Myths and psychoanalysis. The paper considers psychoanalysis as a powerful and precious contemporary mythology. It analyses the struggles between genera-tions of an ancient Greek cosmogony, which tell us something about the Oedipus complex. Myths are told in many versions, and all these stories may be true and false: their polysemy shapes a space in which mental diseases are allowed to move. When the Author was a child her father was always ready to listen to her and he always could answer to her questions, but he had no word to explain the disease of his father, who had to be admitted in a clinic for his periodic crisis of manic depression. Psychoanalysis as well as myths do not rule out madness, and it is the first to recognize the deep and disturbing humanity of mental disorders, sys-tematically repressed by common sense and psychiatric institutions. Psychoanaly-sis cannot become an accomplished and unambiguous method or theory if it keeps its look on neurotic symptoms and on psychic delusion. This may seem like a dis-advantage, but it is the power of psychoanalysis instead, because it is a science of questions, not of answers; the questions open the metamorphic space. There are many important analogies to deepen between psychoanalysis and sciences like non-Euclidean geometry and quantum mechanics, nevertheless psychoanalysis will be recognized as a science by others - and by itself - only by its own history, its theory and its treatments.
Keywords: Freud, psychoanalysis, metamorphosis, science, myth, storytelling, madness, neurosis, dream, treatment, theory.