The nineteen chapters in this thought-provoking edited volume remind us, once again, how much psychoanalysis is imbued with antiquity in general and with Classical myths in particular. It is a book about both modern and ancient history; about what the ancient world ‘really’ was, and why it has been so widely adopted by psychoanalytic scholars since the late-nineteenth century. It contains several articles, mainly written by classicists, on the history of some fundamental concepts and myths from the classical canon, which were used widely by psychoanalysts, such as ‘narcissism’, the ‘phallic’ and ‘Pandora's box’. Other contributors shed light on famous – as well as overlooked – aspects of Freud's interests in classical culture, for example, his preoccupation with the city of Rome and his admiration of the Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. It also contains some interesting case studies of how useful psychoanalysis could be as a literary tool for reading classical texts. Interestingly – though not surprisingly considering his wide usage of classical materials – many contemporary classicists find Jacques Lacan particularly useful in reading the Greek and Roman canon.
An exception to these strands of research is J. De Vleminck's original study of the Hungarian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Léopold Szondi (1893–1986). Survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Szondi, following the Second World War, explained human aggression differently from the way Freud did, namely, by not approaching this topic solely through the lens of sexuality. Szondi proposed to add to the psychoanalytic discourse another fundamental myth in addition to Greek Oedipus: the biblical story of Cain and Abel. For Szondi, the Cain and Abel story – like Oedipus – ‘reveals a universal and a-historic kernel of our singular existence’ (p. 273), and hence his suggestion to think of the ‘Cain Complex’ alongside the ‘Oedipus Complex’. De Vleminck's achievement lies in demonstrating that expanding our research beyond the more familiar examples of Greek and Roman myths, as well as beyond the more familiar psychoanalysts such as Freud, Jung and Lacan, is not only possible but very fruitful.
Some chapters assume previous knowledge of psychoanalysis, classical myths and in some cases of both. But generally speaking, psychoanalytic scholars with only basic classical background (like the author of this review) will find in this book an invaluable source for contextualising the psychoanalytical canon. At the same time, the book will serve as an inspiration for scholars of Antiquity to use psychoanalytic ideas in their analysis of ancient Greece and Rome. Using psychoanalysis as an interpretative tool carries the risk of falling into unconvincing anachronism, but most of the chapters do not fall into this trap. Thus, for example, V. Wohl convincingly uses Lacanian ideas for interpreting the paternal role in Athenian inheritance law.
Some chapters, however, seem somewhat problematic when psychoanalytical notions are conflated with historical descriptions. In some cases, for instance, one can think that twentieth-century Lacanian notions are part and parcel of the original classical language itself. Therefore, the editors should be appreciated for their decision to conclude with P. duBois's essay, ‘Listening, Counter-Transference, and the Classicist as “Subject-Supposed-to-Know”’, that goes against the grain of some of the other contributions. DuBois warns scholars not to forget a ‘difference, not identity’ (p. 317) in studying the ancient past of Europe and elsewhere: ‘A reading, a listening attuned to resistances and counter-transferences seems to me a more productive deployment of psychoanalysis in the present, in relation to classical antiquity, than projecting a modern psyche onto ancient persons, characters in texts, or social allegories’ (p. 319).
The main weakness of this volume is that there is not much attention to the rich historiography of psychoanalysis in the last three decades. For example, many chapters could serve to support the view that, in his preoccupation with classical culture, Freud was indeed ‘a loyal son of the Enlightenment’ (P. Gay, A Godless Jew [1987], p. 41). This understanding of the Freudian legacy – represented mainly by P. Gay and C. Schorske – was a dominant one until the 1980s. Since then, however, this perception of Freud's intellectual project has been greatly challenged by other scholars who have shown that in contrast with how Freud perceived himself – i.e. a Western secular and universalistic scientist – his writings are an ongoing dialogue with another aspect of his identity: a Viennese assimilated Jew with all its complexities. Thus, for example, S. Gilman argued that psychoanalysis was an effort to refute old nineteenth-century anti-Semitic medical perceptions, and to show that what was perceived then as a uniquely Jewish pathology such as hysteria, or homosexuality, was in fact a universal ‘illness’, which has nothing to do with Jews (Freud, Race, and Gender [1993]). Furthermore, some scholars claimed that not only did Freud never abandon his Judaism, but that he believed that psychoanalysis itself was in one way or another a ‘Jewish science‘(see Y.H. Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses [1991]). With the exception of R. Armstrong's stimulating chapter on Freud's perception of religion and secularism, these historiographical debates are not mentioned in the volume. Therefore, it is hard to locate the good claims proposed here in the wider scholarly strands on Freud's identity and the Freudian legacy as a whole.
A wider historiographical perspective is important because the close affinities between Classical myths and Freudian culture can be explained neither solely by classical texts nor by Freud's familiarity with this canon. Thus, some scholars in the volume who draw heavily on Freud himself find themselves almost ‘disappointed’ by his sometimes simplistic reading of ancient writings, as if there were not many other motivations in his work besides promoting classical culture. As Freud's intellectual commitments – as well as numerous elements of his identity – are varied and often contradict each other, it is necessary to read his texts against his explicit intentions (as it would also be recommended to do with classical texts).
The editors suggest that ‘[t]he description of psychoanalysis originating with Freud is only one of the possible ways of describing its birth’ (p. 7). It is not by coincidence that Freud adopted the classicist language on so many levels, they claim: in many respects, classicism preceded psychoanalysis. Thus, for instance, as part of their attempt to ‘tell the story of psychoanalysis from a different starting point’, the editors suggest that ‘Ovid's preoccupation with the boundaries of the self in his Metamorphoses is to regard the poem as proto-psychoanalytic’ (pp. 7–8). But what does it mean for an ancient Roman poem to be ‘proto-psychoanalytic’? Is it really true that ‘Freud did not read into Oedipus Tyrannus his own ideas about psychology but found them already anticipated there’, as G.A. Staley argues (p. 124)?
The editors seem to have overlooked other historiographical attempts, made in the last few decades, which discuss alternative starting points to the emergence of psychoanalysis to the more familiar one, i.e. Freud (M. ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious [2012]; H. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious [1970]). However, scholars often first looked for these new starting points in more obvious places such as nineteenth-century medicine, philosophy and politics. Yet, even if one prefers to go earlier than the more specific historical roots of the psychoanalytical movement in the modern age, it is not clear why to start with Homer and not his predecessors. Or, similarly, one may ask why go all the way to Greece and Rome, and not stop, for instance, in the psychological thinking of the sixteenth-century Reformation, as one scholar brilliantly did recently (L. Roper, ‘The Seven-Headed Monster: Luther and Psychology’, in S. Alexander and B. Taylor [edd.], History and Psyche [2012]). After all, no one claimed that psychology did not exist before Freud. This is why showing continuities of psychoanalysis with other previous strands of thought is so challenging, and insisting on some historical discontinuities is so necessary. Therefore, more attention to the existing literature on the social and cultural history of psychoanalysis is the one thing missing from this otherwise important and scholarly volume.
