A Psychological Approach to Mythological Figures: Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Orpheus

Human beings are wishful creatures while they cannot fulfill all their wishes. To prove this claim many philosophers, psychologists, historians, myth-writers and critics have much debated. It was Sigmund Freud who through the discussions of ‘Oedipus complex’ and ‘Fear of Castration’, refers to a biological lack. While Jacques Lacan through his ‘Imaginary and Symbolic Orders’ and by the concept of objet petit a, fully argued about lack and endless unfulfilled desires. Fritz Heider, later, represents desire and pleasure as counterparts for the fact the desire is associated with a separation between man and his valued object while in pleasure man is in contact with what he has wished for. In mythology, these notions in a story-like manner and a symbolic way, are brought to the reader. Myths of Tantalus, Sisyphus and Orpheus are portraits of a man who is in struggle with his unfulfilled desires. They all experience a near success but at the very last moment they fail and remain unsatisfied which this makes their punishment and their despair greater and even worse.