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PAGE 106
JONES
family. The tyrant who seeks to destroy the hero is then
most commonly the grandfather, as in the legends of Cyrus,
Gilgam, Perseus, Telephos and others, or the grand-uncle, as
in those of Romulus and Remus and their Greek predecessors,
Amphion and Zethos; less often is he the uncle, as in the
Hamlet legend. When the decomposition is more complete,
the tyrant is not of the same family as the father, though he
may be socially related, as in the case of Abraham whose father
Therachs was the tyrant Nimrod's commander-in-chief; as a
rule the tyrant is in this sub-group a stranger, as in the cases
of Moses and Pharaoh, Feridun and Zohäk, Jesus and Herod,
and others. In the last two instances, and in many others, not
only are the mother and son, but also the father, persecuted by
the tyrant, and we thus reach a still more complex variant, well
represented by the Feridun legend, in which the son adores
his father and avenges him by slaying their common enemy.
The picture of the son as avenger instead of as slayer of the
father therefore illustrates the highest degree of psychological
"repression," in which the true meaning of the story is con-
cealed by the identical mechanism that in real life conceals
"repressed" hostility and jealousy in so many families, namely,
exaggerated solicitude, care and respect. The dutiful Laertes
avenging his murdered father Polonius is probably also an in-
stance of the same stage in the development of the myth.
Suppressed hate towards a father would seem to be adequately
concealed by being thus masked by devotion and desire to
avenge, and Shakspere's modification of the Hamlet legend is
the only instance in which intense "repression" has produced
still further distortion of the hero's attitude; in this legend,
however, the matter is more complicated by the unusual prom-
inence of the love for the mother over the hate for the father,
and by the appearance of other factors such as the relationship
of the tyrant to the father and to the mother.
Not only may the two above-mentioned attributes of the
parent, fatherliness and tyranny, be split off so as to give rise
to the creation of separate figures, but others also. For in-
stance, the power and authority of the parent may be invested
in the person of a king or other distinguished man, who may
be contrasted with the lowly-born father.1 In the present
legend I think it probable that the figure of Polonius may be
thus regarded as resulting from the "decomposition" of the paren-
tal archetype, and as representing a certain group of qualities
which the young not infrequently find an irritating feature in
1This important theme, which is fully dealt with by Freud and
Rank, I have not here discussed, for it does not enter into the present
legend. Abraham (Op. cit., S. 40) has interestingly pointed out the
significance of it in the development of paranoiac delusions.
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