A New Look at Freud on Myth: Reanalyzing the Star-Husband Tale

Author(s): Michael P. Carroll

Source: Ethos, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 189-205
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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A
at

Freud

New

Look

on

Myth:

Reanalyzing
the Star-Husband Tale
MICHAELP. CARROLL
Because the distinction between "myth" and "fairy tale" is difficult
to establish with certainty, it is hardly surprising when a theoretical
perspective developed in one area is applied to the other. For example, although that variant of structural analysis associated with
Levi-Strauss (1969, 1973) and Leach (1969) was originally developed
in connection with the study of myth, it has since been applied to
the study of fairy tales (Hammel 1972). But what is surprisinggiven the difficulty of drawing a sharp distinction between myth and
fairy tale -is to find that there are some theoretical perspectives that
are used quite successfully in one area but that are used not at all in
the other. For example, a theoretical perspective often used in the
study of myth is a Durkheimian perspective that sees the structure of
myth as reflecting the structure of society (Young 1970; Swanson
1976), while a psychoanalytic perspective is very popular in the
study of fairy tales (Bettelheim 1977; Elms 1977). But psychoanalytic interpretations of myth are (at least today) quite rare, as are
Durkheimian interpretations of fairy tales.
The goal of this article is to reduce this imbalance somewhat by
developing and testing a psychoanalytic explanation for a cycle of
myths that has been well-studied (called the Star-Husband cycle) using a variety of nonpsychoanalytic perspectives.
MICHAELP. CARROLLis an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Univer-

sity of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

189

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ETHOS

FREUD ON THE ORIGINS OF MYTH

To say that psychoanalytic interpretations of myth are today quite

rare is not to say that this has always been the case. Freud himself,
for instance, often made reference to the myths found in preliterate
cultures. Unfortunately, his thinking on such myths was somewhat
confused; he developed two quite separate arguments relating to the
origin of myth.
Most of the discussion presented in both Totem and Taboo
(Freud 1918) and Moses and Monotheism (Freud 1967) sees religion
(the general category under which Freud included myth) as reflecting traumatic events in the early evolutionary history of a society. To
take what is perhaps his most well-known argument in this regard,
Freud'(1918) argued that at the "primal horde" stage of social evolution, the sons-jealous of their father's sexual privileges-rose in
revolt and killed him. Driven by their guilt, they eventually came to
venerate their father in the form of a totem ancestor. In this way
Freud accounted for the origin of totemism.
But to account for the maintenance of totemic beliefs over
generations, he was forced to postulate that the unconscious
memory of the original patricide was somehow transmitted
genetically from one generation to the next. It is obvious that few investigators today would accept a theory (like the one hypothesized by
Freud) that relies so heavily upon such a Lamarckian mechanism.
Nevertheless, Freud's "evolutionary" hypothesis should not obscure
the fact that he also developed a second, quite separate, hypothesis
concerning the origin of religion.
In a number of places, but most clearly in The Future of an Illusion (1961), Freud argued that the content of religious beliefs in a
society reflects the early childhood experiences of the members of
that society. Why is God a male? Because the powerful figure that
we identify as God when we are adults comes to take on the
character of the most powerful figure in our childhood, our father
(cf. Freud 1961:24). As long as the childhood experiences of the
members of a society are relatively homogeneous from one generation to the next (a situation that obtains in many preliterate
societies), then it is perfectly legitimate (from within the Freudian
perspective) to explain the content of the myths found in a society in
terms of the shared childhood experiences of that society's members.

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FREUDIAN INTERPRETATION OF STAR-HUSAND TALE

191

In contrast to Freud's "evolutionary" hypothesis, this second

hypothesis concerning the origin of religious belief has been more
favorably received, and in fact applications of this second hypothesis
have received a moderate degree of empirical support (see, for instance, Spiro and D'Andrade 1967). There is certainly no denying
that "psychoanalytic anthropology," generally, is an established
subdiscipline (for a review of recent research in this area, see Gehrie
1977).
But if we focus specifically upon "myth," then it is clear that
psychoanalytic interpretations of myth are not today in vogue
among anthropologists. This is not because anthropology has ignored Freud's view of myth. On the contrary, between 1920 and
1950 there were several very visible attempts by anthropologists to
develop a Freudian perspective on myth. The most well-known of
these attempts, of course, was the one developed by Malinowski.
Keep in mind that Malinowski developed two separate hypotheses
concerning myth. The first (presented most clearly in Malinowski
1954) was the familiar "charter hypothesis," which argues that the
function of myth is to legitimate existing social arrangements (to explain, for instance, why one clan takes precedence over another in
various matters). But the second (presented in Malinowski
1955:81-120) was borrowed directly from Freud: myths reflect sentiments that are generated by recurrent social situations and that,
for some reason, must be repressed. Malinowski did differ from
Freud in several ways, however. Where Freud argued that the
Oedipal conflicts he described were universal, Malinowski argued
that the conflicts and sentiments experienced by individuals would
depend upon the way in which their family life was organized.
Specifically, he argued that the nature of life in a matrilineal culture,
like the one he found in the Trobriands, would generate conflicts
and sentiments different from those that characterized the Viennese
families studied by Freud. Nevertheless, in demonstrating that
Trobriand myths reflect repressed sentiments generated by recurrent social situations found within Trobriand culture, Malinowski
(1955:237) quite explicitly felt that he was validating the general
thrust of the Freudian argument.
Apart from Malinowski, Geza R6heim is probably the other anthropologist most associated with a psychoanalytic approach to
myth. During the 1930s and 1940s, R6heim several times used a

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ETHOS

Freudian perspective to interpret various myths, mainly those he

himself had gathered from various Australian aboriginal cultures
(see, for instance, the collections of essays in R6heim 1950, 1972).
Nevertheless, the psychoanalytic perspective on myth pioneered
by Malinowski and R6heim never really established itself in anthropology. If contemporary investigators discuss Malinowski's work
on myth, the discussion is almost always concerned only with his
charter hypothesis (see, for instance, the extended discussion of
Malinowski on myth found in Kirk 1974:59-64). If Malinowski's
connection with Freud is mentioned at all, it is usually in the context
of saying that he falsified Freud's assertion that the Oedipal situation was universal. R6heim has probably fared even worse than
Malinowski. Though a few devoted disciples did continue to pursue
a Freudian perspective on myth along the lines suggested by R6heim
(cf. the collection of essays in Muensterberger and Axelrad 1964),
most of those who are today concerned with the study of myth simply make no mention of Roheim's work.
Why did the application of psychoanalytic principles to the study
of myth lead to such a theoretical dead-end? Part of the answer is
undoubtedly that the anthropological study of myth itself went into
a decline during the 1940s and the 1950s. But even with the
resurgence of anthropological interest in myth that started in the
1960s (a resurgence due in large part to the work of Levi-Strauss and
his structuralist coworkers), few investigators in this area have looked
to Freud for inspiration.
It is of course impossible to say with certainty why so few have
picked up upon the early work by Freud, Malinowski, and R6heim,
but several plausible explanations come easily to mind. First,
Freud's views on social evolution have now been discredited in the
eyes of most anthropologists, and this has probably tended to
discredit all the hypotheses presented in Totem and Taboo (including those that had nothing to do with social evolution). Second,
Freud mimicked Frazier in that he presented his ethnographic data
in bits and pieces, depending upon the point he wanted to make.
Since almost any argument can be supported if the investigator is
free to pick and choose from among the ethnographic data in this
way, most anthropologists probably feel that Freud never really did
provide solid empirical support for his arguments. Freud and Freudians have also been faulted for presenting their ethnographic data
in such close association with their theoretical arguments that it is

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impossible to separate out "data" from "theoretical interpretation"

and so determine if the data is capable of being explained in other
ways. Kroeber (1939:450), for instance, argued that much of the
very rich ethnographic data presented by R6heim was worthless to
nonpsychoanalytic anthropologists for this very reason. Finally, the
whole idea of arguing that "dreams" and "myths" are built up using
the same associations and are generated by similar processes probably makes many anthropologists uneasy. In one early review of
Freud, for instance, Radin (1929:24-25) singled out Freud's failure
to convincingly establish an equivalence between dreams and myth
as the single most important theoretical flaw in Totem and Taboo. I
suspect too that most anthropologists probably infer (however incorrectly) that in equating myths and dreams Freud is arguing that
myths are produced by something like a "group mind" in the same
way that individual minds produce individual dreams, and therefore reject Freud because they find the notion of "group mind"
unacceptable.
If all of this is correct, then it suggests that anyone who wishes to
revitalize the Freudian approach to myth must do at least two
things. The first is to carefully disassociate Freud's view that myths
are projective systems that reflect repressed sentiments generated by
recurring social situations from other parts of his theory (such as his
"evolutionary" views on myth). The second is to test the assertions
about myth that are derivable from a Freudian perspective with
ethnographic data that has not been collected by someone with a
Freudian bias. The first of these two things has already been done;
the remainder of this article will be concerned with doing the second.
THE STAR-HUSBAND

TALE

In a now-classic article, Stith Thompson (1965) presented 84 versions of a myth - labeled the Star-Husband Tale - found in a variety
of North American Indian cultures.' Thompson himself was concerned with (1) reconstructing the original ("archetypal") form of
the myth, and (2) pinpointing the original myth's geographical
origins. In this section, I am going to take Thompson's conclusions
1

Thompson lists 86 different stories but concludes (1965:455) that two of these are not
really versions of the Star-Husband Tale.

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ETHOS

with regard to these questions as given, and proceed to develop a

psychoanalytic explanation for certain features of this myth.
After considering the various traits present and absent in the versions of the myth that he had gathered together, Thompson concludes that the original form of the myth was:
Two girls sleeping out in the open wish for two stars to be their husbands. The girls
are taken to the skyworld where they find themselves married to these stars, now
taken to be men. The women discover a hole in the sky and through this hole descend back to earth on a rope.2

Several different investigators have developed explanations to account for various aspects of the Star-Husband Tale, the most recent
of these being Levi-Strauss (1968:185-224), Young (1970), and
Swanson (1976). In a review of all the work done on the StarHusband Tale, Young (1978) points out that all three of these
authors adopt a Durkheimian position in that all three see this myth
as reflecting something about social organization. (The three
analyses do differ, of course, in that each author focuses upon different aspects of the myth and different aspects of social organization.) In any case, as far as I know, there is as yet no explicitly
psychoanalytic explanation of this particular myth.
How would a Freudian begin to analyze the Star-Husband Tale?
Since Freud very often pointed out that the symbolism to be found
in myths was very similar to the symbolism to be found in dreams
(see for example, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1976), the most obvious procedure is to analyze this myth as Freud would analyze a
dream.
To anyone who has read The Interpretation of Dreams, the
feature of this myth that should stand out immediately is the up and
down activity that it involves (i.e., the movement to the sky-world
and back). Climbing up and down (climbing up and down a flight
of stairs, for instance) was taken by Freud (1976:484) to be an obvious allusion to sexual intercourse, and I therefore take sexual intercourse to be the underlying concern of this myth. But if the Star-

2 In
Thompson's reconstructed archetype, the discovery of the skyhole is associated with
the breaking of a taboo that had been put upon the girl or girls in the skyworld. But because
both Dundes (1965) and Rich (1971) have questioned the inclusion of the "brokentaboo" trait
in the archetype, I have not included it here.

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Husband Tale is concerned with sexual intercourse, who are the individuals involved?
Consider that the myth concerns females who wish to mate with
men who are superior to them in a spatial sense. Taking Freud's
(1976:391-392) assertion that a high spatial position is often an allusion to a high social position, and combining this with his general
argument that the origin of myth is to be found in some type of
childhood experience, we come to the conclusion that the myth is in
the end concerned with females who want to have sexual intercourse
with the one male who was most clearly their social superior during
their respective childhoods, namely, their fathers. In short, the StarHusband Tale reflects a daughter's desire to have an incestuous relationship with her father.
Of course, a common critique of Freudian interpretations is that
they are impossible to falsify; that no matter what the data, a committed Freudian will read into that data whatever he or she wants to
see. In this particular case, however, it is possible to derive some
predictions that are falsifiable and that can be tested with quantitative data. But before deriving these, it is worth reviewing Freud's
theory relating to the resolution of the Oedipal situation among
females.
Unlike his treatment of the Oedipal conflict among males (which
was left relatively unchanged, once formulated), Freud's position on
how females resolved this same conflict was changed several times.
His final position (and the one to be used here) is presented in
several of Freud's works (1973, 1977a, 1977b).
Freud argued that the daughter's first sexual attachment (like the
son's) would be to the mother. Eventually, the daughter would come
to perceive the "anatomical distinction between the sexes" (namely,
that she lacked a penis), would come to feel that this lack put her at
a great disadvantage in the enjoyment of sexual pleasure (i.e., the
diffuse sense of physical pleasure produced by manipulation of the
genitals), and finally, would come to blame this lack of a penis upon
her mother. This in turn would lead to a rejection of the mother as a
sexual object, and the daughter would form a sexual attachment to
the one individual whom she feels might provide her with the penis
that she lacks, this individual being her father. After a while, this
desire for a penis from the father will be converted into a wish for a
child from the father (in particular, a male child that will have the
penis that the daughter covets). To understand what happens next,

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it is necessary to contrast what has happened so far with the

daughter to what typically happens with the son.
The son's first sexual attachment is also to the mother, but eventually the son comes to view the father as a sexual rival and so comes
to fear castration by the father. This leads the son to repress his
desire for the mother (which differs considerably from the case of
the daughter, who rejects her sexual attachment to the mother). To
aid in this repression, the son will identify with the father, as such an
identification allows him (the son) to introject the father's authority,
that is, to turn the father's authority in upon himself in order to
force himself to effect the repression of his sexual attachment to the
mother. Thus, the son ends up with a repressed desire for the
mother (which comes out in later life as a sexual desire for women in
general) and an identification with his father.
But what happens to the daughter? At the point in the process
where we left her, she had a sexual attachment to her father. But
there is nothing akin to the son's fear of castration that would force
the daughter to repress this sexual attachment to the father, and
therefore this attachment remains strong. As to identification,
Freud simply assumes that purely constitutional factors (by which he
meant innate tendencies) would lead the daughter to identify with
her mother. Freud further assumes that the existence of a general
taboo against father-daughter incest (a taboo that he takes as given)
will insure that the daughter eventually gives up the hope of having
sexual intercourse and a child with her father. Instead, the daughter
converts her attachment to her father into a sexual attachment to
men generally.
But the fact remains that the daughter's sexual attachment to the
father has never been strongly repressed (as was the son's attachment
to the mother), and for Freud this meant that a daughter's sexual
desire for her father would always be exceedingly likely to burst into
her conscious mind in some form. For Freud, this explained why
almost all his female patients said that as young girls they had been
seduced by their fathers. Freud (1973:153-154) came to believe that
these recollections were less reports of what had actually happened
and were more fantasy reconstructions that expressed the daughter's
strong sexual attachment to her father.
For the son then, the key event is the fear of castration. Although
Freud did not concern himself with cross-cultural variations in family structure, it is clear that such variations will affect this key

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variable. For instance, in societies where there is very little contact

between a son and his father and in which the son spends much time
alone with the mother, the son is presumably less likely to fear
castration. In any case, for some attempts to expand Freud's
original argument by showing how cross-cultural variations in family structure will affect the son's response to the Oedipal situation,
the reader is referred not only to the already cited work by
Malinowski, but also to Stephens (1962) and Carroll (1978).
But for the daughter the key event is the discovery that she lacks a
penis, and this lack is universal. Hence, while the outcome of the
Oedipal situation for the son might vary from culture to culture,
depending upon the type of family structure that prevails, the outcome for females (assuming, of course, that Freud's theory is correct) should be relatively invariant. The widespread distribution of
the Star-Husband Tale can therefore be attributed to the fact that
this myth expresses a cross-culturally invariant desire on a
daughter's part for sexual intercourse with her father.
SOME QUANTITATIVE

TESTS

At this point I wish to introduce a methodological hypothesis that

will allow the argument just developed to be tested in a relatively
precise manner. The hypothesis is that those cultures that have had

a myth (like the Star-Husband Tale) the longest are also likely to be
the cultures that possess those versions of the myth that most clearly
express the myth's underlying theme (that theme being, in this case,
a daughter's desirefor sexual intercourse with her father).3

The argument that leads to this hypothesis is fairly straightforward. It starts by assuming that Freud is correct in arguing that
religious beliefs generally and myths in particular are projections of
the repressed sentiments prevalent in a culture. But if the individuals in a culture do project their repressed sentiments onto the

3 In his
study of fairy tales, Hammel (1972:15) has proposed a similar hypothesis, though
for reasons quite different from my own. Hammel is concerned with the underlying structural
contrasts (along the lines of Levi-Strauss) found in fairy tales and assumes that the human
mind has an innate preference for thinking in terms of such contrasts. This innate preference
(in and of itself) will insure that as the tales are told and retold, those changes that are introduced will make the underlying contrasts more explicit. For this reason (he concludes), later
versions of a tale should more clearly express the structural contrasts underlying a tale than
do earlier versions.

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content of their myths, then this presumably means that individduals-however

unconsciously-will
continually shape the content
of their myths so as to make the details of those myths reflect those
underlying sentiments. In short, this suggests that there should be a
continuing tendency in the minds of the individuals in a culture to
change their myths so as to make the sentiment underlying these
myths even more explicit. Remember too that the myths in a
preliterate culture are transmitted orally, thus providing the
members of that culture with opportunity for changing their myths.
All of this leads me to conclude that the more a given myth is told
and retold over the generations in a culture, the more likely the
details of the myths will be changed as to make the repressed sentiment underlying the myth more explicit. I therefore expect to find
those versions of a myth that most clearly reflect the myth's underlying concern in those cultures that have had the greatest opportunity
to introduce changes, that is, I expect to find these versions in those
cultures that have had the myth for the longest period of time.
In any case, if Thompson (1965:455) is correct in his conclusion
that the Star-Husband Tale originated somewhere on the Plains,
and given that all of the versions of the Tale listed by Thompson
were gathered at more or less the same time (just before or just after
1900), this would mean that the Plains tribes had had the myth for
the longest period of time.
What all of this suggests is that if the Freudian argument that has
been developed here (namely, that the Star-Husband is ultimately
concerned with a daughter's sexual desire for her father) is correct,
zf the methodological hypothesis given above is correct, and if
Thompson is correct in arguing that the Tale originated on the
Plains, then the following should be true:
Plains tribes should be more likely than tribes located elsewhere to possess those versions of the Star-Husband Tale that most clearly express the daughter's-sexualattachment-to-her-father theme.

Failure to find empirical support for this prediction would suggest

that any or all of the assumptions we have made in deriving it are incorrect. But if the data support the prediction, then I take this as
providing at least some support for all these assumptions, notably
including the one derived from Freud's argument.
One test of this prediction can be constructed by considering the

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means by which the girls in the tale descend back to earth. By far
the most common means is the discovery of a skyhole and the lowering of a rope through this hole (found in 50 of the 84 versions of the
myth). In four versions the girls are lowered in a basket, with the existence of a rope holding the basket implied; in another four versions
a ladder rather than a rope is lowered through the hole. In 20 versions no skyhole is mentioned, while in the remaining six versions a
skyhole is mentioned; but either the girls simply fall through it or
the means of descent is not clearly specified. What would Freud
think of all this?
In reading Freud (1976) on dreams it is easy to get the impression
that Freud could see phallic imagery behind almost anything. Still,
to be fair to Freud, most of the objects that he took to be "phallic"
were long and narrow. Since a rope or a ladder both have these two
characteristics, these objects (for Freud and thus for us) would have
phallic connotations. Given this, I trust that even the most committed anti-Freudian would agree that the lowering of a rope (or
ladder) through a hole might reasonably be interpreted as a
metaphor for a penis entering a vagina, that is, for sexual intercourse. Since a concern for sexual intercourse between father and
daughter is (by our argument) one of the underlying concerns of the
Star-Husband Tale, we would thus expect:
Prediction 1. Tribes located upon the Plains are more likely than tribes located
elsewhere to have a version of the Star-Husband Tale that includes the lowering of a
rope or a ladder through a skyhole.

The 84 versions of the Tale considered by Thompson were taken

from 44 different tribes, which he groups under eight geographical
headings (Eskimo area, Mackenzie area, North Pacific area,
California area, Plateau area, Plains area, Southeast area, and
Woodland area). Whether or not any of the versions taken from a
given tribe included the "rope (or ladder) through skyhole" trait was
cross-tabulated with the tribe's location (Plains/elsewhere). The
result is presented in Table 1, and is as predicted: Plains tribes were
more likely to have versions of the myth that incorporated this trait
(phi = .36).
Strictly speaking, a test of significance cannot be applied to the
data in Table 1, as such a test requires that the units involved represent independent observations. Given the high degree of cultural

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TABLE 1

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRIBE'S GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION AND WHETHER OR NOT TRIBE

HAS A VERSION OF THE STAR-HUSBAND TALE THAT INCLUDES THE "ROPE (OR LADDER)
THROUGH SKYHOLE" TRAIT

Tribe has a version of the myth that includes the "rope (or
ladder) through skyhole" trait

Tribe's
location

Plains
elsewhere

yes

no

14
17

1
12

(phi = .36, p = .02)

diffusion among the tribes in Thompson's sample (after all, that

such diffusion took place is the whole point of the Thompson
analysis), this requirement is probably not met. Still, if the observations were independent, then the result would be statistically significant (p = .02, using Fisher's Exact Test, one-tailed).
A slightly different way to test the argument leading to Prediction
1 would be to take the individual versions of the myth as the units of
analysis rather than the individual tribes. The result, however, is exactly the same: 86 percent (31 of 36) of the versions taken from
Plains tribes incorporated the "rope or ladder through skyhole"
trait, while only 52 percent (25 of 48) of the versions taken from
tribes located elsewhere incorporated this trait.
But although this data is consistent with the Freudian argument,
there is another, simpler explanation for the same data that I cannot rule out. According to Thompson's reconstruction, the "rope
through the skyhole" trait was part of the original version of the
Star-Husband Tale. If (as Thompson also asserts) the original version of the myth did originate somewhere on the Plains, than a simple process of cultural diffusion would account for the fact that this
trait is more likely to be found in versions of the myth held by Plains
tribes.
A more fruitful test of the Freudian argument would involve looking at traits which (according to Thompson's reconstruction) were
not part of the original version of the myth, that is, at traits that
were added at a later point.
Consider, for instance, the means used by the girls in the myth to
ascend to the skyworld. In Thompson's reconstructed archetype,

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they are simply transported there in their sleep; no other method of

ascent is mentioned. "Transportation during sleep" is in fact the
method of ascent mentioned in 42 of the 84 versions of the myth.
Among the remaining versions, the girls ascend by following a porcupine up a tree that magically stretches from the earth to the
skyworld (found in 19 versions of the myth), by means of a feather
(found in two versions), by being carried in a basket (found in one
version), by means of a whirlwind (found in two versions) and by being carried by the hair. Finally, the means of ascent is not specified
at all in 17 versions.
If we again assume that anything long and narrow tends to have
phallic connotations, then such connotations are evoked by several
of these methods of ascent. The methods involving "hair" and "a
feather" are examples. But perhaps the best case of phallic imagery
can be made in those cases where the ascent involves both a tree that
stretches to the skyworld and a porcupine (an animal noted for its
long, stiff quills).
In any case, if the Star-Husband Tale really is concerned with a
daughter's longing for sexual intercourse with her father, then
phallic imagery would be quite appropriate, and the previous argument leads us to expect that this imagery should be strongest in
those versions of the myth taken from those tribes that had had the
myth the longest:
Prediction 2. Tribes located upon the Plains are more likely than tribes located
elsewhere to have a version of the Star-Husband Tale in which the method of ascent
involves phallic imagery.

Table 2 tests this prediction by cross-tabulating whether or not a

tribe has a version of the myth in which the ascent to the skyworld
involves phallic imagery (i.e., whether or not the method of ascent
involves the use of hair, a feather or both a porcupine and a
stretched tree) with the tribe's location. The data support the

prediction (phi = .59, p = .004).

Looking at individual versions of the myth rather than at tribes,

the data still supports the argument: 58 percent (21 of 36) of the versions taken from Plains tribes associate the ascent with phallic imagery, while this imagery is found in only two percent (one of 48) of
the versions taken from tribes located elsewhere.
Finally, if we infer phallic imagery only in those cases where the

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202

ETHOS
TABLE 2

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRIBE'S GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION AND WHETHER OR NOT TRIBE

HAS A VERSION OF THE STAR-HUSBAND TALE IN WHICH THE ASCENT TO THE SKYWORLD
INVOLVES PHALLIC IMAGERY*

Tribe's
location

Plains
elsewhere

Tribe has a version of the myth in which the ascent to

the skyworld involves phallic imagery
yes

no

8
1

7
28

* Phallic
imagery is taken to occur when the ascent involves hair, a feather, or a porcupine
and a tree that stretches to the skyworld. See the discussion in text.
(phi = .59, p = .004)

strongest case for such imagery can be made (i.e., in the case where
ascent involves following a porcupine up a tree that stretches to the
skyworld), the argument presented here receives its strongest support yet: of the eight tribes having a version of the myth that incorporated the stretching tree/porcupine trait, all were Plains tribes.
At least one final prediction is possible and it concerns an element
that should be in the myth if the Freudian interpretation developed
here is correct, but which we have so far not mentioned. Remember
that in Freud's theory, the daughter originally turns to her father in
the hope that he will provide her with a penis, a wish that later converts to a wish for a male child. The daughter's desire for sexual intercourse with the father derives from this wish for a child from the
father. All of this suggests that if indeed the Star-Husband Tale is
concerned with the daughter's sexual desire for her father, then
somehow the wish for a male child from the father should also be expressed in the myth. The most obvious way to do this would be to
have a son born to the women in the myth who marry StarHusbands, and in fact a son is born to one or both of the women in
39 of the 84 versions of the tale.
Using the same reasoning that led to the derivation of our
previous two predictions leads us to:
Prediction 3. Tribes located upon the Plains are more likely than tribes located
elsewhere to have a version of the Star-Husband Tale in which a son is born to one
or both of the women who marry Star-Husbands.

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FREUDIAN INTERPRETATION OF STAR-HUSAND TALE

203

Table 3 indicates that this prediction is supported (phi = .50, p =

.004).
The result holds up even when looking at the individual versions
of the myth: 78 percent (28 of 36) of the versions taken from Plains
tribes involve the birth of a son, while this is true of only 23 percent
(11 of 48) of the versions taken from tribes located elsewhere.
CONCLUSION
My overall goal has been to revitalize the tradition that investigators like Malinowski and R6heim tried to establish-a tradition in which a psychoanalytic perspective is brought to bear upon
the study of myth. The particular interpretation of the StarHusband Tale presented here seems at least as convincing as the
psychoanalytic interpretations of fairy tales that have recently
become so popular. If anything the explanation presented here is
more convincing, in that it can be used to derive predictions that are
falsifiable in principle (after all, it might easily have been the case,
for instance, that the "birth of a son" trait might not have been
more common among the versions of the myth taken from Plains
tribes) but that in fact are supported by the relevant data.
I see no way to devise a "crucial test" that would indicate whether
my explanation is more or less powerful than the Durkheimian explanations of the Star-Husband Tale developed previously by LeviStrauss, Young, and Swanson. In any case, the study of myth is not
so well advanced that it makes much sense to rule out one explanation in favor of another; presumably different types of explanation
TABLE 3
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRIBE'S GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION AND WHETHER OR NOT TRIBE
HAS A VERSION OF THE STAR-HUSBAND TALE THAT INCLUDES THE "BIRTH OF A SON" TRAIT

Tribe's
location

Tribe has a version of the myth that includes the "birth of

a son" trait

Plains
elsewhere

yes

no

12
8

3
21

(phi = .50, p = .003)

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204

ETHOS

can be used to account for different aspects of any particular myth.

I do believe, however, that a psychoanalytic perspective can lead to
certain insights that are perhaps not discoverable using other
methods of myth analysis. For this reason, those interested in the anthropological study of myth would do well to dust off the works of
Freud, Malinowski, and R6heim and to give them a second look.

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