“In psychoanalysis, obsessional thinking is structured as a myth: the obsession takes the prior conflicts of another, and transposes and reorders them, and places them into a mythic structure. It is a psychic repetition of events, most often in his family’s history; an unconscious intergenerational transmission. It uses the obsession to transpose unresolved elements in the father’s history and resolve them in himself. For example, “marrying your mother” is more often not an Oedipal fantasy about a child’s desire, but an obsessional attempt at reworking the father’s history. It is unconscious; he does not know that marrying her is such an attempt, nor why he feels familiarly unsatisfied in the marriage. The fantasy of Odysseus returning, then besting the suitors; first at a technical skill and then in individual combat; collecting all of their weapons––it is an acting out of a play, the obsessive’s individual myth. The trouble is that it is impossible to bring these two stories––history and myth––together; it cannot entirely succeed, one can’t settle the dead father’s old debts by re-enacting them with a new cast. He will inevitably fail at closing the loop; but by trying to make one coincide with the other, he makes a perennially unsatisfying turning maneuver, and therefore continues to try. But when this "play" is enacted in an actual play, i.e. not in real life but in an actual story, myth, the loop can be closed by some *author*, some other omnipotent entity; to be clear, it literally requires *deus ex machina*, for example by a god convincing the suitors' extended families not to descend on the house and retaliate. But this requirement is not a part of the failing of the literary myth as a story; it is the fulfillment of an unconscious wish in an obsessive's individual myth: the myth *causes to exist* some other omnipotent entity.”