Gynophobia

Abstract: These two articles, "The Sword and Shield of Perseus: Some Mythological Dimensions of the Law" and "Gods and Goddesses of the Quadrant: Some Further Thoughts on the Mythological Dimensions of the Law" constitute a study in Psychoanalytic Jurisprudence. Psychoanalytic theory relates human biology to consciousness by clarifying how biological instincts relating to reproduction and survival are manifest in human consciousness in the form of the sexual and the ego drives. Freud drew comparisons between neurosis that arose out of specific psychic conflicts in an individual’s life and collective neuroses such as the fear of death and the Oedipal Complex, using myth as a key to reveal the neurotic dimensions of culture. The mythic structures that constitute religion, for example, manifest the repression of the fear of death and of the sexual drive. Law is the central ideology of social order. The great paradox of social ordering is that while its most basic foundational premise is equality before the law, patriarchy continues to prevail in even the most enlightened societies. At the evolutionary biological level the dialectics of sexual reproduction are manifested in the form of female’s pursuing their reproductive interest in quality by female selection of males, while the reproductive interest of males is in quantity as manifested in strategies to override female choice. These two papers use the structures of classical myth to explore the neurotic foundations of social order as manifested in the dialectics of patriarchy and its opposition as underlying and played out in the law.