myth- Hephaestus- early roots

The Anal Body Ego

Memories from the second year of life, obtained in the analysis of two and three year old children, reveal that a child under two years of age frequently experiences his own falling as being thrown down, being expelled from his mother's arms and picked up again (Kestenberg, Development of the Young Child as Expressed through Bodily Movements, p.756-7)

Compare this to:

Hephaestus was born weak and crippled. Displeased by the sight of her son, Hera threw Hephaestus from Mount Olympus, and he fell for a whole day before landing in the sea. Nymphs rescued him and took him to Lemnos, where the people of the island cared for him. But other versions say Zeus threw him from Mount Olympus after Hephaestus had sided with his mother in a quarrel. This legend says that Hephaestus fell for nine days and nine nights, and he landed on the island of Lemnos. It was on Lemnos where he built his palace and his forges under a volcano.

Then compare this to:

The inveterate enemy of the Olympian gods is described in detail by Hesiod as a vast grisly monster with a hundred serpent heads "with dark flickering tongues" flashing fire from their eyes and a din of voices and a hundred serpents legs, a feature shared by many primal monsters of Greek myth that extend in serpentine or scaly coils from the waist down. The titanic struggle created earthquakes and tsunamis.Once conquered by Zeus' thunderbolts, Typhon was cast into Tartarus, the common destiny of many such archaic adversaries, or he was confined beneath Mount Aetna (Pindar, Pythian Ode 1.19–20; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 370), where "his bed scratches and goads the whole length of his back stretched out against it", or in other volcanic regions, where he is the cause of eruptions. Typhon is thus the chthonic figuration of volcanic forces, as Hephaestus (Roman Vulcan) is their "civilized" Olympian manifestation.

This equivalency will be important for my next big post on how an ego ideal takes its primary fixation point from aggression in regards to masculine subjectivity.

"Typhon –hamstrung, sank to his knees in despair… for miles the whole great earth was enkindled by the blast of heavenly wind"

Notice that Typhon is hamstrung and that a heavenly wind is emitted from him.

"From the waist down he was a tangle of hissing vipers, he had majestic wings, and shaggy hair covered his body"

Here we see an upper vs. lower body split and this would indicate that the legs have chronic tension from the repression of anger involved. From this we get such phrases as 'hopping mad'.