Per Hage

A Viennese autochtonous hero: Structural duality in Freud’s origin myths What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping. The Book tells us it is no sin to limp. S. Freud, Beyond the pleasure principle. It is... very rare for a mythological system, if it is at all resourceful, not even-tually to exhaust all the possible codings of a single message, even if this is achieved through the apparent inversion of certain signs. C. Levi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked. This paper has a double aim. The first is to provide an interpreta-tion of L6vi-Strauss’s (1963a) statement that Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex should be counted as one more version of the Oedipus myth which is shown to be a model generated by the con-tradiction between the empirical knowledge and a cultural theory of human procreation. Freud’s myths are of some interest for structural analysis since there is clear evidence for the presumed underlying contradiction. This is a case in which an explicit connec-tion can be made &dquo;between the relatively formal myths and the rest of the mental activity&dquo; as Yalman (1967) put it in his discussion of purely formal as opposed to structural analysis. I wish to thank Robert Anderson, Terrence Hayes, and especially Dorwin Cart-wright for their comments on various aspects of this paper. I also wish to thank Pro