God as the Shadow of Man is based on the pioneering work of Claude Levi-Strauss, who postulated that myths are links between nature and culture. Shoham enlarges this concept and claims that myth in the form of a mythogene, the structural longings and experiences of the individual as projected onto mythology, links history and transcendence, the individual and society, and consciousness and energy-matter. The mythogenes are related to Shoham's personality theory, which, in essence, postulates that personality types can be paxonomized along a continuum with one pole having the Tantalic type, which aims to melt into the object, and the other pole having the Sisyphean type, which aims to overpower and control the object.