages of the text, he tends to make more sense.

For example, he explains that the Murngin (nowadays called Yolngu) population of north-eastern Australia thrives in the dry period and suffers in the extremely rainy one. It is mirrored in their mythology: "The great primeval flood is merely a dramatic enlargement of what takes place every year."^[9] The symbolism created from these annual changes reflects the opposites:

Myth therefore identifies the season of plenty with the nourishing mother and the season of scarcity with the aggressive, copulating father.

For the natives of Central Australia, on the other hand, the situation is reversed. They find food in the rainy period but starve in the dry one. Accordingly, they do not celebrate the drought but the rain, and welcome the lightning as a promise of rain, where "the waters are represented by a swallowing and yet beneficial serpent."^[10]

That makes sense, without any unconscious interference. What is beneficial is celebrated, and what is detrimental is feared. No need for Oedipus.

As for the intriguing title of Róheim's book, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, it is derived from the Aboriginal word altjira, which means, "(a) a dream, (b) beings who appear in the dream, and (c) a narrative with a happy end (folk-tale)."^[11] It refers to the distant past of the dream time, when the mythical ancestors lived.

The concept of the distant past as a dream time is ingenious. We can all relate to it, even in our short individual lifetimes. Distant memories get hidden in a thickening mist, becoming more and more like dreams, which are difficult to remember after waking up. It is a poetic description, and yet spot on. Also, it focuses on the true big mystery of the mind — its ability to create dreams.

What the expression is likely to suggest is that the distant past, which no one alive now has experienced, is as elusive and uncertain as a dream. To Róheim, though, it represents a denial of both mothers and fathers:

The eternal ones of the dream are those who have had no mother; they originated of themselves. Their immortality is a denial of separation anxiety. In their origin myths fully-formed spirit children emerge from pouches carried by the ancestors. In one sense this is a denial of fatherhood (Oedipus complex) but in another sense a denial of motherhood, with the mythical being and the pouch replacing the mother.^[12]

This mythical component of the eternals is connected to the problems of dealing with growing up and the illusion of living forever:

In the eternal ones of the dream it is we who deny decay and aggression and object-loss, and who guard eternal youth and reunion with the mother.^[13]

That might be true as well, although Róheim has not really proven it. Our inescapable death is a complication for us all, and has been so for as long as it has been known to our species. It has infiltrated every mythology and ritual, regardless of their pronounced subject or purpose. Still, neither Oedipus nor his mother and father are necessary to explain it.

Always Oedipus

Were it not for Róheim's persistent return to the Oedipus complex in just about every explanation of myth, ritual, and religion, his discussion on those matters would have been less absurd. But he seemed unable to reach any other conclusion, staying loyal to Freud's paradigm even past his master's death, as can be seen in his 1945 book The Eternal Ones of the Dream, discussed above.

Róheim also found the Oedipus complex behind the very origin of religion and the gods, even the formation of society:

The Oedipus complex is not a "survival" of the primal-horde but, on the contrary, the primal-horde itself is to be regarded as an early form of social organization arising from the eternally human Oedipus complex.^[14]

The reason for this, according to Róheim, is the extended duration of human childhood, and the series of libidinal traumata it has to endure for so long. Therefore, he is confident to assume that mankind evolved through the repression and sublimation of infantile traumata. This extended infancy also explains our need for supernatural beings, both demons and benevolent spirits:^[15]

In other words, demons originate because the parents are not as evil as they appear to the child in the light of the primal scene, and doubles and benevolent spirits originate because the parents are not as good as sublimation would have them. The first step denied reality, the second accepted it.

Summing up clearly and precisely Christian dogma, he is well aware of the fact that its concept of religion is far from the only one in the world:

The idea of a benevolent and omnipotent father, of a great creator in the sky, who takes care of his children if they behave well and punishes them for sinful conduct, and the notion of a future world in which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished, have not been evolved by such people as the Central Australians and cannot be regarded as the only religion mankind has ever had.^[16]

Yet, he uses the same Oedipus recipe to explain them all. The difference he sees is that civilization has increased the repression of natural urges, and his wording indicates that it is not completely fortunate:

Unluckily however we have a superego in our mental makeup, a principle in us that is opposed to life and pleasure, and as mankind grows in age it renounces more and more of the original impulses.^[17]

Róheim sees it as death claiming its own. Still, it is not all dark:

But the pendulum sways to and fro and in Christianity we have a creed in which God and religion are equated with love, that is, with Eros in its sublimated aspects.

A couple of years before his death, he wrote the essay "The Panic of the Gods," in which he argued again for the Oedipus complex manifesting in mythology, even being the cause of it. He was nothing if not persistent. He swiftly dismissed alternative theories, such as those in anthropology and Jungian psychology,^[18] ending the text with this conclusion:

Myth is created by the individual: the group only rewrites it, modifies it, etc.: first taking shape in the form of a dream, the myth reflects a conflict in the development of every individual — that of growing up; hence the hero of the story is genital libido.^[19]

It is true that any myth must initially have begun with the imagination of one individual, but it would have reached nowhere without the adaption — and modifications — in the society where it was transmitted. And there are so many myths with very different plots and characters, they cannot all be explained with the same simple formula.

Actually, just like his teacher Freud, Róheim fails to prove that the Oedipal complex is at the root of any one of them. But they were too stubborn to even seriously and fairly consider other theories. There must be a term in Freudian psychopathology for such behavior.

Notes

A primal herd consisting of but one adult male with several female mates, where other males are expelled at a young age, as suggested by James Jasper Atkinson. Lang & Atkinson 1903, p. 230. ↑
Géza Róheim, "Primitive Man and Environment," The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, volume II:2 1921, p. 158. The italics are his. ↑
Ibid., p. 177. ↑
Ibid., p. 163, footnote. ↑
Ibid., p. 164. ↑
Ibid., pp. 166f. ↑
Ibid., p. 175. ↑
Ibid., pp. 177f. ↑
Géza Róheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Australian Myth and Ritual, New York 1945, p. 245. ↑
Ibid., p. 247. ↑
Ibid., p. 210. ↑
Ibid., p. 222. ↑
Ibid., pp. 249f. ↑
"Primitive High Gods," Géza Róheim, The Panic of the Gods and Other Essays, New York 1972, p. 108. Originally published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. 3 no. 1, 1934. ↑
Ibid., pp. 117f. ↑
"Animism and Religion," ibid., pp. 121f. Originally published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. 1, 1932. ↑
Ibid., p. 168. ↑
"The Panic of the Gods," ibid., pp. 218f. Originally published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1, 1952. ↑
Ibid., p. 220. ↑

Freudians on Myth and Religion

This text is an excerpt from my book Psychoanalysis of Mythology: Freudian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in February, 2026.

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