Mythologists are now anthropologists, philologists, etiologists, ethnologists, and perhaps most of all, psychologists. And crossing these disciplines are ritualists, diffusionists, structuralists, Jungians, Freudians, and culturalists, who, in turn, are not always mutually exclusive. In fact, myths might be called the dreams of humankind. Dreams serve as escape valves for individuals. They represent wishes and fears.
Myths serve whole societies.
Most of us have had dreams of falling from a great height, dreams of being lost or left behind, dreams of conquest. Nearly every society has myths which express these themes on the group level. So myths spring from the particular problems and concerns of a given race or tribe, but on a deeper level their source is the universal soul of the human race itself. Just as we can interpret dreams of an individual to gain insight into that particular psyche, just so can we study myths to better understand the humankind's psyche. We search, as we do in dreams, for recurrent themes and patterns.