The Ancient Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and the Ancient Text [Illustrated] 2019931804, 9780198827795, 0198827792

Table of contents :
Cover
The Ancient Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and the Ancient Text
Copyright
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Introduction
1: The ancient unconscious?: Towards a methodology
1.1 Philology’s complexes
1.2 Facing ancient experience
1.3 Psychologizing the ancients: The case of E. R. Dodds
1.4 The unconscious and Gadamer’s fusion of times
1.5 Anachronism as a new philological project
1.6 Antiquity and modernity: The familiar strangers
2: Hegel’s antiquity: Far away, so close
2.1 The past: Buried and unburied
2.2 Antiquity: A fountainhead of ambiguities
2.2.1 IDEALIZATION AND REPRESSION
2.2.2 CHILDREN AND ANCESTORS
2.2.3 CHTHONIC AND OLYMPIAN
2.3 Self-estrangement
2.4 Golden apples in silver bowls
2.5 Antiquity as mother-earth
2.6 The Antaeus complex
2.7 Veiled antiquity
3: Freud on the Acropolis
3.1 From Hegel’s Antaeus to Freud’s Oedipus
3.2 The death of the father and there awakened past
3.3 A view from the Acropolis
3.4 Parvis componere magna
3.5 The future unveiling of Tityrus’ unconscious
3.6 Virgil’s unveiling of Freud’s unconscious
4: Childhood memories: Homeric digression and Freudian regression
4.1 Freud’s alte Zeiten
4.2 From mythic to psychological memory
4.3 Memory as a digression
4.4 Remembering and forgetting
4.5 οἳ δ᾽ εἰσὶ ποῦ γῆς; (Where on earth are they?)
4.6 The return of the primordial washing scene
4.7 The scar and the dream navel
5: The unconscious as a figura futurorum
5.1 From universalism to a theory of analogies
5.2 Linkings
5.2.1 GROUP IMAGES
5.2.2 AN “A” AND A “B”
5.2.3 JUNCTURES
5.2.4 GENEALOGICAL LINKS
5.2.5 THE MODERN NEUROTIC AND THE ANCIENT OEDIPUS
5.2.6 “OEDIPUS-HAMLET”
5.3 Temporalities
5.3.1 THE FUTURE PAST
5.3.2 THE PAST FUTURE: OEDIPUS REX AS FIGURA FUTURORUM
5.3.3 THE COMPLEX
6: Oedipal dreams: The ancient and modern unconscious
6.1 Dreaming about Oedipus
6.2 The unconscious at the crossroads
6.3 The Oedipal dream: Backwards and forwards
6.4 The future of dreams
6.5 Past translated into future
6.6 Disguised and undisguised Oedipal dreams
6.7 Asexual Oedipal dreams: An ancient case of repression?
6.8 Artemidorus’ unconscious
6.9 The sexual mother
6.10 Aeneas’ Oedipal dream
7: Epilogue
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

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CLASSICS IN THEORY General Editors  . 

 

 

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CLASSICS IN THEORY Classics in Theory explores the new directions for classical scholarship opened up by critical theory. Inherently interdisciplinary, the series creates a forum for the exchange of ideas between classics, anthropology, modern literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, and other related fields. Invigorating and agenda-setting volumes analyse the cross-fertilizations between theory and classical scholarship and set out a vision for future work on the productive intersections between the ancient world and contemporary thought.

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The Ancient Unconscious Psychoanalysis and the Ancient Text

Vered Lev Kenaan

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Vered Lev Kenaan 2019 The Quotation from 2 Corinthians 3:13–18 taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931804 ISBN 978–0–19–882779–5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To Renana, the singing voice in my life

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■ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In recent years the relationship between antiquity and modernity has been fruitful ground for many fascinating studies in classical studies, comparative literature, and reception studies. My investigations of the ancient unconscious are indebted to many authors whose important work is cited and referred to throughout my book. Here I wish to express deep and special gratitude to Hagi Kenaan, Patricia Rosenmeyer, David Konstan, Lior Levy, Michael Halberstam, Ron Katwan, Joanna Spiro, Leora Bilsky, Noa Naaman-Zauderer, Joel Perl, Lilach Lachman, Galili Shachar, Gabriel Zoran, Emma Scioli, Rachel Bowlby, Richard Armstrong, and Miriam Leonard. Their attentive reading and openminded responses have been invaluable. I deeply appreciate the friendship of Talila Michaeli and collegiality of Alix Barbet, who provided me with the permission to use the image of the Oedipus Fresco. A grant from the Israel Science Foundation provided me the necessary financial support for my research during 2011–14. I am grateful to Noga Weiss, Maor Liscia, and Arnon Rosenthal, who offered great help as research assistants. I deeply thank the gifted editor Mark Joseph for his careful reading and superb advice. I acknowledge with gratitude the welcoming of the book by the editors of the Classics in Theory series, Miriam Leonard, Tim Whitmarsh, and Brooke Holmes. I am thankful to Charlotte Loveridge, the Commissioning Editor of Classics and Archaeology, and to Georgie Leighton, who supervises the production process at Oxford University Press. My deep gratitude to my beloved daughters, Ilil and Renana, whose beautiful companionship offers me constant encouragement and compassion.

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■ CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

xi

Introduction

1

1 The ancient unconscious? Towards a methodology

9

1.1 Philology’s complexes

9

1.2 Facing ancient experience

14

1.3 Psychologizing the ancients: The case of E. R. Dodds

19

1.4 The unconscious and Gadamer’s fusion of times

26

1.5 Anachronism as a new philological project

30

1.6 Antiquity and modernity: The familiar strangers

33

2 Hegel’s antiquity: Far away, so close

37

2.1 The past: Buried and unburied

37

2.2 Antiquity: A fountainhead of ambiguities

43

2.3 Self-estrangement

46

2.4 Golden apples in silver bowls

48

2.5 Antiquity as mother-earth

52

2.6 The Antaeus complex

54

2.7 Veiled antiquity

60

3 Freud on the Acropolis

65

3.1 From Hegel’s Antaeus to Freud’s Oedipus

65

3.2 The death of the father and the reawakened past

68

3.3 A view from the Acropolis

72

3.4 Parvis componere magna

80

3.5 The future unveiling of Tityrus’ unconscious

86

3.6 Virgil’s unveiling of Freud’s unconscious

88

4 Childhood memories: Homeric digression and Freudian regression

91

4.1 Freud’s alte Zeiten

92

4.2 From mythic to psychological memory

97

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x CONTENTS

4.3

Memory as a digression

102

4.4

Remembering and forgetting

108

4.5

οἳ δ᾽ εἰσὶ ποῦ γῆς; (Where on earth are they?)

112

4.6

The return of the primordial washing scene

118

4.7

The scar and the dream navel

122

5 The unconscious as a figura futurorum

129

5.1

From universalism to a theory of analogies

129

5.2

Linkings

133

5.3

Temporalities

150

6 Oedipal dreams: The ancient and modern unconscious

163

6.1

Dreaming about Oedipus

163

6.2

The unconscious at the crossroads

164

6.3

The Oedipal dream: Backwards and forwards

172

6.4

The future of dreams

176

6.5

Past translated into future

179

6.6

Disguised and undisguised Oedipal dreams

180

6.7

Asexual Oedipal dreams: An ancient case of repression?

182

6.8

Artemidorus’ unconscious

187

6.9

The sexual mother

192

6.10 Aeneas’ Oedipal dream

194

7 Epilogue

199

BIBLIOGRAPHY

203 215

INDEX

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■ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1 Oedipus fresco, Tuna el-Gebel, house 16, Cairo Museum. IFAO after A. Barbet, Les Scènes figurées dans les nécropoles romaines du Proche-Orient, dans I temi figurativi nella pittura parietale antica (IV sec. A. C–IV sec. D. C.), Atti del VI Convegno Internazionale sulla Pittura Parietale Antica (Bologne 20–23 Sept. 1995), Bologne 1997, fig. 6b, c, d, reunited by F. Ory. © IFAO.

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5.1 Raphael, The Parnassus, The Palace of the Vatican, 1509–11. Parnassus, from the Stanza della Segnatura, 1510–11 (fresco) (see also 16879), Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio of Urbino) (1483–1520) / Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City / Bridgeman Images.

134

7.1 The Williams House, New Haven, CT.

200

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Introduction Death of the father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a father why tell stories? Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin, speaking one’s conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred? Today, we dismiss Oedipus and narrative at one and the same time; we no longer love, we no longer fear, we no longer narrate. As fiction, Oedipus was at least good for something: to make good novels, to tell good stories. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text¹

On March 18, 1934, the New York Times published a short column on a recent archeological excavation in Egypt at the Roman necropolis of Tuna el-Gebel.² The report, sent from Cairo by the newspaper’s correspondent in the Middle East, tells its readers of the discovery of a funerary house containing the remarkable remains of second-century  paintings of mythical scenes. “The frescoes,” according to the correspondent, Mr. Joseph M. Levy, “are distinguished not so much because of the quality of the art but for the subjects represented.” What specifically stands out is a panel depicting two episodes from the Oedipus legend: In a room in the first story there’s a complete picture about six and a half feet wide and nearly three feet high, showing two incidents in the Oedipus legend. On the right, Oedipus cuts the throat of his father, Laios. A woman flees from the scene gesticulating in horror. On the left, Oedipus standing in the arched gateway to Thebes, answers the question of the Sphynx. A seated figure is intended as a personification of the riddle asked by the Sphynx. Lastly, a female figure stands at the center panel as the personification of the city of Thebes. These figures are painted on a pale blue background with a white freeze above.

Levy’s assessment that the painting was done “in a rather hasty manner,” falling short of a masterpiece—but still qualifying as worthy archeological evidence of the deep impact of Greece on the Nile valley—may be read today, with postcolonial self-awareness, as an expression of a colonial outlook that fails to come to terms with the local transmission of ¹ Barthes 1975: 47. ² The Oedipus painting was found in a funerary house (16) at the southern necropolis of Tuna el-Gebel, the Greco-Roman Hermopolis Magna.

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2 THE ANCIENT UNCONSCIOUS

high and low culture on its own terms. While this may be the case, it would be wrong to think of this short cultural report as a mere illustration. In addition to showing the complexities of region and identity in 1934—an American Jewish correspondent who studied in Beirut, served as private and political secretary to the Governor of Jerusalem under the British Mandate, and wrote from Cairo—the report gives voice to a unique aesthetic experience in which the author comes to appreciate the role played by the painting in the reception of the ancient Greek myth. Indeed, the discovery of the Egyptian-Roman transmission of the story of Oedipus testifies to the continuity of the Greek past in the present. Levy’s report describing the fresco’s two episodes from the Oedipus myth appeals to the reader with an air of scandal. And yet, what kind of a scandal is it if even in antiquity the mythic plot of Oedipus was never regarded as anything but old news? It is rather the act of reiteration that makes it new. That the discovery in Tuna el-Gebel was turned into a news item meant that lay readers in 1934 could recognize, in the unexpected recovery of ancient Oedipus, how tenacious his grip was in their own lives. Perhaps it is not mere coincidence that during the summer of 1934 Freud completed a first draft of Moses and Monotheism that not only contributed to the Egyptian transmission of the Greek Oedipus, but also gave him, the theoretician, another opportunity to assert his claim to fame with the thought that the unconscious is synonymous with ancient Oedipus. Freud, after all, linked his discovery of the unconscious to the moment when he recognized himself in that character. In the figure of Oedipus Freud encountered the trace inside an ancient infantile primary experience. His discovery, however, does not ascribe an exclusive epistemic role to the figure of Oedipus. The dialectic of modern and ancient times underpinning Freud’s discovery means that the ancient Greeks could also discover their unconscious in another ancient culture. For the Greeks this self-recognition depended on recovering the residue of ancient Egyptian culture in their memory. Thus, for example, the discovery in an Egyptian landscape of the fresco’s Hellenized version of the Sphinx episode is significant: the provenance of the Egyptian Sphinx conjures the image’s double origins. The Egyptian-Roman visual representation of the Oedipus myth thus uncovers a hidden, inherent alterity. Hence, the discovery of the unconscious requires a moment of selfrecognition that intrinsically belongs to the future.³ The discovery of ³ Consider how Freud relies, for example, on Diderot’s (pre-Freudian) perception of the Oedipus complex to validate his own discovery. The trace of Diderot in Freud’s theory of the repressed Oedipus complex surfaces in a future where Freud’s discovery of one of “the

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INTRODUCTION

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the unconscious in the Egyptian-Roman Oedipus fresco belongs to the future spectator. The Oedipus fresco was created to venerate the dead. The family of the deceased probably commissioned the work, and the story of the wandering Oedipus was chosen to decorate the wall of the tomb. Thus, respect for the dead is inscribed on the wall through commemoration of another life, the life of Oedipus. This life, which began in Thebes with the infant’s cruel exposure on Mount Cithaeron and subsequent rescue by a shepherd, who then entrusted the baby to a Corinthian couple— Oedipus’ adoptive parents—leads the adolescent Oedipus, upon hearing the oracle’s prophecy about a future patricide and incest with the mother, to leave the place he once called home and finally return, unknowingly and without recognizing it, to the land of his birth. Through the juncture of departure and homecoming the Oedipus painting holds up a mirror for the dead to the full span of a human life. The fresco thus solemnly offers a gift to the dead. A rupture of this ceremonial and stable form of meaning occurs as the fresco meets the living eye. If we take a look at the Oedipus fresco (Fig. 0.1), the first thing to notice is its unusual presentation of the story. Whereas ancient iconography of the Oedipus myth usually concentrates on an isolated episode from the cycle, mostly choosing to focus on Oedipus’ encounter with the Sphinx, the spectator of the fresco faces a tripartite composition. The

Fig. 0.1. Oedipus fresco, Tuna el-Gebel, house 16, Cairo Museum

precious new acquisitions of mankind” (as Freud put it) can take place. In other words, Diderot’s text will discover its unconscious when its past associations materialize in the future, that is, in Freud’s work. See Freud, “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis,” SE (Standard Edition) 23: 192–3.

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4 THE ANCIENT UNCONSCIOUS

right and left flanks of the painting display two familiar scenes from the Oedipus saga: on the right, Oedipus murders Laius while, on the left, he answers the riddling Sphinx. The centerpiece, however, features a group of three figures named: Zetema (search for truth), Thebes, and Agnoia (ignorance). The three figures create a group but each relates independently to the two episodes. Thus, Zetema, a seated half-naked male, gazes at the scene of Oedipus and the Sphinx. The two female figures look in the opposite direction at Oedipus killing Laius. The seated Thebes creates an axis of symmetry dividing the painting into two parts. A little further to the right stands Agnoia, recoiling from the dreadful sight of the murder. As a group, the three figures conceptualize the painting’s temporal complexity. The murder and the Sphinx episodes stand opposed to one another. The violent confrontation with the father contrasts with Oedipus’ meditative encounter with the feminine monster. In the murder episode, Oedipus is depicted in the act of killing. He stands firm, legs are spread wide, his arms outstretched. One hand holds the sword which penetrates Laius’ neck. Oedipus is intensely invested in the murder. Under the gaze of Agnoia, however, self-absorption is replaced by the self-forgetfulness required by such a horrible deed. In comparison to the drama of the savage instincts conveyed by Oedipus’ sword-clasping hand, the confrontation with the Sphinx leads us elsewhere, to the secondary domain of realization and reflection. Faced by the Sphinx, Oedipus reaches a moment of self-recognition. In this part of the picture, Oedipus raises his hand and points at himself. His gaze at the Sphinx is transposed into inner reflection. In the Sphinx episode, the hand’s reflexive gesture is the inverse of its violent grip on the sword in the murder scene. By pointing at himself with his index finger, Oedipus answers the riddle of the Sphinx: “It is a man, just like me.” At the same time, however, viewing the gesture of the pointing finger in relation to the episode at the far right of the panel (the killing of Laius) suggests a confession: “The man who killed Laius is me.” Only a reading from right to left connects the two dramatic events in chronological order: first Oedipus kills Laius on the road; then, as he approaches the gates of Thebes, he meets the Sphinx. But, the linear reading from right to left is not supported by ancient conventions for reading visual narratives.⁴ The visual experience of the Oedipus fresco resists continuity. The spectator’s inclination to any kind of linear narrativity is disrupted by other strategies of reading offered simultaneously by ⁴ On conventional and unconventional readings of the visual cycle, see Marjorie Venit, who writes that a continuous chronological narrative of this fresco requires that we read from left to right, against convention. In Venit 2012: 409.

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INTRODUCTION

5

the fresco. A reading from left to right, for example, offers a variation at odds with the chronological story, aligning it with Sophocles’ play as well as with Freud’s retrospective psychoanalytic plot. This reading begins with the Sphinx’s riddle initiating a self-investigation that leads Oedipus, like a Freudian analysand, to the primal scene. Like Sophocles’ play, which Freud saw as consisting in “nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement,” the Oedipus fresco too consists in “a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-analysis.”⁵ Oedipus’ past is investigated from the point of view of the present. These two different readings hinge on the structure of temporal priority ascribed to the murder scene. There is, however, a third option less concerned with temporal precedence and chronology. This reading is based on a visual experience in which the two episodes are taken concomitantly. In the focus on the fresco’s centerpiece of the allegorical group of three figures, the linear narrative gives way to simultaneity. Thebes sitting at the center of the painting represents a topographical site orienting the two episodes in relation to it. The naming of the city (the word “Thebes” is inscribed on her right) signifies much more than just a mention of the city’s name. In fact, the figure of Thebes is the painting’s focal point, integrating Oedipus’ different perspectives. “Thebes” thus designates Oedipus’ birthplace, a motherland, and a womb from which the infant was violently projected into the world.⁶ From the perspective of the adult Oedipus, however, Thebes poses an enigma, a lapse, the obscurity of a foreign land. Oedipus’ two perspectives on Thebes are rendered through his different location in respect to the city: distant from or close to his birthplace. The murder takes place outside the city, while the encounter with the Sphinx brings him closer to Thebes, to the gates of the city. Juxtaposed, the two episodes create an intersection of different times, preparing the spectator to accept the principle of ambivalence underpinning Oedipus’ human condition. The painting effectively reproduces a visual possibility in which being unconscious and gaining consciousness coalesce. The Greek agnoia, and its Latin equivalent, ignorantia, are the closest ancient nouns to render literally the modern term “unconscious.”⁷ In the Oedipus fresco the double representation of Agnoia and Zetema

⁵ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 261–2. ⁶ Marjorie Venit comments that the figure of Thebes is seen reclining against a twopeaked mountain representing Mount Cithaeron, where Laius abandoned the infant Oedipus. See Venit 2012: 406. ⁷ Agnoia is an antonym of gnosis, while ignorantia is an antonym of conscientia.

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6 THE ANCIENT UNCONSCIOUS

creates an enigmatic conjunction. While Agnoia is feminine and emotionally expressive, fearful and running away, Zetema is masculine and restrained.⁸ While Agnoia is dressed, Zetema’s naked body is exposed. Not knowing is represented as a veiled figure. Is this not an indication of Agnoia’s strategies of concealment and cunning? Can we not say that this feminine figure has the ambivalence typical of disguised Oedipal dreams, where one figure through condensation conceals a memory of the dreamer’s mother? Joining the two central episodes into the same pictorial framework creates a dialectical knot. In sharing the same symbolic space, the figures of Agnoia and Zetema are overshadowed by each other’s presence. In Zetema’s perspective, the figure of Agnoia cannot mean just a lack of knowledge, but rather signifies knowledge eclipsed. Under the shadow of Zetema, who symbolizes a recovery of one’s identity, Agnoia, equivalent to Oedipus’ ignorance, means a temporary or, even partial forgetfulness. Paired with Zetema, Agnoia does not denote “not knowing” but rather symbolizes an act of avoidance. Overshadowed by the future possibility of recovering a memory of one’s past, Agnoia signifies a stage of resistance. In the context of being under the sway of Agnoia, Zetema represents a stage in which one is liberated from disavowal and forgetfulness, and thus conveys the idea that searching for the truth and turning to futural horizons of meaning are always evocative of the past. *

*

*

My account of the experience of looking at the Oedipus fresco introduces you, the reader, to the kind of textual analysis that you are going to encounter in the following chapters. In a way analogous to my interpretation of the visual conjunction of past and present episodes in the life of Oedipus, this book investigates the meaning of the textual ties created by arbitrary, spontaneous, and unintentional contacts between the past and its future. Understanding the meaning of textuality through contact between times, historical moments that disown any priority under the law of chronology, goes hand in hand with the book’s psychoanalytic framework. Associations and connections between the past and its future—the present—belong to the sphere of the unconscious. The latter is primarily employed here in order to study the inherent, often hidden links that bind modernity to classical antiquity, modern to ancient experiences.

⁸ Michael Grant identifies Zetema with the figure of Narcissus. See Grant 2011: 335.

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INTRODUCTION

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In the field of classical studies, the psychoanalytic construction of the unconscious is, however, rarely regarded as a fruitful methodological concept. Commonly understood as a modern conceptual invention rather than the discovery of a psychic reality, the notion of the unconscious is often criticized as an anachronistic lens, one that ineluctably subjects ancient experience to modern patterns of thought. I shall challenge this ambivalent theoretical disposition toward the psychoanalytic concept by offering an interpretation of the unconscious explaining why this concept is in fact inseparable from, and crucial for, the study of the ancient text and more generally for the methodology of classical philology. I develop my attempt to rehabilitate the unconscious as a methodological tool for approaching the ancient text within the context of examining the complicated, often conflicted relationship between classical studies and psychoanalytic theory. The debate over whether or not Oedipus had a complex, or whether the ancients had an unconscious, presupposes that a solution of this kind depends on a historical reconstruction of a psychic reality. Though the question about the ancient Oedipus complex is central to this book, I shall not provide a determinate answer to this question. And yet I consider the question valuable precisely because it invites us to rethink the relationship between antiquity and modernity. The moderns are not identical to the ancients. But is the son like or unlike his father? While antiquity does not provide organic provenance for modernity, it is nevertheless the case that, despite the cultural and historical distance, the two epochs are firmly connected. Connections and differences, continuity and discontinuity, are characteristic of the junctions “antiquity–modernity,” “father–son,” and “past–present” that also figure in the chronotope embodied in the mythic crossroads of Oedipus Rex. The Oedipus complex, therefore, reverberates as a trope in each chapter of this book, where various manifestations of conjunction and juncture straddling the ancient–modern connection are examined. And as for the question, “Did Oedipus have a complex?,” I think that it would be more fruitful to allow the question to resonate while ultimately circumventing it, recognizing that what it asks about cannot be reduced to the form of a fact among historical facts. Or, in other words, that this question covers up an important, non-positivistic option for understanding the significance that the unconscious can have for classical studies. This option, developed in the following chapters, seeks to rearticulate the Freudian unconscious as a dynamic principle of textual meaning and, specifically, as a paradigm of a text’s essence as unfolding, in time, through readings and misreadings, through a constant fusion of horizons that give birth to the “classical text.” Hence, while I agree that the ancient

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8 THE ANCIENT UNCONSCIOUS

unconscious does not belong (in the factual sense) to the particularity of ancient experience, it is nonetheless more than an invention of the moderns—not because it is a mere product of the modern imagination, but because its modus operandi consists in a deferral of meaning that is manifest only retroactively. The ancient unconscious is nothing like a hidden layer of mental facts in ancient times. It is, rather, an implicit, yet constitutive structure of meaning with which the ancients were familiar.

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The ancient unconscious? Towards a methodology

1.1 Philology’s complexes The unconscious has a long history. Yet its formation as a concept, as something that we make an effort to know about and live with, is modern. Its philosophical roots predating Freud disclose a range of interests in, and sensitivities toward, the hidden, inaccessible, or less accessible dimensions of cognitive structure and cultural and aesthetic experience, and more generally toward dark and obscure sides of human existence. Classical antiquity, which concerns me here, provides a plentiful source of associations foreshadowing eighteenth-century images of the unconscious such as “the darkness of thoughts,” or “the dark map of the mind.”¹ Eighteenth-century speculation on the inner space of the unconscious has its underpinning in a rich and ancient taxonomy of underground spaces and subversive figures. Links have been drawn between the modern conceptualization of the unconscious and various mythological images and ancient metaphors, such as the chthonic origins of the world, the space of the underworld, the enigmatic language of dreams, the mythic typology of the Other (monsters, women, slaves, and the “barbarous” political other), the obscure (latent) sources of poetry, and the dialectics of memory and forgetfulness underlying the metaphysical sources of both poetry and philosophy. Psychoanalysis finds anchors in ancient literary and philosophical sources that document the discovery of the soul’s irrational aspects and reflect upon its psychological and political significance. These ancient sources are aligned with psychoanalysis in the creation of a long tradition of the therapeutic arts aimed at “the care of the soul.”² This is only a partial list demonstrating how antiquity provided premodern markers for the future development ¹ “Dunckelheit der Gedancken” is the influential expression coined by Christian Wolf (1679–1764). Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–79) issued a summons to investigate the soul’s obscure regions, “die dunkeln Gegenden der Seele.” Kant’s “the dark map of the mind” appears in APH 7: 135. For a historical account of the development of the concept of the unconscious and the associated imagery of darkness, see Ellenberger 1970; Bell 2005; Nicholls and Liebscher 2010: 1–25; Ffytche 2012. ² For the ancient therapeutic arts, see, for example, Entralgo 1970.

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of the modern unconscious. Invoking the soul’s hidden dimensions, these ancient tropes were gradually absorbed in different periods on their way to becoming one of the most influential concepts operating in the humanities. Yet, in the shaping of the twentieth-century field of psychology, it was Freud’s impact on the history of the unconscious that was ultimately the most important. Today, the humanities’ fascination with Freudian psychoanalysis has waned since its high point in the 1980s and 1990s, when it served as the backdrop for a highly influential theoretical framework for critical engagement with literary texts and works of art. Freud’s conceptualization of the unconscious is now often treated with suspicion. It has been argued that Freud’s unconscious is culturally and historically too narrow since it is strongly embedded in the zeitgeist of the Viennese fin de siècle. Freud—it has become a commonplace to argue—did not discover the unconscious but invented a particular version of it. Furthermore, Freud’s notion of the unconscious is criticized on account of a universalism that is insensitive to cultural, ethnic, and gendered otherness.³ As new interest in cognitive psychology and neuroscience has usurped the influential position once held by psychoanalysis, Freud’s notion of the unconscious has lost its authority and prestige and is no longer considered as central as it once was to the project of knowledge in the humanities. In this book I argue for the need to reclaim the value of the unconscious as a hermeneutic tool for the study of ancient texts, something that, at the same time, would require a transformation of our understanding of what the unconscious means, the way it operates, and how it relates to textual hermeneutics. My approach to the unconscious in this study draws heavily on temporal transgressions, leading my discussion towards—what I consider to be its central undertaking—the intersection between the ancients and the moderns. This well-known cultural conception of temporal merging, articulated in the prevailing nineteenth-century image of a sacred marriage between antiquity and modernity,⁴ played an important role in the development of European self-consciousness. It is through the emergence of national and cultural identities, grounded in the temporal fusion between antiquity and modernity, that the anachronic as a force disruptive of temporal consistency, a principle of temporal confusion, began to establish itself as an essential agent in the psychic apparatus. Thus, by 1900 the idea of an anachronic textuality had become central to Freud’s investigation in The Interpretation ³ I deal with the problem of universalism in Chapter 5. ⁴ For a further discussion on Burkhardt’s hieros gamos, the sacred marriage between antiquity and modernity, see Chapter 2.

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of Dreams, which presented it as the domain of the unconscious. Freud emphasizes the dream’s unique form of textuality, which disregards “logical sequence” by its indifference to chronological order.⁵ For Freud, the connections made by the dream between past and present manifest the valuable role of a confusion of times in the creation of meaning. The threading of present modifications into our view of the past, and the blending of present and past impressions, are essential to the unconscious’s art of weaving. The dream, a “weaver’s masterpiece,” is hence the production of daring analogies and uninhibited associations which are created in “the factory of thoughts.”⁶ But alongside the attraction that psychoanalysis had for anachronism (apropos its close relation to the art of unconscious associations), the historical disciplines of the humanities typically kept their guard against anachronism’s implied dangers. The rationality of twentieth-century modernist reason insisted on the importance of cultural divides that prevent the problematic cathexis of modern frameworks and ancient phenomena. Thus, the opposition between psychoanalytic fascination with the unconscious’s language of associations and scientific hostility towards it can explain the tension between classical studies and psychoanalysis. Hence, after Freud, modern philology could not tolerate any identification with antiquity which would involve temporal transgressions. The new historical science wished to defy such boundary-crossing across eras and reassert the logic of chronology. The threat of anachronism, “the capital sin against method,” can thus partly explain why, deep down, practitioners of modern classical philology are antagonistic towards psychoanalysis.⁷ For classical studies the relationship with psychoanalysis has always been a complicated one, even if the dialogue between the two disciplines seems at times to be constructive and essential.⁸ The discipline of classical studies has clearly changed over recent decades but it is still connected to and at times even dominated by the traditional principles of classical philology in its hermetic, self-protective stance that has so often resisted new theoretical developments as if they were foreign contagions. In this sense, the great wave of interdisciplinary studies, reception ⁵ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 314. ⁶ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 283. ⁷ Loraux 2002: 154. Nicole Loraux’s “in praise of anachronism” signaled a theoretical turn in the field of classical studies that recently has been adopted by the blog “Anachronism and Antiquity” based at the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford. ⁸ On the relationship between psychoanalysis and classical studies, see Brown 1957: 241–5; Simon 1978; duBois 1988; Selden 1990: 155–78; Armstrong 2005; Bowlby 2009; Stoc 2010: 355–70.

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studies, gender studies, visual studies, and postcolonial studies that has proven so effective for the discipline’s postmodern facelift, opening classical studies to a rich spectrum of polyphonic dialogue, all too often hides the discipline’s continuing commitment to preserve the exclusive historical and cultural identities of both the ancient subject and its ultimate researcher, the modern classicist. To insist on the presence of these complexes in classical studies well into the twenty-first century may seem somewhat odd or irrelevant, just as reasserting the currency of the Oedipal complex sounds outdated in our IVF era.⁹ In discussing the discipline’s old resentments, however, I wish to show how philological resistance to the impact of Freud merges with the self-understanding of classical studies in our current post-humanist era. Consider an anecdote from the life of the scholar who set the direction for investigating the manifestations of the ancient unconscious. E. R. Dodds (1893–1979) was an exceptional figure among leading philologists of his time and a nonconformist scholar whose impact on the field of classical studies and related disciplines still reverberates. His contribution to the study of subjective experience in ancient times is undoubtedly one of my inspirations for this study. In 1936, Dodds was appointed Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. In his inaugural lecture titled “Humanism and Technique in Greek Studies,” Dodds suggested, as the story goes, “that since we now have texts of most ancient authors adequate for understanding, we would do well to devote less energy to textual criticism and more to general interpretation.” Dodds’s invocation of a “general interpretation” is emblematic of his understanding of the classics as an integral part of what Dilthey called the human sciences— the Geisteswissenschaften—whose primary principle is hermeneutics.¹⁰ Dilthey’s hermeneutic turn was presented as the means for addressing the self-expressive essence of the human. Unlike the natural sciences that are based on objective explanation, the humanities are committed to and require a methodology that takes into account the self-understanding of the human subject. Dodds’s evocative invitation was not welcomed. The morning after his lecture, “Dodds was greeted by a colleague in the street with the words: ‘I see, Dodds, that you have decided to kill research.’ ”¹¹ This distrustful attitude toward hermeneutics—and toward psychoanalysis as its proponent—has persisted. In fact, it has never ceased to be part, albeit latent and inconspicuous, of the development of the discipline of classical studies up to the present. In the case of psychoanalysis, ⁹ On the meaning of Sophocles’ Oedipus in the IVF era, see Bowlby 2018: 59–75. ¹⁰ See, for example, Dilthey 1996. ¹¹ Lloyd-Jones 1980: 80. Cf. Dodds 1977.

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the antagonism has been specifically directed at its founding father, Sigmund Freud, and his monumental work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Within contemporary pluralistic academic paradigms, it is nevertheless surprising to encounter the current intensity of the suspicious, even hostile response to Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to antiquity issuing from major representatives of the traditional discipline. In 2009, for example, the ancient historian William Harris opens his Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity by dedicating his introduction to recapitulating the process of Freudian decline in recent years in the fields of the humanities and social sciences only to underline Freud’s meager relevance for the study of antiquity. Armed by a host of anti-Freudian, neo-Freudian, and neuropsychological arguments, Harris reiterates a positivist view according to which Freudian dream hermeneutics cannot contribute to our understanding of the ancient experience of dreams. In Harris’s theoretical framework there are winners and losers. The victory of neuroscience implies that “there is no longer any mystery about dreams,” while Freud’s promise of a “true unveiling of a mystery” remains unfulfilled and proves the failure of his hermeneutics.¹² What Harris fails to remember in his synoptic view is that the “unveiling of a mystery,” the declared objective of positivist science, is not at all a goal for hermeneutics. My interest in the resistance to Freud does not imply that classical studies have not also known how to embrace psychoanalysis. For the seminal writings of Page duBois, Pietro Pucci, Nicole Loraux, and others, psychoanalysis has clearly provided a stimulating and engaging interlocutor. But whereas these scholars embraced Freudian terminology in their readings of ancient texts, their important work does not represent traditional philology, whose aversion to psychoanalysis is, in itself, illuminating and is the focus of my discussion here. The recurrent objection to Freud in classical studies was that he spoke to the modern reader in a terminology that was incongruous with the formulations of the soul in antiquity. Apprehension about anachronism and fusion of times is part of the philologist’s defense of the grounds of his or her discipline. The ethics of the discipline indeed require such a defense. But what interests here is less the validity or invalidity of this defense, and more what is revealed by this apprehension as a response to this potential crisis. I am concerned with the working of the philological defence as the field’s typical response. What is at stake here is a certain pathology, revealed each time anew by the discipline’s reaction to anachronism: a constant

¹² Harris 2009: 6, 8.

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suspicion of contact with temporal confusions that the discipline desires to hide. Thus, the philologist’s anxiety regarding this conflation of historical times touches upon, and inadvertently reveals, the dynamic structure of the unconscious.

1.2 Facing ancient experience Philology’s resistance to psychoanalysis is also a matter of rivalry. Freud’s thought not only violated disciplinary standards but offered an alternative understanding of antiquity that competed with how the experts saw it. And, in a corollary manner, the disapproval of Freud’s methodology expressed a fear of the younger discipline that had begun to assimilate philology’s methodological principles. Freudian psychoanalysis absorbed an archeological methodology with which it constructed a multilayered architecture of the modern subject. Moreover, it was through the figure of antiquity that Freud was able to articulate the concept of the unconscious.¹³ The fragmented presence of antiquity in the present offered Freud a paradigm for thinking about the eruption into experience of inaccessible dimensions of the soul. Freud’s historicization of the soul and his search for “the royal road to the unconscious” rivaled philology, paving a new path for thinking about ancient experience. Yet, in framing antiquity as an inaccessible domain, Freud exposed classical philology to its own insecurities. It was the unconscious in particular that reflected a basic methodological problem for the classical interpreter of the past. The core of the problem was the nonobjective status of the unconscious, which took the idea of inaccessibility a step further. It referred the philologist to the primacy of an existence even more inaccessible than ancient experience, and thus challenged classical studies in presenting a different structure of absence, one that is foreign to the fragmentary remains of the ancient world’s great buildings, and literary and visual works of art. Faced with the fragmentary object, philology could demonstrate its restoration skills. The unconscious, however, posed a far more difficult challenge that could not be integrated naturally to the project of philology. What kind of restoration work is appropriate for the trace of the untraced? The difficulty for an interpreter searching in antiquity for traces of the unconscious is typically understood as having to go through and beyond the facts of ancient experience. ¹³ For a discussion of antiquity as a source for the modern unconscious, see Chapter 2, pp. 37–42.

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And in this respect the sought-after unconscious experience is twice removed from the modern interpreter’s present. Whereas the reconstruction of a past experience depends on the transmission and translation of the remaining factual manifestations of a past world into present discourse, the unconscious, being originally absent from past experience, introduces an impossible hermeneutic challenge: it can be translated from the past to the present only on the condition that it could have been restored as an experience in the first place. We shall eventually return to discuss how the structure of an unrecoverable absence can be part of the historical-philological project. For now, let us turn to some preliminary observations concerning philology’s modes of understanding of past experience and its restoration. The understanding that philology’s chief mission was to adequately transmit ancient treasures to present and future generations was well established by the beginning of the nineteenth century. This mission was indispensable and inseparable from the modern commitment to the legacy of the humanities as envisioned by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who is known for being responsible for the institutionalization of Prussian education. Humboldt’s pedagogical concentration on languages was formative for the development of the historicalphilological worldview. Classical texts were first of all human products that were shown by practices of reading and interpretation to embody the spirit of the Greek and Roman nations. Hence, the task of the philologist demanded, according to Humboldt’s view, much more than “a critically exact editing of the literary monuments” of the Greek and Latin authors. Reading of the classical text constituted rather the possibility of modern knowledge obtaining “a coherent picture” of a nation’s individuality, its Volksgeist. Humboldt directed philology’s conservative capacities towards the goal of recovering the richness of the lived experience, the Erlebnis, of the ancients: For although in such treatment the study of the whole language is itself the ultimate aim, it still starts initially from the monuments extant therein, attempts to restore and preserve them as purely and faithfully as possible, and seeks to use them for obtaining reliable knowledge of antiquity.¹⁴

The restoration and preservation of literary monuments serve a higher goal of learning for Humboldt. The knowledge of antiquity cannot be complete and sufficient without the modern reader’s transformative encounter with ancient experience.¹⁵ Humboldt’s pioneering view of

¹⁴ Humboldt 1999: 155.

¹⁵ Humboldt 2002.

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the important task of philology in the humanities¹⁶ is essential for a retrospective evaluation of philology’s investment in a holistic notion of experience. Humboldt’s influence on contemporary philology can still be detected and yet the latter retains only some aspects of his humanistic vision. While Humboldt’s impulse to preserve is central to modern philology, his invocation of antiquity as an inalienable part of modern self-enlightenment is abandoned. Philology’s modern commitment to its disciplinary codes of conservation was even strengthened in reaction to the postmodern wave of deconstruction. In 1995, for example—the year I received my PhD at Yale in classics and comparative literature—David West’s presidential lecture to the British Classical Association addressed a young generation of philologists by employing, even if unknowingly, Humboldt’s image of the “monuments”: “Get down to real work,” he exhorts his audience, reminding them that philology’s prior commitment is to the “texts, the monuments, the surviving objects, the evidence.”¹⁷ West’s exhortation points to the idea that the object-like essence of the ancient text is of a kind with monuments, relics, and archeological evidence. What distinguishes twentieth-century philology from Humboldt’s philological vision is an intensification of the rigid requirement to maintain a clear-cut distinction between ancient and modern experience.¹⁸ As philology’s scientific and technological skills of preservation improved, the aspiration to overcome the inescapable loss of the past increased. Accepting that a full reconstruction of the past would always be beyond reach, twentieth-century philology developed refined tools for obtaining an at least “reliable knowledge of antiquity.” Henceforth philology should be aware of its modest goals. Humboldt’s humanist universalism, with its aspiration to discover the modern ideal in the Greeks, is no longer valid. A more rigorously monitored acquaintance with the ancient world now being articulated is based on philology’s refined technologies of making invisible and illegible remains visible and legible. Philology’s emphasis on the process of transmission released it from the old hermeneutic commitment. Reconstruction of human existence as it pervades the ancient text is hence no more than a good ¹⁶ Humboldt designed the University of Berlin by elevating the humanities above the more “practical” faculties (medicine, law, and theology) and subordinating the natural sciences to the humanities. On Humboldt’s conception of education, see Marchand 1996: 24–31. ¹⁷ West 1995: 16–17. Cf. Judith P. Hallett’s description of the event in Hallett and Nortwick 1997: 5. ¹⁸ In the 1990s theoretical alternatives that probed the integration of the interpreter’s modern perspective in writing on classical texts, such as Hallett and van Nortwick’s edited volume Compromising Traditions, were completely unorthodox in the field of classical studies.

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conjecture—similar to the clever guesswork typical of philology’s proficiency in textual criticism. Restoration achieves one of the main aims of the field, which aspires through its mediation between the ancient text and its modern reader to be a sounding board for a foreign world lost to modern life. This coming to grips with the perennial loss of ancient life did not quench the passionate demand for historicism in the work of interpreting the past. As every student of classical philology knows, the discipline requires first of all a faithful adherence to the ancient text’s temporal boundaries. Philology’s territorial compulsion demands from its disciples uncompromising faithfulness. A text’s meaning should primarily reflect, in the eye of the philologist, the historical time of its production. The first philological commandment posits the rule of respecting the ancient text’s time of composition, while warning the interpreter about anachronism. I will argue in what follows for a loosening of this unwavering commitment to historical contextualization, in the interests of understanding both ancient and modern phenomena. This innate cautiousness about the particular time of the ancients proved effective for the twentieth century’s intensive study of ancient experience. Beginning in the second half of that century, the term “experience” became popular, especially in studies that strove to retrieve the historical reality of ancient everyday life (Oakley 1974; Veyne 1987).¹⁹ The idea that a formal historiography and a chronological analysis can revive the lost past was abandoned in favor of an exploration of the ancient arts as “vehicles of expression” (Pollitt 1972).²⁰ Late twentiethcentury scholarship placed emphasis on specific aspects of ancient private life, particularly its notions of sexuality, gender, and emotion.²¹ Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure reflected a new trend in cultural studies that sought collaboration with philology. The response to Foucault’s study of sexuality is important for understanding philology’s equivocal position with regard to this postmodern development.²² Attempts at historicizing the

¹⁹ For reconstructions of intellectual, material, and practical aspects of the ancient past, see, for example, Veyne 1987, or, on medieval history, Oakley 1974. ²⁰ On the role of experience in the study of Greek art, J. J. Pollitt comments that his interest in the cultural experiences expressed in the arts is set against a persistent concentration on the formal development of Greek art. See Pollitt 1972: xiii, from which I have borrowed the phrase “vehicles of expression.” ²¹ In the 1990s, increasing interest in gender and sexuality prompted scholars to use “experience” in their titles to specify the sphere of erotic identities, e.g. Loraux 1990 and Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1991. Later titles employing experience in their titles include Nussbaum and Sihvola 2002 and Cokayne 2003. ²² Questioning Foucault’s philological competence to accomplish the promise of his theoretical project in The Use of Pleasure, Martha Nussbaum privileges its contemporaneous philological study, Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality. See Nussbaum 1985.

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self flourished in the context of classical studies in discussions of the sociology of sex and the politics of identity and emotions. In problematizing universal notions of the self, philologists may seem to be at least partly attuned to Foucault’s notion of the subject as a social construction, and Foucault’s sense of historicity was congruent with philology’s insistence on conveying the singularity of a specific cultural moment. In spite of Foucault’s revolutionary contribution to classical studies, his notion of history eminently reflects philological instincts, namely, that the study of antiquity is based on the premise of a cultural difference.²³ Classics’s insistence on an ontology of difference between the ancients and the moderns is also apparent in its reaction against ancient literature’s psychological impact on the modern reader. Philology frequently undertakes the task of reminding the reader of the ancient text of the importance of the cultural gap between past and present. This warning is needed in light of ancient literature’s capacity to precipitate an experience of selfrecognition in modern readers. The danger in approaching the ancient text as a channel for bringing modern readers to face themselves is that the sense of familiarity is all too often unfounded. It is precisely this modern self-recognition triggered by an ancient play that gave birth to Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex. Philologists deem it necessary to remind modern readers to be aware of cultural difference as a critical tool illuminating the distinctiveness of ancient literature’s emotive dimension. As with Augustine’s self-criticism of his emotional reading of Dido in his youth,²⁴ the modern philologist often warns against misreadings that stem from overidentification with ancient protagonists. Thus, the philologist prompts the reader to employ distancing strategies in reading ancient texts. In this remark of Bruno Snell’s from 1946, he reminds us that “we” need to guard against emotional identification with the ancients: “The Iliad and the Odyssey, which stand at the source of the Greek tradition, speak to us with a strong emotional appeal; and as a result we are quick to forget how radically the experience of Homer differs from our own.”²⁵ To know the Greeks’ archaic past requires a process of objectification that posits distance between Homeric men and women and their modern observers as a prerequisite. This distance is needed in order to create the objective field of philological investigation. Moreover, Snell explicitly warns against the inclination to be emotionally ²³ This is precisely the philological undertaking in the investigation of the ancient emotions endorsed, for example, by David Konstan: “The premise of this book is that the emotions of the ancient Greeks were in some significant respects different from our own, and that recognizing these differences is important to our understanding of Greek literature and culture generally.” Konstan 2006: ix. ²⁴ Augustine, Confessions 1.13.20–1. ²⁵ Snell 1982 (orig. 1946): v.

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absorbed in the gripping fictional world of ancient literature. In the manner of a Platonic advocate, he warns us of the illusionary power of ancient mimesis that induces forgetfulness of the truth. And yet Snell’s caution against “forgetfulness” leaves a trace of a different kind of memory. It is not the memory of the eternal truth that Humboldt and his contemporaries sought in antiquity, nor is it the eternal truth which is swept aside by poetry’s magnetism as Plato has it in Ion for example. Snell’s concern is rather directed at the danger of losing touch with the concreteness of the past. The emotional fusion between the moderns and the ancients represents a problem for the positivist philologist since it blurs the important distinction between our present and their present, between “us” and “them.” It is hence important to guard against this dangerous and unscientific homogenization and assimilation that blur the singularity of ancient experience. Contextualization is, then, a main requisite for the expert’s reading, enhanced by linguistic competence. The very premise of philology cannot be wrong. We always need to remember how different we are from the ancients. But this understanding, encapsulating as it does a fundamental principle in philology’s educational program, requires a further observation. We still need to understand what this difference means, and how it impinges on the possibility of our understanding the ancients.

1.3 Psychologizing the ancients: The case of E. R. Dodds Reviewing the influence of psychoanalysis on the field of classical studies, Hugh Lloyd-Jones puts the psychoanalytically oriented researcher in the shoes of Alice in Wonderland. Like Alice, classicists who are fascinated by the mysterious world of psychoanalysis find themselves swept wholly unprepared into the strange world of dreams and imagination: Many assumed that psychoanalysis would provide them with a golden key and hastened to apply it to all locks, without stopping to ask themselves what doors it might reasonably be expected to open or what they might expect to find behind them.²⁶

Scholars who abandon the rules of rationality and consistency end up blindly following their instincts instead of grounding their investigation in a clear methodological framework. Indeed, Lloyd-Jones gives more ²⁶ Lloyd-Jones 1985: 153.

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credit to the classical scholar with some knowledge of psychology than to the psychologist with some knowledge of antiquity. The psychohistorian’s investigation, he generalizes, often just demonstrates an “ignorance of ancient culture.” In neither case, however, can we expect much. Studies involving psychoanalytic analysis of ancient figures were doomed to make “inferences that lacked any secure base.”²⁷ Nevertheless, skeptic though he is, Lloyd-Jones cannot completely deny the achievements of “the important book,” The Greeks and the Irrational, despite its “obvious marks of psychoanalytic influence.”²⁸ The book was written, after all, by Lloyd-Jones’s predecessor, E. R. Dodds in 1951 and was applauded by Norman O. Brown as being as “important as courageous and successful pioneering in this [psychoanalyticalanthropological] direction.”²⁹ These two opposing responses to the application of psychoanalysis to the ancient world render an ambivalence that I shall eventually tie to the phenomenon of fusion of times. (As we shall see below, in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, the philologist may find the opportunity to turn the fear of anachronism into something fruitful.) The case of the ambivalent reception of Dodds’s psychoanalytically oriented book, which was considered already at the time of its publication a breakthrough and an innovative, even provocative contribution to the investigation of ancient psychological experience, is telling. Dodds’s daring project exposes the discipline’s Achilles heel. But why does his specific interest in ancient psychological experience once again pose the threat of anachronism, which philology shuns as if it were a scientific transgression? Dodds’s new direction of inquiry had its roots in the intellectual milieu of the nineteenth century. In the history of classical scholarship, discussions of ancient psychology have paradigmatically been tied to mythical and philosophical notions of irrationality. Dodds’s interest in antique phenomena subversive of ideals of reason and truth is embedded in the dialectic of Apollo and Dionysus that Nietzsche postulated as inherent in Greek culture.³⁰ Dodds’s pathbreaking research gave a new twist to this philosophical concern with the Greek experience of irrationality by associating it with psychoanalysis. This new twist exposed Dodds to criticism which he sought to assuage by showing that his discussion ²⁷ Lloyd-Jones 1985: 154. ²⁸ Lloyd-Jones 1985: 153. ²⁹ Brown 1957: 243. Dodds is described as one of the most “psychologically sophisticated Hellenists” in Devereux 1976: xxx. For a critical overview of Dodds’s classic work, see Price 1990: 367, 379, 381. ³⁰ For Nietzsche’s role in shaping the view of Greek irrationality, see Porter 2000: 226–8. The school known as the Cambridge ritualists had its own impact on transmitting the importance of the experience of irrationality for the study of ancient Greek culture.

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remained respectful of the philological principle of preserving the difference between antiquity and modernity. The book was based on a lecture series originally delivered to “many anthropologists and other scholars who had no specialist knowledge of ancient Greece.”³¹ The mixed audience inspired Dodds to pursue a challenging methodology, even though he was aware that such an alliance between classical studies, psychology, and anthropology would evoke reservations among contemporary philologists. Careful not to generate antagonism towards a psychological understanding of the ancients, he felt obliged to address his “fellow-professionals” somewhat defensively. In the preface to The Greeks and the Irrational Dodds expresses a concern about his readers’ responses to the way he uses “recent anthropological and psychological observations and theories.”³² The concern specifically relates to his work on dreams. Acknowledging the possible contribution of psychoanalytic developments to the study of dreams in antiquity, Dodds imported Freudian ideas of repression, defense mechanisms, and the unconscious. He also hinted, though tongue in cheek, that there is an interesting connection, an unexpected affinity, between modern and ancient interest in dreams: Dreams, as it now appears, are highly significant after all; the ancient art of oneirocritice once more provides clever men with a lucrative livelihood, and the most highly educated of our contemporaries hasten to report their dreams to the specialist with as grave an anxiety as the Superstitious Man of Theophrastus.³³

In the first half of the twentieth century, the interpretation of dreams was an important method in the modern practice of the care of the soul. Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in particular, and psychoanalysis in general, flourished and became central in studies of the arts and literature, providing an important toolbox for critical theory. And yet philology responded defensively to any effect psychoanalysis might have on it, and fortified itself against its abduction by this modern theory understood to be foreign. Accordingly, Dodds felt a need to assure his philological readers that he had been careful not to impose psychoanalytic methodology on ancient dreams: There are two ways of looking at the recorded dream-experience of a past culture: we may try to see it through the eyes of the dreamers themselves, and thus reconstruct as far as may be what it meant to their waking consciousness; or we may attempt, by applying principles derived from modern dream-analysis, to

³¹ Dodds 1951: preface.

³² Dodds 1951: viii.

³³ Dodds 1951: 103.

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penetrate from its manifest to its latent content. The latter procedure is plainly hazardous: it rests on an unproved assumption about the universality of dreamsymbols which we cannot control by obtaining the dreamer’s associations. That in skilled and cautious hands it might nevertheless yield interesting results, I am willing to believe; but I must not be beguiled into essaying it.³⁴

Accessing ancient notions of dreams is for Dodds a commendable objective, but applying a psychoanalytic approach to the ancient dream in order “to penetrate from its manifest to its latent content,” is already “hazardous.”³⁵ Dodds’s programmatic declaration sheds light on classical studies as a twentieth-century discipline that comes to grips with modern theoretical demands. More specifically, it sheds light on the winding course it has pursued in the assimilation of these modern theories. Regarding psychoanalysis, Dodds accepts that the principles derived from modern dream-analysis apply to ancient dreams. The ancient dream, according to his view, often contains latent meanings featuring the dreamer’s desires and anxieties, concealed by the dream’s manifest content. He considers the ancient psychological dream-work an example of a human constant and in this sense no different from modern dream-work.³⁶ Dodds accepts the claim of universality for the unconscious as a phenomenon that crosses temporal boundaries, but is reluctant to adopt Freudian hermeneutic strategies and to psychoanalyze the ancients. More specifically, he is reluctant to accept what he conceives as “an unproved assumption about the universality of dream-symbols.” He thereby rejects not only any analysis premised on that, but also the very possibility of deciphering the idiosyncratic significance of the ancient dream’s manifest content. Dodds, then, does acknowledge the existence of an ancient unconscious, but views attempts to expose its hidden contents as unproductive. “Our” unconscious, he seems to be saying, is categorically different from “their” unconscious, even if “their” waking consciousness appears to “us” more tenable and plausible.³⁷ More precisely, the ancients’ ³⁴ Dodds 1951: 103. ³⁵ Interestingly, Dodds made a call for a skilled psychoanalyst to interpret ancient dreams, promising that the endeavor might “yield interesting results.” Dodds 1951: 103. In 1976, Devereux took up the challenge in his Dreams in Greek Tragedy. ³⁶ Dodds’s view was contested by various scholars, among them Price 1990: 367, 379, 381. William Harris accepts the argument of affinity and continuity between ancient and modern dream experiences but on different theoretical premises. For Harris, it is not Freud’s unconscious that totalizes all dream experiences of different times and cultures, but, rather, the dream’s physiological-neurobiological core. Harris 2009: 13. ³⁷ The unconscious is only one way of marking the ancients’ complete otherness. Consider the work of Arthur W. H. Adkins, who consistently stressed the otherness of the Greeks when studying their ethics and morality in Adkins 1960. Cf. Louden 1996: 12.

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unconscious thoughts are unavailable to us because they belong to a distant culture. For Dodds, the unconscious means “something” that is latently present and needs to be uncovered and analyzed in a psychoanalytic session. The fact that we cannot offer ancient dreamers a couch and ask them to yield their stream of associations makes their unconscious impenetrable.³⁸ Citing the lack of access to the ancient dreamer’s freie Einfälle, Dodds avoids tracking down the ancients’ subjective experience of dreaming.³⁹ The traditional position assuming a clear-cut distinction between consciousness and the unconscious rests on seeing them as two fields belonging to two separate registers. Thus, for example, this distinction is apparent in Plato’s classification of dreaming and dream-interpreting into two different faculties. While the dream is created “when the power of . . . intelligence is fettered in sleep,” Plato explains, its interpretation “belongs to a man in his right mind.”⁴⁰ Dodds leaves the ancient experience of dreaming outside of his investigation. It is, rather, the dream’s modified version as a written text that provides Dodds with a way to assess the ancients’ conscious attitude to the dream. An investigation directed at the dream’s wakeful elaborations is the only way left to us, Dodds argues, and the only approach which has any value for a philological study. Turning to the dream’s wakeful elaboration as a source for his investigation, Dodds’s study focuses on the dream-patterns, on those cultural conventions that provide us with a grammar—consisting of typical textual and visual forms—through which the otherwise inaccessible subjective experience is partially transmitted. Dodds’s elaboration of the notion of the “culture-pattern” dream is, therefore, one of

³⁸ One source of philological ambivalence towards psychoanalysis lies, in my view, in a confusion often made between psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytic hermeneutics. There is, accordingly, a need to differentiate between the role of the unconscious in shaping narratives of self-disclosure, the products of analytic sessions, and the role of the unconscious as a principle of exegesis. The latter is the present study’s main concern. ³⁹ Thus he concurs with Freud: “But dream-interpretation of such a kind, without reference to the dreamer’s associations, would in the most favorable case remain a piece of unscientific virtuosity of very doubtful value.” Freud, “Some Additional Notes on DreamInterpretation as a Whole,” SE 19: 128. ⁴⁰ Timaeus 71e. Freud distinguishes between the subjective dream experience and the process of consolidating the dream as a spoken and written object of reflection. According to Freud, a dream text can never recover the dream experience as a whole. Rather, the dream text is always a product of the integration of the sleeping experience with attempts to restore it by means of narration and interpretation. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 514. Freud’s distinction between the dream experience and its later verbal and written modifications does not rest on a rigid split between unconscious and conscious, however. Both parts of the dream text are subject to the work of the unconscious.

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his main achievements; it is how he defends his strict philological position from the dangers of his Freudian proclivities: My main concern is not with the dream-experience of the Greeks, but with the Greek attitude to dream-experience. In so defining our subject we must, however, bear in mind the possibility that differences between the Greek and the modern attitude to dreams may reflect not only different ways of interpreting the same type of experience, but also variations in the character of the experience itself.⁴¹

Whereas he insists on the differences between ancient and modern culture-pattern dreams, Dodds recognizes the common ground of ancient and modern dreams, specifically that they all reflect unconscious thoughts. Yet, for Dodds, the ancient unconscious nevertheless remains terra incognita, and unconquerable. In this respect, for him, as for the traditional classicist, ancient descriptions of dreams remain dubious hermeneutic tools for deciphering the work of the unconscious. Disconnected from their original dreaming subjects, ancient dream texts are like dead letters. Dodds’s reservations concerning the decipherability of the ancient unconscious derive from his Freudian belief that the analysis of dreams requires the dreamers’ active collaboration in the interpretative process.⁴² His reservations echo old Platonic fears about the loss of the speaking subject. Discussing the invention of writing in the Phaedrus, Plato sees a text as mute and uncommunicative once living speech, parent to logos, has been lost: “it [writing bereft of an original speaker] always needs its father to attend to it, being quite unable to defend itself or attend to its own needs” (Plato, Phaedrus 275e). Analogously, without the presence of ancient dreamers, the textual residues of the ancient unconscious remain inanimate. Plato, who sought to retain the dialogic dimension of live conversation in writing, felt the speaker’s disappearance as an irrevocable loss. The invention of the written text was viewed as tantamount to digging the philosopher’s grave, given that the written text produces a mute speaker who is prevented from responding freely to the reader’s inquiries. Resembling the dead signs of ancient speakers, the written dreams of antiquity confront a Freudian philologist, like Dodds, with the dead signs of an unrecoverable unconscious. While Plato responded to the danger of the loss of presence by forging a textual alternative that would allow some engagement with the past presence through the dramatization of dialectics, Dodds’s typical philological position resorts to the barrier of time as the ultimate reason why an ancient unconscious cannot echo back to an inquiry into past experience. He is reluctant to put himself in danger of going beyond the written and ⁴¹ Dodds 1951: 103.

⁴² Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 515.

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thus succumbing to a psychoanalytically motivated fantasy of making the lost past present. The philologist’s reluctance to submit the ancients to modern analysis has not disappeared completely from current philological writing. Thus, for example, Ellen Oliensis’s contribution to the “Cambridge Series on Roman Literature and its Contexts” offers a psychoanalytically oriented reading of ancient texts. Freud’s Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry binds psychoanalysis to the discussion of authorial intention and instances of the textual unconscious in Roman literature.⁴³ Oliensis is writing towards the end of a decade when “psychoanalysis has been absorbed into the mainstream of Roman studies.” And yet she still hears the censor’s admonishing voice, so familiar to those of us trained in classical philology: Yet I need to acknowledge, here at the outset, that the question also carries, to my anxious ears at least, something of the urgency of a challenge or even a rebuke. Really now, in heaven’s name, why would someone working with Latin poetry take up psychoanalysis of all things? For the truth is that psychoanalysis has always had a checkered reception within the discipline of Classics.⁴⁴

It is hard to overcome the temptation to see the philological critique of psychoanalysis in a perspective derived from that upstart discipline. Has the general attitude of classical studies towards psychoanalysis been symptomatic of the discipline’s Oedipal structure? More than any other modern field of inquiry, the young field of psychoanalysis has been a threat to the philological father. And thus haunted by their loyalty to the law of the father, some modern classicists have been typically alarmed by the possible charge of anachronism that an assimilation of psychoanalytical theory might involve. Ironically, it is mostly in the controversy around the reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex that the antagonism towards psychoanalysis has betrayed the conservative bias of the classicists’ profession. A mechanism internal to classical studies guards against psychoanalysis that seems to interfere with its primal commitment to reconstruct and preserve the values of a past culture. For the field of classical studies, it is specifically psychoanalysis’s openness to anachronism and its attraction to the anachronic dimension of the unconscious that makes it alien to the philological project. ⁴³ Oliensis’s study reflects a current tendency to place the classical text in broader contexts within which the relationship to psychoanalytic theories of ancient paradigms of myth, desire, and subjectivity is examined. For this interdisciplinary approach, see, for example, Zajko and O’Gorman: 2013. ⁴⁴ Oliensis 2009: 2. See also Richard Caldwell’s opening sentence in an essay dealing with psychoanalysis and Greek myth: “Psychoanalytic interpretations of both Greek myth and Greek literature have often met with skepticism and outright hostility” (Caldwell 1990: 344).

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Psychoanalysis shows great interest in the ancient turn to the future through dreams, oracles, and other enigmatic texts to discover what is latent in the present. Whereas philology regards this hermeneutic praxis as typical of the ancients, psychoanalysis takes it to be congruous with its own modern premises. This understanding finds arresting articulation in Freud’s concluding remarks to The Interpretation of Dreams, where he shows how ancient and modern views concerning the unconscious play with time and have much in common. The familiarity of the ancients with the futural structure of how a text unfolds is not only challenging for Freud’s hermeneutics, but also indicative of their experience of the unconscious as a trope for an implicit structure of meaning: And the value of dreams for giving us knowledge of the future? There is of course no question of that. It would be truer to say instead that they give us knowledge of the past. For dreams are derived from the past in every sense. Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past.⁴⁵

According to Freudian hermeneutics, both antiquity and modernity share the psychoanalytic promise of the unconscious as something still to come, resonating with and in some way pointing to the future.

1.4 The unconscious and Gadamer’s fusion of times The relationship between the philologist and the psychoanalyst is a theme that is developed by philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), to whose conception of a temporally based hermeneutics my inquiry is, as will become clear, significantly indebted. In Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer focuses on three figures who, for him, embody and are, as such, important for understanding three hermeneutic positions for negotiating the past: the philologist, the historian, and the psychologist. His treatment of these figures is ultimately critical, underscoring the limitations of a predominant notion of “reconstruction” that governs these models of understanding the past, of rendering the past meaningful in and for the present. Gadamer begins by analogizing the philologist and the historian:

⁴⁵ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 621.

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The philologist is a historian, in that he discovers a historical dimension in his literary sources. Understanding, then, is for him a matter of placing a given text in the context of the history of language, literary form, style, and so on, and thus mediating it with the whole context of historical life.⁴⁶

According to Gadamer, the modus operandi shared by the philologist and historian in achieving understanding of a given text is the fundamental act of locating and framing that text within a wider explanatory context. Both treat the ancient text “as other available historical material—i.e., as the socalled relics of the past.”⁴⁷ For a particular text to become meaningful, it needs to be mediated by a reconstruction of “the whole context of historical life” to which it originally belonged and which no longer exists. The philologist-historian also comes to an understanding of the past in a way similar to the psychologist’s approach to the mind: Interpretation is necessary where the meaning of a text cannot be immediately understood. It is necessary wherever one is not prepared to trust what a phenomenon immediately presents to us. The psychologist interprets in this way by not accepting the expressions of life in their intended sense but delving back into what was taking place in the unconscious. Similarly, the historian interprets the data of tradition in order to discover the true meaning that is expressed and, at the same time, hidden in them.⁴⁸

For Gadamer, the very need for an interpretation attests to the manner in which the ancient text is given to us, that is, to a gap existing between the text’s apparent immediate givenness and what calls for further understanding—its meaning. In interpreting a text, the philologisthistorian and the psychologist both seek to move beyond “what a phenomenon immediately presents to us” into a hidden domain in which the core of a text’s meaningfulness is to be found. In this context, it is interesting to notice that Gadamer evokes the notion of the “unconscious.” He does so, however, in a manner that allows the psychoanalytic sense of the term to intersect with its more traditional hermeneutic sense. Thus, for him, the psychic space of the unconscious intertwines with a dimension of hiddenness that is essential to the text and, in a corollary manner, to the process of understanding as such. Like the psychologist, who brackets the immediate meaning-intentions apparent in a person’s expressions, the philologist-historian also searches for an analogous “unconscious,” that which is structurally not given to—not a content of—consciousness. From a philological perspective, this analogy suggests ⁴⁶ Gadamer 1975: 337. On the common understanding of the philologist and the historian, see also Gadamer 1975: 335. ⁴⁷ Gadamer 1975: 336. ⁴⁸ Gadamer 1975: 336.

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that an interpreter’s objective cannot remain within the reconstruction of an author’s intended utterance but is, in fact, also driven by attention to dimensions of the text which the author did not intend to convey to his original, ancient addressee. Philology, Gadamer implies, is interested in going beyond the intended utterance. It professes to find interest in what the ancient author “intended without saying.”⁴⁹ Embracing the unconscious as a structural textual element, Gadamer identifies its—often unnoticed—presence in the un-self-evident, hidden meaning grounding the interpretation of psychologist and philologist alike. And yet at the same time the manner in which these disciplines delve into the text’s “unconscious” is, for Gadamer, not radical enough. Gadamer is critical of a common historical tendency to appropriate the unique presence of the unconscious as if it were a positive phenomenon— a given—that is lost and simply requires reconstruction or rediscovery. That is, in their act of reconstruction, both psychology and philology typically remain committed to a positive conception of experience that is not altered by its inaccessibility. The past, for them, does not have a uniquely different mode of existence, but is understood as a fully given present that circumstantially lost its presence and thus calls for the historical enterprise of restoration. This is linked to a more general critique that Gadamer launches against these models of interpretation that, according to him, completely ignore the cardinal question of the relationship of interpretation to the horizon of time. But before I develop this idea, I wish to say another word about a somewhat legalistic term, Zeugnis, that Gadamer uses in describing the tendency (of philologist and psychologist alike) to approach texts as testimonies of a given, albeit buried, historical facticity. For him, in philology and psychology, a text is regarded as a testimony or a witness that “aids in establishing facts.”⁵⁰ Is there a way to understand the unconscious in terms that do not objectify it and turn it into yet another form of facticity? In many ways, this is a central aspect of Freud’s vision, one which Gadamer interestingly does not mention in his aforementioned short discussion of psychology. Is this because he sees in Freud a more radical interpreter than the common representative of the discipline, one who comes closer to the hermeneutic agenda he espouses himself ? In “The Unconscious” (1915), Freud makes similar use of a term borrowed from the epistemological and legal discourses concerned with evidence in order to describe the connection between consciousness and the unconscious. For him, the apparent manifestations of consciousness are, in and ⁴⁹ Gadamer 1975: 336. ⁵⁰ Gadamer 1975: 338. Cf. West’s use of evidence in West 1995: 16–17.

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of themselves, proof, Beweis, of the existence of the unconscious. And yet the language of proof is not used by Freud to establish—and thus reconstruct—a hidden factual order, but to bring into view a nonobjectified kind of presence that cannot be reduced to the form of a positive mental fact. Consciousness provides “incontrovertible proof ” (unanfechtbarer Beweis) of the existence of an unconscious network, but what has been proved as existing is an unknown, although “it is of course only as something conscious that we know it.”⁵¹ Freud sees the language of consciousness entangled with unconscious expression, producing disconnected and unintelligible parapraxes and dreams. According to Freud, a successful interpretation fills in the gaps created by the fragmentary and opaque data of this mixture.⁵² While having indeed lent itself to positivist readings, I think that Freud’s notion of the unconscious is most compelling—and most fruitful—when we recognize how it subverts the idea of a factual reconstruction. For Freud, the testimony of memory does not entail facts but renders the absence of the past irrevocable. The unconscious for Freud is atopos. What we have is only the expression of consciousness betraying the enigmatic declaration of the unconscious: “I was there.” Considering the ancient text through Freud’s idea of consciousness as an expression of the unconscious we may gain, and even propose, a different perspective on the task of philology. For Freud, the contents of consciousness, albeit belated and indirect, give access to the unconscious. Like consciousness, the ancient text summons the interpreter to search for additional meaning beyond the factual dimension of past experience. This is in contrast to the philological tendency to look for evidence outside the text that would ground its meaning. In searching for the experience embedded in the ancient text’s unconscious, philology cannot delve into the hidden, since the idea of past experience as hidden data is altogether rejected. The unconscious as a rule achieves presence in ancient expression belatedly, and its evidence is always given through the structure of Nachträglichkeit, thus falling outside the permissible focus of philology. To return to Gadamer’s critique of philology’s insensitivity to its temporal underpinnings, we may say that, for him, it is precisely the philologist’s awareness of and respect for the singularity of ancient times that ultimately covers up, whatever the explicit intentions, the temporal structure through which the ancient text becomes meaningful. In ⁵¹ Freud, “The Unconscious,” SE 14: 167. ⁵² “A gain in meaning is a perfectly justifiable ground for going beyond the limits of direct experience.” Freud, “The Unconscious,” SE 14: 167.

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searching for the meaning of a text within a clear and distinct temporal frame of reference, traditional philology cannot recognize the importance of a temporal fusion—a fusion of times—that is always already at work in constituting the horizons of the interpretation of a text. On these grounds, Gadamer makes it his business to distinguish between philological and hermeneutic approaches to the ancient text; the latter, for him, is liberated from a narrow historicism.⁵³ Gadamer vouches for the productivity of a hermeneutics that sustains a “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) and calls on the philologist to entertain an alternative interpretive position that would permit him to be part of the ancient text’s meaning. “The philologist,” he writes, “belongs to the text that he is reading,” and must therefore realize that “future generations will understand differently what he has read in the text.”⁵⁴ Failing to do so, the philologist and the historian would continue to labor under similar parochial, scientific premises. But what kind of attentiveness is required from us if we are interested in the meaning of the unconscious experience that cannot be reduced to the logic of facts? How can we develop an ear for the significance of an ancient unconscious experience whose unfolding is essentially temporal? How can temporality, the experience of time, be integral to our interpretation of the ancient unconscious? These questions are central for this study. We can say to begin with that we are looking for a radical change of perspective, one that would allow us to see that the passage of time is not a barrier to the interpretation of the ancient text so much as the condition and grounds of it. The Freudian Nachträglichkeit which provides this temporal structure has been often used in the context of the individual form of life, in miniature as it were, and in this study it will be employed in relation to the historical domain of textuality.

1.5 Anachronism as a new philological project Philologists and historians know that interpretation by its very nature constantly runs the risk of diluting the past with the interpreter’s

⁵³ Gadamer 1975: 338. In Truth and Method, Gadamer critically challenges the view that hermeneutics can be identified with philology. The target of his criticism is Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose reconstructions of the past Gadamer identifies as philological rather than hermeneutic. For Gadamer’s critique of Schleiermacher, see Gjesdal 2006: 133–56. ⁵⁴ Gadamer 1975: 340.

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present.⁵⁵ Such fusion is usually accepted, however, only if the experience of the present operates as a means to configure the life of the past.⁵⁶ Interpretation of the past (event or literary text) should be aware of the inevitable input of the interpreter’s experience and utilize the interpreter’s present horizon in the effort to bring the modern reader to the ancient author.⁵⁷ This temporal fusion imposed on the interpreter of the past as a default embodies for Gadamer the very essence of historical understanding: A really historical thought must also think its own historicity. Only then will it not chase the phantom of a historical object that is the object of progressive research but rather learn to recognize in the object the other of itself and hence the one as the other. The true historical object is no object but the unity of the one and the other, a relation in which the reality of history, as the reality of historical understanding, consists.⁵⁸

Gadamer does not believe that understanding a text written in another historical moment means to re-experience an original understanding. Rather, understanding is for him a realization of a temporal fusion between the past and the interpreter’s present.⁵⁹ The possibility of reliving an experience, or rather of understanding it through a fusion of times, should open our eyes to an important temporal feature of ancient experience. Temporal fusion pertains to the ancient experience of time, and not only to a modern approach to the ancient world.⁶⁰ As ⁵⁵ Friedrich Nietzsche’s radical views on classical philology are specifically relevant to our study. For Nietzsche, “philology does not uncover the past. It discovers the present in the light of the past’s endless futurity,” writes James Porter as he analyzes the philosophical and cultural notions constitutive of Nietzsche’s early philological writing. See Porter 2000: 14. ⁵⁶ Consider Theodor Mommsen’s view of the way in which the record of human history brings to fulfillment the life of the past in the experience of the present. In the first volume of The History of Rome, Mommsen takes the difference between modern and ancient periods to be grounded not on “a mere accident,” or “a mere matter of chronological convenience.” He asserts that “what is called modern history is . . . destined to experience in full measure the vicissitudes of national weal and woe, the periods of growth, of maturity, and of age.” Hence, he concludes, “the old task is ever set anew with a wider range and with a deeper meaning.” Mommsen 1864: 4. Cf. Norman O. Brown on Mommsen’s view of the historian’s task as writing the history of the past through the drama of the insistent present in Brown 1957: 241. ⁵⁷ Deborah H. Roberts refers to this hermeneutic approach in the context of the debate on how to translate ancient literature in “Translating Antiquity: Intertextuality, Anachronism, and Archaism” (Roberts 2007: 266). ⁵⁸ Gadamer 1975: 267. ⁵⁹ See Georgia Warnke’s interpretation of “understanding as participation” in Warnke 1987: 69. ⁶⁰ See, for example, the recent study of temporal dynamics in the context of ancient historiography, Grethlein 2013.

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I argue, an understanding of this complex structure of temporality is not only integral to the ancients’ reflection on experience but can also reflect their subjective experience itself. The inescapability of temporal fusion is explored no less, and perhaps even more, by the ancients. Consider, for example, ancient dream interpretation. This kind of art demanded from its practitioners a high awareness of, and competence in creating, temporal fusions. In the Homeric epic, the fusion between the dreamers’ past, present, and future is constantly in play. Ancient dreams are often thought to stage an event as an experience whose interpretation determines a future meaning. Agamemnon and Penelope are both alert to their dreams’ complex form of temporality. Ancient dreams often mark a twilight zone spanning two points in time, before and after the meaning of the dream unfolds. For Agamemnon, the dream (Il. 2.1–47) promises imminent victory over the Trojans. And yet Agamemnon needs time in order to evaluate the truth-value of the message of the dream. Likewise, Penelope in the famous dream of her twenty beloved geese killed by an eagle (Od. 19.508–53) has a similar experience where the dream’s resonance is dependent on developments over time. Her dream stages a completed event (the killing of her beloved geese), but, upon waking, Penelope is concerned by the present condition of her geese as well as with the dream’s possible future meaning. Ancient dreamers are exposed to a hermeneutic puzzle whose enigmatic core is time’s ambiguities. Overvaluing temporal boundaries and attempting to control time in historical discourse may result in dismissing the significant participation of time in the dynamic field of meaning. Making time part of our investigation of the dream experience, for example, means that we should take its duration into account, its dynamic effect on the dreamer. It consequently also means that the experience of time is the platform where meaning shows itself. An approach to the past that seeks to overcome temporal dynamics does not allow time to be pertinent to deciphering past experience. To accept time as essential for subjective experience is primarily to cease seeing temporal fusion as an impediment to our attempt to reconstruct past experience. In this sense dreams, like any other ambiguous mental experiences, engage the subject, ancient and modern alike, in a hermeneutic act that involves the blending of times. Ancient dreams offer us an example of the kind of experience that in particular requires the interpreter to go beyond immediate phenomena, beyond explicit acts, beyond factual accounts, and search for the hidden structure of meaning beyond the dreamer’s present horizon. This is a case where philology needs to rethink its own premises, and to reconsider the contribution of the temporality of the unconscious as a working principle in unravelling the meaning of a past experience.

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1.6 Antiquity and modernity: The familiar strangers In many ways this study violates the fundamental precept against anachronism that I have inherited from my excellent teachers of classical studies. Within the context of the present investigation the important philological rule against anachronism will be subverted in order to evoke intersections between the ancients and the moderns. It is definitely not my intention to restore nineteenth-century idealistic sentiments here. My motivation in reviving the discussion of the intersection between antiquity and modernity is hermeneutic. The encounter between the ancients and the moderns, which in the twentieth century was under threat of being written off because of its displays of both anachronism and universalism, will be explored in the following chapters as strategically important for establishing the theoretical grounds of the unconscious as I wish to draw it here: a core experience of humanity, the evidence for which lies in narratives whose complex temporality is figured by a fusion of horizons that connects them with texts written both prior to and after their production. Oedipus, as might be expected, will serve for us as a central figure in the investigation that follows. He is a central protagonist, first of all due to the twofold manner in which he contains a link between past and present, and between past and future. His experience in the past cannot be withdrawn from his future, while his present condition is a symptom of the inseparability of his past and future. Yet Oedipus displays a link in another important manner. He has become a figure of intersection, that is, a figure whose experience thematizes the meaning of the implicit meeting between antiquity and modernity, between philology and psychoanalysis, between textual criticism and intertextuality. The content of the Freudian unconscious depends in part on an intersection between the ancient text and the modern reader: The famous complex of (no longer really) ancient Oedipus makes its appearance, as we know, only in its modern future, in modernity. And yet the ancient tragedy provides many fragmentary and opaque manifestations of temporal confusions indicative of unconscious traces. Sophocles’ Oedipus, in the time of the play, both knows and does not know himself at the same time. He knows that there is a divine decree addressing his predicament in the future; and yet he does not know that that future has turned into a present and already become a past. The past appears to Oedipus as a future threat. In a corollary manner, what concerns me here is not the specificity of sexual or instinctual hidden contents but an often unnoticed temporal structure and, furthermore, a general relational principle that is integral, in my view, to the ancient experience embodied by the figure of Oedipus.

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Yet the unconscious does not—and will not—show itself as long as we view ancient experience as a phenomenal field of immediacy, one in which the inception of meaning can only occur within the narrow confines of a “now.” Searching for the unconscious in such a “now,” for example in the immediate experience of a tragic protagonist, will lead to nothing, because the imprint of the unconscious is never part of discrete and self-contained experience. The search for the unconscious will lead to nothing, because the unconscious is not a something, not a positive aspect of experience, but an underlying relational structure that is hidden by positive articulations of experience. The relational notion of the unconscious that I shall present in this study is not only temporal but generally irreducible to any one locality or to a positive demarcation. In this sense, it would be just as wrong to try to identify its presence in the mind or subjective affectivity of one particular person. Hence, in returning to Oedipus Rex, for example, I shall attend to the experience of its protagonist as essentially intertemporal and intersubjective. Oedipus’ “now” is couched in a conglomerate of past, present, and future. And the subjectivity to which he gives voice as an individual figure cannot be severed from an underlying matrix of perspectives including other figures such as Jocasta, the absent figure of the dead Laius, and, on a different level, the play’s indefinite number of spectators and readers. The ancient dramatization of intertemporal and intersubjective experience will be examined in ancient and modern descriptions of dreams and narratives that have absorbed the dream logic. While the typical question that arises in discussions of the unconscious in antiquity is whether or not the ancients had an unconscious, I offer an alternative approach giving rise to a different set of questions. The search for the ancient unconscious, as I understand it, does not seek to reveal a latent level of contents underlying the ancient text. Rather, the non-positive presence of the ancient unconscious will be discussed in the context of the dynamic relationship between ancient texts and their modern readers, between dream images and their transformations in modern dreams interpreted by psychoanalysis. I will consider, therefore, only reappearances of the ancient unconscious in texts that are temporally and culturally set apart from antiquity. For there are only traces of the unconscious—belated appearances—that appear in the horizon of interpretation, as part of a web of intertextuality. In my view, the meeting between the past and the past’s future is much more than a theoretical exercise. It is, after all, a central experience that structures our life and imagination. While thinking of the meeting between two different worlds, or two mental registers (living together even in the same person)

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separated by time and space, the image comes to mind of an accidental encounter between two strangers coming across each other by chance in the park or in the street. Can an encounter between two strangers involve, despite their alienation from each other, a sudden spark of recognition? Considering the meaning of the particular plane where the encounter of the ancients and moderns takes place, the question should be rearticulated. Can the present recognize its past? Can the past recognize its future? In the next chapter I shall consider such an occurrence of recognition, one that in the nineteenth century gave birth to the modern notion of the unconscious.

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Hegel’s antiquity Far away, so close

2.1 The past: Buried and unburied “Hegel and Freud,” writes Paul Ricoeur, “each stand as a separate continent.” And yet, he asserts, their use of a “dialectic of archeology” is homologous. Freud’s investigation of the unconscious is an archeology tied to “a teleology of the process of becoming conscious,”¹ says Ricoeur, for whom the archeological character of Freud’s investigation of the subject makes him a romantic: I regard Freudianism as a revelation of the archaic, a manifestation of the ever prior. Thus Freud’s thought has roots, both old and new, in the romantic philosophy of life and the unconscious. A review of Freud’s entire theoretical work from the viewpoint of its temporal implications would show that its main preoccupation is the theme of the prior, the anterior.²

Ricoeur’s reading of Freud brings to the fore Freud’s passionate relationship with the exciting discoveries of the archeology flourishing in the nineteenth century.³ Nineteenth-century archeology provided a stimulating image for the emerging concept of the unconscious in the early stages of psychoanalysis. Its ability to unearth new knowledge about the past triggered psychoanalysts to transpose the fieldwork of archeology into the field of mental life.⁴ Like the archeologist, the psychoanalyst is devoted to digging up fragments from different buried layers of the past requiring careful reconstruction. In this sense, the analogy of archeology was

¹ Ricoeur 1978: 461. ² Ricoeur 1978: 440. ³ The excavations by Schliemann at Hissarlik took place during Freud’s school and university years, and in later years there were Evans’s excavation of Knossos, and the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen by Carnarvon and Carter. On the impact of Schliemann’s excavations on the history of German philhellenism, see Marchand 2003: 118–24; Calder III: 1986. On the impact of contemporary archeological discoveries on Freud, see Bowie 1987: 18. ⁴ Freud presented archeology and psychoanalysis as sister arts. As the father of psychoanalysis, Freud could not disguise his predilection for the younger daughter. On Freud’s competitiveness with archeology, see Bowie 1987: 21.

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crucial for concretizing the application of the scientific tools of topography and stratigraphy in the investigation of the unconscious.⁵ Freud frequently used the metaphor of archeology to illustrate for his patients and readers alike the depth dimension of the new introspective method. Archeology provided Freud’s readers with an imaginative site through which the invisibility of the unconscious could to some extent be overcome. Furthermore, the display of ancient miniature figurines in Freud’s consulting room offered his patients a tangible analogy for their encounter with the unconscious. This is the impression one gets from Freud’s remarks to the Rat Man in his 1907 analysis. Wishing to demonstrate to the Rat Man the difference between the conscious and the unconscious, Freud turns his attention to the collection of archeological objects exhibited in the room: I then made some short observations upon the psychological differences between the conscious and the unconscious, and upon the fact that everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing-away, while what was unconscious was relatively unchangeable; and I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antiques standing about in my room. They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation: the destruction of Pompeii was only beginning now that it had been dug up.⁶

The collection of antique objects stands out first of all as remnants of a lost world. The objects’ visibility helps Freud show his patient something invisible. The tangible presence of the archeological finds offers Freud an analogy that objectifies the unconscious, thus making it more susceptible of characterization. There are mental things deeply buried inside us, Freud seems to say, but which through analysis can be excavated and thus appear, just like the archeological objects standing on the shelf. The antique objects are on display in Freud’s room just as the contents of the Rat Man’s inner life appear in the room, the site of his analysis. The space in which Freud carries out his analytic practice is thus specified as the site where the discovery of the unconscious takes place. Observe these objects on the shelf, Freud seems to encourage his patient, and you will become aware of your unconscious and better understand it. Acts of burial and excavation, preservation and destruction, are the paired opposites, the terms by which Freud speaks of the difference between the unconscious and the conscious: between the unchangeable

⁵ See Richard Armstrong’s discussion of the archeological analogy in Armstrong 2005: 184–200. ⁶ Freud “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” SE 10: 176.

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condition of the unconscious and the conscious-that-wears-away. Freud points to two modes in which unconscious thoughts remain preserved: buried and unburied. In these two modes the unconscious remains disconnected from the conscious, and thus the dichotomous relationship of conscious and unconscious is maintained: The buried-unburied images of the unconscious render it lifeless in comparison to the dynamic conscious. But, then, Freud pauses, and, for that moment seeming to give in to his unconscious, turns to undermine the justmade-clear distinction between the unconscious and the conscious. Suddenly Freud moves from his private collection to a completely different archeological register. The sudden shift in Freud’s thought reflects a doubt concerning the possibility of keeping the revealed unconscious completely detached from the dynamics of consciousness. Does the analogy of archeological objects really work for the unconscious? Do the unconscious and the conscious remain separate? Freud’s paratactic remark that “the destruction of Pompeii was only beginning now that it had been dug up” seems to suggest just the opposite. Taking him beyond the analytic room, Freud’s train of thought brings him to Pompeii. And it is through the image of that famous archeological site that a new insight regarding the unconscious emerges. This new idea of the unconscious seems to contradict and even undermine the logic behind Freud’s previous analogy of the archeological finds in his room. The metaphor of Pompeii defies the facticity and objective parameters that Freud’s metaphor of archeological objects provides for the unconscious. With the example of the excavations at Pompeii, Freud arrives at a new insight about the unconscious. By exposing the buried past to the light of the present, the destruction of the past in its state of conservation begins. The only way to preserve the past unchanged is to keep it buried. Like archeology, psychoanalysis digs up the quiescent past, bringing unconscious thoughts across the boundary to consciousness. This transition affects the unchangeable character of the unconscious by exposing it to the unceasingly changeable conscious mind. For “everything conscious” Freud asserts is “subject to a process of wearing away.”⁷ But what in fact are we learning about Freud’s notion of the unconscious from his metaphor of archeology? Does he identify the unconscious with the buried objects discovered in excavations? Not necessarily. Exposing the shards of the past to the light of the analytic session terminates their previous preserved state, disconnecting them from the unchangeable

⁷ Freud “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” SE 10: 176.

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unconscious. It turns out that what we can know about the unconscious, through the excavation of the buried past, is always interfered with by mediating consciousness. Freud argues that the very process of becoming aware of the unconscious ultimately brings about its destruction, for it is transformed, thus losing its distinctive condition of changelessness. The metaphor of the excavation of Pompeii illustrates this idea: Psychoanalysis’ archeological quest culminates in a moment of exposure in which unconscious thoughts dissolve into consciousness. For Freud, this moment of exposure, the moment in which the unconscious is discovered, has a specific and actual historical manifestation: the discovery of classical antiquity in modern times.⁸ It is common knowledge that antiquity has a special role in the history of the evolution of modern psychoanalysis. But this does not mean, as it is often understood, that classical antiquity is a primary historical domain of facts that could serve to narrate the history of the unconscious. The role of antiquity as a primordial beginning, a mythic origin for studying the evolution of modern phenomena, pertains to a positivist history such as Henri Ellenberger puts forward in The Discovery of the Unconscious. For Ellenberger, discovering the ancient, prescientific sources of psychoanalysis means uncovering early shamanistic, philosophical, and medical practices and texts. This kind of positivist approach to the history of the unconscious is ensconced in a history of events. Ellenberger’s historical approach, then, suggests that the discovery of the unconscious should be investigated on “the ground of historical facts.”⁹ Freud’s rejigging of the metaphor for the unconscious implies a different conception for its retrieval. His example of Pompeii offers us a historical pattern through which the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious can be construed. In the analogy of the digging of Pompeii, Freud discerns a moment of exposure where the past is recognized in the present. Thus, the discovery of Pompeii brings Freud to realize the place of the unconscious in the life of consciousness. For the psychoanalytic history of the self, the uncovering of the unconscious marks an irreversible stage in the life of consciousness. It is not only the stage in which the subject becomes aware of her unconscious, but also one in which she recognizes the links between her unconscious and conscious experience.

⁸ By way of analogy, think of the episode in Fellini’s Roma (1972) depicting the fading away of ancient frescoes in the underground site as soon as they are exposed for the first time to fresh air. ⁹ Ellenberger 1970: 886.

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Freud’s insight is grounded in nineteenth-century discourses in history and philosophy¹⁰ that challenge the tradition of chronological history.¹¹ The influence of these kinds of non-positivist history is apparent in Freud’s historicization of the self.¹² It is interesting that the development of this kind of historical thinking went hand in hand with expressions of a certain figure of thought, a particular conviction deeply rooted in German culture, one well-known version of which was the anachronic metaphor coined by Jacob Burckhardt: the sacred marriage, hieros gamos, between the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Germany.¹³ Relating to the connection between modern Germans and ancient Greeks in terms of matrimony, Burckhardt conceives the contribution of the Greek spirit to the German Bildung as essentially hereditary.¹⁴ Much more than a cultural inspiration, the Greek spirit governs the very system of the inner life of Germany, shaping perceptual and cognitive faculties. Perhaps the most striking example from The Greeks and Greek Civilization, capturing Burckhardt’s notion of the Hellenic Germans, is when he resorts to the first-person plural: “We see with their eyes and use ¹⁰ Matt Ffytche writes that the nineteenth-century romantic inquiry into human existence embraced the idea that “history, psychology and the unconscious become intimately allied with each other” (Ffytche 2012: 143). For further reading on the notion of the “historical unconscious,” see Ffytche 2012: 138–77. ¹¹ “Historical thinking for Schelling implies a necessary revision of notions of order, connection and meaning per se,” writes Ffytche (2012: 139). ¹² Richard Armstrong presents the reciprocity between history and psychoanalysis as follows: “The recourse to history is thus to be understood recursively. Psychoanalysis needs historical methods to illuminate and clarify the analytic task, but history is itself a psychological need that psychoanalysis can best explain. If psychoanalysis can thus explain the writing of history, does it not become itself a method of historiographical analysis?” (Armstrong 2005: 168–9). ¹³ “From the time of Winckelmann and Lessing, and of Voss’s translation of Homer, a feeling has grown up of the existence of a ‘sacred marriage’ (hieros gamos) between the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Germany, a special relationship and sympathy shared by no other Western people in modern times” (Burckhardt 1998: 10–11). Benjamin Z. Kedar comments on this passage: “What Jacob Burckhardt is talking about in this part of the introduction is the relationship of the present, especially of present-day German Bildung, with the Hellenes. It is clear that Burckhardt is referring to German culture, of which he considers himself a part, and certainly not the German nation, or the Second Reich that came into being just two years before he began his lectures on Griechische Kulturgeschichte. Burckhardt grew up in a world in which ‘German’ designated a culture that flourished in various political settings, from Prussia to Württemberg to Bavaria to the Austrian Empire to Switzerland; and he may be alluding not only to the purported similarity of the Hellenic and German spirits, but also to the flourishing of Hellenic culture in different political entities” (correspondence with author). ¹⁴ In this respect, Burckhardt reflects a traditional aspect of German thought and, as . . Momigliano points out, his Kulturgeschichte “is a monument to the Romantic spirit he had absorbed before 1848, a monument if not actually anachronistic, at least certainly created when the main German historians of the Greek world could no longer fail to see its defects” (Momigliano 1994: 47–8).

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their phrases when we speak.”¹⁵ It is by way of this spiritual fusion between modern present and classical past that the notion of the unconscious reverberates:¹⁶ One great advantage of studying cultural history is the certainty of its more important facts, compared with those of history in the ordinary sense of narrated events: . . . Cultural history by contrast [to history in the ordinary sense] possesses a primary degree of certainty, as it consists for the most part of material conveyed in an unintentional, disinterested, or even involuntary way by sources and monuments; they betray their secrets unconsciously [unbewusst] and even, paradoxically, through fictitious elaborations, quite apart from the material details they may set out to record and glorify, and are thus doubly instructive for the cultural historian.¹⁷

Burckhardt underlines the role of the unconscious in constructing the cultural history of ancient Greece as opposed to “history in the ordinary sense.” Mere chronology of facts and events, argues Burckhardt, is no key for retrieving the ancient mind. Unlike the positivist approach, the unconscious aspects of the past are essential for Burckhardt’s idea of history. Burckhardt’s systematic history assigns meaningfulness to “the unintentional, disinterested, or even involuntary” expressions of ancient sources and monuments. This vision of cultural history thus encourages the future historian to develop an awareness of unconscious connections created between the modern historian and the ancient sources and monuments. Modern readers and viewers encounter things unconsciously revealed by ancient remains. Such a discovery of antiquity’s buried secrets, which the process of time lays bare before the modern eye, has a direct bearing on modern affiliations with the ancient world. Though the modern explorer may approach this distant past as concealed and inaccessible,¹⁸ it is nevertheless integral to the modern field of vision. In this sense, Burckhardt imagines a historical landscape similar to Freud’s Pompeii, namely a present that allows the past to appear.

¹⁵ Burckhardt 1998: 36. ¹⁶ The text of The Greeks and Greek Civilization is based on Burckhardt’s lectures on Griechische Kulturgeschichte (delivered during 1872, 1874, 1878, and 1885) and was published after his death; it is not clear that he intended to publish it at all; hence, it cannot be regarded as an authorized text. See Murray 1998: xxxiii. ¹⁷ Burckhardt 1998: 5. Cf. Armstrong 2005: 176, who quotes and comments on this passage in the context of discussing the impact of nineteenth-century historiography on Freud’s thought. ¹⁸ Schelling’s notion of the past as inaccessible to chronology is evidently an influence on this construction. See Schelling 2007.

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2.2 Antiquity: A fountainhead of ambiguities The methodology of Burckhardt’s cultural history is visual at its core.¹⁹ Cultural history is based on a method of seeing, of making the past show up in the modern field of vision. Burckhardt’s vision of history, a vision open to the encounter between past and present, has its origins in Hegel’s articulation of the relationship between modern Germans and the ancients.²⁰ For Hegel, the cultural landscape created by the fusion between the moderns and the ancients is indispensable for recognizing the inner structure of modern consciousness.²¹ In contrast to Burckhardt’s revelation of antiquity’s unconscious expressions, Hegel’s interest in this kind of relational history allows the moderns to gain a new perspective on themselves. Antiquity’s irruption into the life of the modern spirit is for him evidence of one dimension of the modern unconscious. Hegel’s notion of antiquity, especially antiquity’s formative role in the education of youth, reinforces the idea that the intricate relationship between the moderns and the ancients is the product of an unconscious network. Hegel’s particular contribution to our discussion relies on the way he grapples with prevailing sentiments about the classical heritage. In Hegel’s world, classical antiquity had been an object of admiration and idealization “for more than a thousand years.”²² As such, it may seem surprising that this admirable, pristine period, a cultural paragon, would provide an opportunity to encounter the unconscious. On the face of it, cultural history provides an array of distinctive figures of otherness that seem to be better candidates for evoking the unconscious than the perfection of antiquity (Altertum). Are not anti-classical tropes such as those of the barbarous, the monstrous, the irrational, the Jew, or the African better suited as preliminary constructs for the articulation of the unconscious? And yet it is precisely the symbolic significance of antiquity as an ideal home for humanity that for Hegel opens up a strange, uncanny space of otherness. In Hegel, antiquity’s otherness is made explicit by recourse to ambiguous sentiments and contradictory ideas that are latent in its idealized representation. The following dualities provide the backdrop against which I read Hegel’s antiquity.

¹⁹ Weintraub 1966; Holly 1988. ²⁰ “Burckhardt’s . . . cultural history is a commitment to a method of research originally rooted in Hegelian sentiments” (Holly 1988: 48). Cf. Gombrich 1969. ²¹ On the recovery of antiquity as central to the project of modernity and to the development of modern self-understanding, see Kelley 2002: 42–50. ²² Hegel 1961: 321.

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2.2.1 IDEALIZATION AND REPRESSION Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s aesthetic principles of “noble simplicity” and “tranquil grandeur”²³ are widely acknowledged as having contributed to the creation of the idealized picture of antiquity as a model of perfection. And yet, through a critical reading of the German neo-humanist tradition, a more complicated picture of the ancient world emerges, bringing to light impressions of it that were always part of the picture, albeit underground. Thus, even in the writings of the greatest advocates of the ancient Greeks, feelings of affinity and alienation coexist, reflecting modern responses to antiquity’s less-seen dark elements along with what is familiar, benign, and anodyne. The other side of the Greeks, their dark, irrational, vulnerable, and violent traits, were therefore integral, albeit implicitly, to the serene picture created by the classicist tradition. It was a serenity held in place by repression under the regime of rationality, consistency, and love. The other side of antiquity has always been, however, part of the sphere of the historically visible, although the spectators of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were at times blind to it.²⁴ This modern failure to perceive antiquity in its “dual nature”²⁵ is inseparable from the blind spots, resistances, and self-denials characteristic of the work of the unconscious, and which Hegel’s work brings to the fore. In the nineteenth century a new articulation of the ancient past prevails, and while it continues to perpetuate an idealized view of antiquity, it also allows for alternative voices, which openly problematize this idealization. The growth of cultural awareness of the enigmatic and equivocal image of antiquity was fed by two interrelated developments. The recognition that classical antiquity represents something other than just an ideal past is entangled with the growing understanding that the idealization of the past is a product of imagination and denial.²⁶ Thus, ²³ For Winckelmann, the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön embody these principles, and epitomize classical perfection in art. See his “Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture” (1755). ²⁴ James Porter ties Nietzsche’s critique of the “repressed classicism” of his time with his “revaluation of cruelty, passion, and turbulence in the classical world” (Porter 2000): 183–4. ²⁵ Abi Warburg’s criticizes Winckelmann’s hegemonic view of the essence of antiquity and calls for the adoption of an “unprejudiced approach to the dual nature of the rich inheritance of antiquity.” In “The Emergence of the Antique as a Stylistic Ideal in Early Renaissance Painting” (1914) in Warburg 1999: 273 (my italics). ²⁶ James Porter shows how Winckelmann’s writing on the aesthetic perfection of the Apollo Belvedere is in fact a rewriting which covers up and disavows his earlier critical analysis of the statue’s “faults.” For Porter, the Apollo Belvedere shows classicism to be an illusory property of works of art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Porter 2005: 32–5.

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the modern nineteenth-century revision of earlier conceptions of antiquity began to shed its defense of classical perfection. As James Porter argues, in the nineteenth century the perfect image of antiquity was understood to be a reflection of modernity’s wishful thinking, and it could be acknowledged that the moderns were using this antique perfection to fashion their own self-image.²⁷

2.2.2 CHILDREN AND ANCESTORS Modern ambivalence about the ancients is typical of cross-generational relationships. As an ideal model, antiquity embodies a parental figure that the modern spirit identifies with and through which its process of individuation begins. For Hegel, as we shall see, this kind of relationship entails a duality: the modern spirit is split between its desire to preserve the ideal past and to make its own progress. The idealization of the parental figure offers an analogy through which the moderns’ cultural aggrandizement of classical antiquity makes for fertile ground for repressions and distortions. Imagining the ancient Greeks as mythical ancestors builds up grandiose expectations. Cultivating admiration of the classical fathers does not interfere with a completely different image of these great classical fathers as innocent children of a lost paradise. For the moderns, antiquity is a figure of ambiguity based on a tension between an age of wisdom and experience and civilization’s childhood.²⁸

2.2.3 CHTHONIC AND OLYMPIAN The archetypical perception of the ancients in the image of the forefathers suggests that the connection to the ancients, despite being modern, is patriarchal at heart. And yet, side by side with this patriarchal union, the notion of an organic bond between the moderns and the ancients has tended towards alternative imagery based on a mother and child relationship. This duality appears, for example, in the use of Olympian and chthonic ideologies characteristic of the nineteenth-century German approach to antiquity.

²⁷ Porter 2000: 179. ²⁸ On canonical images of cross-generational relationships, see my discussion of John of Salisbury’s “dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants” in Chapter 5.

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2.3 Self-estrangement Hegel discusses classical antiquity in several works, but his treatment of it in his speech “On Classical Studies” evolves from his concern about the future of classical studies, which by the mid-eighteenth century begins to lose its status as the ultimate academic prerequisite of the humanities and as the foundation of any scientific progress.²⁹ The year is 1809 and Hegel, rector of the Nuremberg Gymnasium, addresses the educational implications of making German rather than Latin the formal language of all sciences. Bereft of its practical role, Latin, and thus also ancient Greek, risk becoming obsolete. Hegel expresses concern in his speech for the future study of the classics and undertakes the task of reinforcing the links between the ancients and the moderns.³⁰ The lecture reflects some general ideas central to Hegel’s philosophy that two years earlier were thematized in a more philosophical and dialectical way in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). In his rectoral speech Hegel expresses two themes central to The Phenomenology of Spirit, themes integral to his educational program and specifically to his understanding of the place of classical studies in the humanistic curriculum: But the substance of Nature and Spirit must have confronted us, must have taken the shape of something alien to us, before it can become our object. Unhappy he whose immediate world of feelings has been alienated from him—for this means nothing less than the snapping of those bonds of faith, love, and trust which unite heart and head with life in a holy friendship. The alienation which is the condition of theoretical erudition does not require this moral pain, or the suffering of the heart, but only the easier pain and strain of the imagination which is occupied with something not given in immediate experience, something foreign, something pertaining to recollection, to memory and the thinking mind.³¹

The knowledge of “Nature and Spirit” cannot be derived, according to Hegel, from the immediate field of perception. Our immersion in the immediate experience belongs to the natural sphere of consciousness, a sphere that is not connected to spiritual truth, and consequently does not lead to self-consciousness. Accordingly, truth is something that the human spirit can reach only through a process. During this process the immediate experience undergoes transformation in which consciousness is objectified through a movement of recognition. Consciousness, in ²⁹ On the decline of humanistic learning by the mid-eighteenth century and the increasing investment in empirical disciplines, see Marchand 1996: 37. ³⁰ On the ongoing debate about the status of the discipline of classics in the nineteenth century, see Porter 2000: 9. ³¹ Hegel 1961: 327–8.

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other words, gains distance from itself. This process of gaining objectivity demands alienation and self-estrangement, indispensable for transformation from consciousness to self-consciousness. Hegel describes this transformation in terms of “a return” or “a homecoming,” in which consciousness brings about the unity of the self. Thus, in returning home, consciousness reaffirms the self on a higher level. Hegel’s imagery delineates this philosophical process as a journey that should be a mandatory part of youth education. Hegel does not hold in high regard the journeys that young people are usually attracted to. These journeys, whose main aim is to help young travelers tear away from all aspects of their immediate experience (including their home, parents, country, and friends) do not result in any fundamental transformation. Geographical distance from home has no true bearing on a youth’s spiritual development. A transformational experience will occur only when we discover the inner distance separating the self from itself: The demand for this separation, however, is so necessary that everyone knows it as a familiar and common impulse. What is strange, and far away, attracts our interest and lures us to activity and effort: it seems to be more desirable the more remote it is and the less we have in common with it. The youth enjoys the prospect of leaving his native country and living like Robinson Crusoe on a distant island. It is a necessary illusion to begin by mistaking distance for profundity; in fact, the depth and strength to which we attain can be measured only by the distance between the point to which we were fleeing and the center in which we were engrossed at first and to which we shall finally return again.³²

Although Robinson Crusoe might play an important role as a literary cult-figure in the adolescent imagination, in Hegel’s view, he clearly cannot be a philosophical role model.³³ Hegel sympathizes with the common juvenile desire to leave whatever is familiar, recognizing it as a crucial motivating drive that “lures us to activity and effort”: “This centrifugal force of the soul explains why the soul must always be provided with the means of estranging itself from its natural condition and essence, and why in particular the young mind must be led into a remote and foreign world.”³⁴ And yet this important youthful desire has an illusionary force that makes one mistake distance for profundity. The journey appropriate to spiritual growth is, according to Hegel, far from being one-way, but should rather accommodate the structure of the ³² Hegel 1961: 328. ³³ In the section dedicated to the master–slave relationship, though, Hegel alludes to the “History of Robinson Crusoe and Friday.” See Hegel 1986: 86. ³⁴ Hegel 1961: 328.

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Odyssey including the preliminary story of Odysseus leaving Ithaca, namely a structure of leaving home and homecoming. Hegel suggests that the encounter with classical antiquity offers just such a spiritual model. Accordingly Hegel construes the study of antiquity as signifying the sphere of the “strange, and far away,” which attracts our interest and “lures us to activity and effort.” Classical antiquity symbolizes the most “desirable” field of experience, since it is denoted as “remote” and “foreign,” “pertaining to recollection, and to memory.” For Hegel, classical antiquity is a suitable educational site just because modern youth have less in common with it: Now, the screen best suited to perform this task of estrangement for the sake of education is the world and language of the ancients. This world separates us from ourselves, but at the same time it grants us the cardinal means of returning to ourselves: we reconcile ourselves with it and thereby find ourselves again in it, but the self which we then find is the one which accords with the tone and universal essence of mind.³⁵

For Hegel, then, antiquity represents a duality of distance and proximity. It is a site of both exile and home. Its foreignness is related to its place in the distant past, and its sense of familiarity depends on recollection. Hegelian antiquity is not a given. It is not an integral part of the domain of immediacy. Hegel’s antiquity relies, rather, on a relational notion of history, a dynamic sense of the past, which is connected to the future and involves self-transformation. Hegel explores these different senses of antiquity through the following images.

2.4 Golden apples in silver bowls Hegel’s image of antiquity relies on its spiritual heritage, its intellectual and ethical achievements: The works of the ancients contain the most noble food in the most noble form: golden apples in silver bowls. They are incomparably richer than all the works of any other nation and of any other time. The greatness of their sentiments, their statuesque virtue free from moral ambiguity, their patriotism, the grand manner of their deeds and characters, the multiplicity of their destinies, of their morals and constitutions—to recall these is enough to vindicate the assertion that in the compass of no other civilization was there ever united so much that was splendid, admirable, original, many-sided, and instructive.³⁶

³⁵ Hegel 1961: 328.

³⁶ Hegel 1961: 326.

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Hegel’s description of classical works stimulates the senses of sight and taste. Classical antiquity’s intellectual and moral achievements are imagined as golden apples in silver bowls. The sensuality of these fruits creates an illusion of proximity. But, actually, the moderns are not part of antiquity’s aesthetic horizon. The modern experience of antiquity is far from immediate. Antiquity’s golden fruits do not hang from the trees in some primordial garden. Instead of the fruits of Eden, Hegel’s metaphor features plucked fruits, piled together in a silver container. The image of the treasure bowl refers us to a cultural domain represented by antiquity. Antiquity’s spiritual products bear “the multiplicity of their destinies” and thus gain their appeal as the future’s precious objects. The contrast between the silver bowl and the golden apples in Hegel’s picture of antiquity suggests that antiquity cannot, in fact, be periodized. Antiquity is, rather, an age in transition, neither a golden nor a silver age. This dynamic notion of antiquity offers the moderns a model for selfreflection. For the modern age too is a dynamic construct of culture uniting different times. And yet, Hegel contends, the modern age fails to understand its relational place in history. The moderns are either completely immersed in the past, believing their generation to be a direct outcome of the classical world, or they are completely engrossed in the future, which they regard as a genuinely modern domain of responsibility. Hegel’s critique is directed both towards the “antiquarians” who cling to the ancient world and to the “modernists” who crave separation from it. From such a “modernist” point of view, the cultivation of antiquity as an invigorating model for modern life necessarily involves some blindness to current needs. A nation immersed in the past might fail to independently bring about its own spiritual achievements. In the speech, Hegel raises strong pedagogical concerns common to the period, and seeks to undermine them by a new vision of the role of the classics in modern education. Hegel raises the burning questions of his age: Why is it still necessary to study Greek and Latin? Are the classics still a vital part of the modern curriculum? Though for Hegel the answer to these questions is unequivocally positive, namely, antiquity must be preserved and continue to be studied, he proposes a more complicated response reflecting his dialectic position. Acknowledging the “modernist” point of view, Hegel says, “It seems to be a just demand that the civilization, art, and science of a nation should manage to stand on its own feet.”³⁷ Antiquity with all its infinite richness is an early stage in European history, that civilization’s childhood.

³⁷ Hegel 1961: 324.

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Germany’s ambition “to stand on its own feet,” therefore, represents an adult’s aspiration for self-definition and liberation from the golden shackles of a glorious childhood: Are we not entitled to assume that the achievements of modern times, our illumination and the progress of all arts and sciences, have worn out the Greek and Roman garments of their childhood and outgrown their leading-strings, so that they can now advance on their own territory without hindrance?³⁸

Hegel presents the seemingly warranted view (which he is about to refute) according to which antiquity represents a time gone forever, a period which, despite its grandiose place in memory, is overshadowed by modern achievements. According to Hegel, in this common view, modern Germans are held to be a mature nation whose Greek and Roman cultural roots do not bear any functional significance for the nation’s present existence. From this adult perspective, antiquity is emptied of relevance and utility for the present. The grown nation cannot continue to wear childhood garments, and does not need the support of leadingstrings as if still learning to walk. This common view, Hegel claims, expresses the wish to see a nation standing on its own feet, independent of its classical heritage. The voice advocating cultural emancipation vouches for detachment from antiquity. The consequence of this perception of thoroughgoing removal from classical times, Hegel fears, is that antiquity will only remain desirable and interesting among the learned and the antiquarians. From the “modernist” point of view, the antiquarians’ antiquity basically does not have any effect on the pulse of the present. For Hegel, however, the antiquarian’s segregation of the past is problematic in positing an unwarranted split between the ancients and the moderns. In this sense, both the modernist and the antiquarian fail to recognize, according to Hegel, a dynamic conception of the past that continues to pulsate in the present, and that consequently could make its way to the future. The antiquarians are positivists; their historical picture frames the past as a fait accompli. A similar danger, Hegel argues, is lurking, however, beneath the “modernist” view: The works of the ancients might on this view always possess an educational value of their own, highly rated by some, less highly by others, but they would have to be ranked with memories and superfluous learned antiquities, with things of merely historical import. Such things might be accepted or rejected within our

³⁸ Hegel 1961: 324.

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higher education, but they should not, on this view, function any longer as its foundation and basis.³⁹

Hegel’s critique targets those who approach temporal difference as a sign of the ancients’ irrelevance for the present. Viewing the ancients as obsolete entails a historical segregation that has the result of relegating antiquity to the negligible region of civilization’s childhood memories. Moreover, Hegel argues that disconnecting the present from antiquity will become counterproductive and eventually undermine the process of national emancipation. The glare of the Enlightenment and the idea of progress led many to object to the perception of ancient languages as “the citadel of all sciences.” For Hegel, this means an indeference to the timeless achievements of antiquity.⁴⁰ These achievements are looked upon as worn garments, obsolete remnants of modern civilization’s lost childhood. Ancient Greek and Latin literature cannot catch up with the mature condition of modern civilization. This metaphoric use of childhood for antiquity is interesting in two respects. First, the metaphor of childhood replaces a more traditional and rather austere image of the Greeks and Romans. Thus, the cultural memory of wise and experienced ancestors is revised in this modern image of naive and innocent children. Second, childhood is a marginalized domain in the life of adulthood, and Hegel disapproves of its association with classical antiquity. For early nineteenthcentury thought, the period of childhood did not designate a vital experience that continues to vibrate in the mature life of man. The experience of childhood was not thought to have any important influence on the life of adults. To see the ancients, therefore, through this common view of childhood is to assign them an insignificant role in the foundation of German identity. For Hegel, such an identification of the Greek and Roman ancients with civilization’s childhood was inconceivable. As testified by the lectures on the philosophy of history, which Hegel delivered during the year of 1830, “the unreflected consciousness” of childhood, Kinderland, enveloped in “the dark mantle of night” characterizes the African and Oriental sources of European culture.⁴¹ Hegel excludes the possibility that such a vague and murky ³⁹ Hegel 1961: 324. ⁴⁰ Hegel 1961: 324. Hegel refers specifically to the learning of Latin as “the citadel of all sciences,” but his discussion deals generally with Greece and Rome. ⁴¹ “Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained—for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World—shut up; it is the Gold-land compressed within itself—the land of childhood (Kinderland), which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night.” Consider too Hegel’s comment on the East as the childhood of history: “The first phase—that with which we have to begin—is the East.

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memory of civilization’s early stages would be associated with classical antiquity. By contrast, therefore, with the common view that regards classical antiquity as humanity’s childhood, and in accordance with his historical understanding of the life of consciousness, Hegel conceives a different memory of antiquity, one that has a formative influence on modern consciousness. He resorts to other metaphors that allow him to critically reflect on the tangible contact with the classical heritage that he understands to be part of the present. As we have seen, the modern relation to the classics invokes two conflicting responses, which Hegel wishes to synthesize: modern resistances to antiquity’s outmoded (worn-out) values, and the conservative aspiration to preserve ancient culture. The former vouches for a cultural separation from antiquity; the latter welcomes the cultural illusion of merging with antiquity. Hegel’s speech, however, calls for a preservation that requires a process of transformation as well: “It is necessary that we appropriate the world of antiquity not only to posses it, but even more to digest and transform it.”⁴²

2.5 Antiquity as mother-earth The Hegelian notion of antiquity pervades his speech from its very beginning: The spirit and purpose of our foundation is preparation for learned study, a preparation grounded on Greece and Rome. For more than a thousand years this has been the soil on which all civilization has stood, from which it has sprung, and with which it has been in continuous connection. Just as the natural organisms, plants and animals, struggle to free themselves from gravitation without being able to renounce this element of their own nature, so the fine arts and the sciences have grown up on that soil, and, while they have attained a self-subsistence of their own, they have not yet emancipated themselves from the recollection of that older culture. As Antaeus renewed his energies by touching his mother-earth, so every new impetus and invigoration of science and learning has emerged into the daylight from a return to antiquity.⁴³

Hegel presents antiquity through the metaphor of the soil, the foundation. The ancient past is understood as a plentiful container, as humanity’s great Unreflected consciousness—substantial, objective, spiritual existence—forms the basis . . . It is the childhood of History (das Kindesalter der Geschichte)” (Hegel 1956: 91, 105 (my italics)). See also Hayden White’s comments on this passage in White 2014: 126. ⁴² Hegel 1961: 327.

⁴³ Hegel 1961: 322.

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nourishing mother: the earth. Modern civilization is imagined as the offspring of great mother-earth, while the germination and development of natural organisms, plants, and animals is understood in terms of a constant struggle. As natural organisms, the moderns cannot renounce their physical connection to the earth nor override their own nature. Seeds are implanted in the earth. Feet tread on it. Similarly, even a modern civilization aspiring to independence from its cultural heritage cannot detach itself entirely from the older culture due to the gravitational force of memory. We cannot disengage from recollection; in fact, recollection of the past is not superfluous, but integral to our being. Hegel’s notion of an organic connection between the moderns and the ancients has its roots in eighteenth-century thought, when this phantasmatic union began to absorb national sentiments.⁴⁴ The influence of German national ideologies can be observed in a new feminine dimension that begins to penetrate the discourse on antiquity. Thus, as mentioned above, the patriarchal bond between the forefathers and their modern descendants was rivaled by an alternative model of parenthood. The bond between modernity and antiquity was also envisioned through a new maternal figure featuring the earthly source of the German lineage. This new cultural construction of the mother–child relationship took the form of a symbiosis and was endorsed by traditional and modern ways of cultivating and idealizing the mother-and-child dyad. In nineteenth-century German intellectual discourse, the earth is underscored as a vital dimension of human existence, forgetfulness of which is, among other things, a sign of cultural deterioration.⁴⁵ The nineteenth-century attraction to the ancient Greeks thus modified its sublime image of Greece to accommodate new nationalist needs. The ancient Greeks were now “infused with organic, harmonious attachment to their land, their language, and their culture” and they “were seen as an antidote to a fragmented modern Germany.”⁴⁶ The new understanding of the vitality of earth for raising national consciousness offers an important background against which the meaning of Hegel’s earth, its particular Hegelian sense, can be distinguished. Hegel claims that the fine arts and sciences of his time are still not free from the weight of the classical heritage—“from the recollection of that older culture.” This is not a critique, however, or an attempt to impugn ⁴⁴ These chthonic and organic themes reflect German national aspirations beyond the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cf. Most 2002: 94; Lacou-Labarthe and Nancy: 1990: 291–312. ⁴⁵ Heidegger would elaborate this notion of forgetfulness in his idea of uprootedness. ⁴⁶ Kelley 2002: 45. For an extensive study of the relation of German nationalism and philhellenism, see Marchand 1996.

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the cultural autonomy of his contemporaries. It is, rather, that Hegel takes advantage of prevailing cultural circumstances in order to make a structural statement about the human spirit. In his view, humanity depends on a dialectical structure of preservation and progress, which he finds operative in antiquity as well. Modern culture’s connectedness to antiquity is not coincidental but reflects, as Hegel’s allusion to an ancient myth shows, a paradigmatic modality of the human spirit.

2.6 The Antaeus complex Hegel’s vision of modern man’s connectedness to the soil of antiquity is inspired by the myth of Antaeus. Let us read his reference to the myth once again: “As Antaeus renewed his energies by touching his motherearth, so every new impetus and invigoration of science and learning has emerged into the daylight from a return to antiquity.”⁴⁷ The example of Antaeus, the Libyan giant, offers Hegel a mythic paradigm of the gravitational force of recollection exerted by Western civilization’s primordial past. However, his choice of the figure of Antaeus as the stimulator of Western memory is interesting and far from obvious. Hegel’s allusion to Antaeus as a metaphor for the modern attraction to antiquity gives expression to modernity’s conflicting ideas of the ancient past. Against the mythological background of the encounter between the Greek Hercules and the African Antaeus, we wonder what is the role of the African other, the stranger, the non-Greek, in Hegel’s Greek paradigm? Attending to Hegel’s invocation of Antaeus, the absence of a corollary mythical allusion becomes apparent: Hercules. In the cultural memory of the myth, Antaeus surfaces as one of the minor protagonists in the grand narrative chain unfolding through Hercules’ heroic adventures. The unconventional invocation of Antaeus without his analogic Greek peer creates a paradigm shift in the traditional reception of the tale. Hegel’s unique choice is to concentrate on the significance that Antaeus’ experience has for us now. In this sense, his interpretation of the episode offers us a new role model, a new philosophical protagonist, the son of motherearth. In order to grasp Hegel’s innovation we need to return to the ancient sources of the myth. The encounter of Hercules with the giant Antaeus in Libya creates a fascinating history of cultural transformations. The story was not considered, at least in its early phases, as one

⁴⁷ Hegel 1961: 322.

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of Hercules’ canonical labors, but rather as a minor exploit. And yet it was by no means ignored or unpopular between antiquity and modern times.⁴⁸ Hercules and Antaeus first appear in the sixth century .⁴⁹ Visual representations place the two opponents wrestling at the center. As such, it is a mythological reference or, rather, a fragment of a story. We may think of the image of the combat as symbolic, or as a “mytheme” structurally enfolding the logic of the myth. Antaeus serves as the paradigmatic antithesis of the ideal Greek: the African as opposed to the Westerner, the barbarian or the savage as opposed to the civilized. The Greek meaning of the name “Antaios,” as Joseph Fontenrose notes, is significant.⁵⁰ The adjective antaios specifies the position of the one who is over against, or stands right opposite. Hence, to be antaios means to oppose, to be confrontational, hostile, and even hateful. His name evokes the epithet of the goddess of the crossroads, Antaia Hecate. This important chthonic divinity, understood to be dark and terrifying, lends Antaios infernal connotations. Antaeus is the son of Poseidon, who ruled in Libya and was especially cruel to strangers, whom he killed after forcing them to wrestle with him. It is he that the traveler meets at the crossroad—Hecate’s consecrated site. Just like Hecate’s ghostly phantoms haunting the crossroads, Antaeus attacks Hercules suddenly, formidable as a giant ghost. Pindar (Isthmian Ode 4) is the first poet to describe the antithetical relationship between the two wrestlers. The death of Antaeus is set against Hercules’ resurrection. Antaeus’ mortality is thus juxtaposed with the immortality of Hercules, who has an eternal place in heaven. Antaeus pertains to the chthonic realm, while Hercules, after the apotheosis, is integrated into the Olympic order. Antaeus’ special relation to the chthonic realm is apparent in many vase paintings from the sixth and fifth centuries  emphasizing his special closeness to the ground.⁵¹ In the first century  a radical shift in the narrative provides a new account of the special bond between Antaeus and earth. The author of the Bibliotheca claims that Antaeus’ attraction to the earth, manifest in his unique style of foot combat, is explained by his filial relation to Gaia.⁵² Ovid says that Hercules kept Antaeus from his mother’s nourishment.⁵³ ⁴⁸ Stafford 2012. ⁴⁹ The story first appears on one of the metopes of the Hera temple in Campania (at Foce del Sele) and then throughout the sixth and the fifth centuries  in Attic vase paintings. ⁵⁰ Fontenrose 1974: 330–4. ⁵¹ See, for example, Athenian Stamnos, Red-figure 500–540 . Attributed to the painter of Copenhagen, Warsaw National Museum 142330; Athenian Pelike, Black-figure 525–475 . Laon, Musée d’art et d’archéologie de Laon, 37.978. ⁵² Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.115. ⁵³ Ovid, Met. 9.183–4.

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Antaeus’ attachment to his mother, then, encapsulates the secret source of his invincibility. Powerful mothers intimate their knowledge to their sons, as in the Hesiodic myth where crafty Gaia entrusts her son Cronus with the crucial instruction that will help him overcome his father Ouranus.⁵⁴ In the Roman period, Antaeus’ prodigious physical strength was explained by his connectedness to his mother (earth). The mythologization of the intimate relation between mothers and sons culminating in the excess of the Oedipus myth is presented in the imperial versions of the Antaeus myth as foreign to Roman nature. The connectedness to the chthonic mother, however, endangers the father’s Olympic sovereignty. In the philosophical and theological tradition, then, the mythological opposition between mother-earth and father-sky, between chthonic Gaia and Olympian Zeus, is embodied by the combat between Hercules and Antaeus. This mythological opposition delineates a dichotomous sphere comprising the vices and the virtues, or the concrete physical realm and the intangible intellectual realm of the virtues. The mythological pair pertains to a long and continuous tradition of allegorical retellings of how Hercules had to fight and overcome the aggressive Libyan giant who only grew stronger and could not be defeated as long as he was touching the earth. The deification of Hercules was traditionally understood as exemplifying the victory of heaven over earth, culminating in Boethius’ proclamation: superata tellus sidera donat (earth overcome grants you the stars).⁵⁵ The myth of Hercules and Antaeus fuels, then, an ideal of transcendence that also helps to tie German thought to the Greeks. Hegel’s unconventional reading of the myth is tied to the common inclination of his contemporaries, himself included, to connect to the Greeks’ spiritual side. The German idealists saw their connection with the ancient Greeks in terms of the sublimity of the latter, as they shaped their collective identity around a common inclination to transcendence and idealization. Invoking the Olympian side of the Greeks, German idealism is forgetful of their very earthly, chthonic essence, as can be seen, for example, in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s The History of the Fall and Decline of the Greek City States.⁵⁶ It is only the Greeks, he writes, who can really teach “us” who we should aspire to be: Our study of Greek history is therefore a matter quite different from our other historical studies. For us the Greeks step out of the circle of history. Even if their destinies belong to the general chain of events, yet in this respect they matter least to us. We fail entirely to recognize our relationship to them if we dare to apply the

⁵⁴ Hesiod, Theogony 163–72. ⁵⁵ Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 4, 34–5. ⁵⁶ Humboldt’s history is an unfinished work from 1808.

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standards to them which we apply to the rest of world history. Knowledge of the Greeks is not merely pleasant, useful or necessary to us—no, in the Greeks alone we find the ideal of that which we should like to be and produce. If every part of history enriched us with its human wisdom and human experience, then from the Greeks we take something more than earthly—almost godlike.⁵⁷

According to Humboldt, the worldly aspect of Greek destiny is insignificant for the development of modern German identity. The earthly dimension of Greek history “matters least.” Humboldt’s fantasy of the intimate relation between modern German identity and the ancient Greeks is tied to his conception of the ideal human existence. To be able to “take something . . . almost godlike” from the Greeks entails, at the same time, a sublimation of their concreteness.⁵⁸ In this respect, Hegel agrees with Humboldt. Yet, unlike Humboldt, he allows for a dialectic of immersion and transcendence in ancient Greece, as his exceptional interest in the Antaeus myth’s chthonic resources shows. Hegel’s silence about heaven’s role in the Antaeus myth is, therefore, intriguing. For the philosophical tradition to which Hegel belongs and for its nineteenth-century reader, the upward movement associated with Hercules resonates not only as a general gesture towards transcendence, freedom, and progress, but also, more specifically as an expression of the German aspiration to cultural independence and intellectual autonomy. At the same time, Hegel’s silence about this Herculean gesture cannot have passed unnoticed and, in this respect, highlights the philosophical elements of light and rationality through their conspicuous absence. And yet, by omitting from his mythological allusion these elements pertaining to philosophy’s Olympian sources, Hegel brings to the fore an antithetical form of knowledge that was traditionally suppressed and undermined. For Hegel, therefore, the myth of Antaeus thematizes a missing source of knowledge that is important for consciousness. Antaeus introduces a countermovement to the Herculean gesture that needs to be embraced philosophically. Hegel uses the image of Antaeus’ foot touching mother-earth as a reminder of modern spirit’s hidden sources. By the analogy of the maternal source of Antaeus’ power, the modern spirit recovers an ancient memory of its own mental resources. The figure of

⁵⁷ Humboldt 1963: 79. Cf. the discussion of this passage in Bernal 1987: 287, and in Porter 2000: 192. ⁵⁸ The Greeks’ “concreteness” comprises instinctual life and irrationality as well as the mundane aspects of their historical existence. Porter disagrees with Nisbet’s “suppression” to describe the German beautification of antiquity. It is a question of sublimation: “Irrationality is not ignored or suppressed in classicism . . . it is openly acknowledged and then sublimated.” In Porter 2000: 257, and note 137 on Nisbet 1985: 6.

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the nourishing earth suggests a paradigm of knowledge germane to our intellectual lives. Hegel wants an image that will conserve the classical heritage for us while at the same time encouraging the human spirit to free itself from gravitation: Antaeus is appropriate for the task of conservation. Whereas the mother element drives us downward, the law of the father propels us upward. This upward dimension is represented in the ancient myth by Hercules. He is the only one who was able to uncover the mysterious source of Antaeus’ invincibility: he understands that in order to weaken him he must hold Antaeus up and separate him from the ground. In the history of the reception of this myth the image of the defeated Antaeus who is cut off from earth and bereft of power has had the most impact. For theological and philosophical audiences this moment of defeat stages the climax of the encounter between the two antagonistic forces. In the second century, the encounter was imagined as a struggle that overthrew the party threatening Olympian rule. This is especially apparent in the ekphrastic work of Philostratus, the second-century sophist. Contemplating a painting of the struggle, Philostratus offers an iconographic description of the mythological scene, foreshadowing a long pictorial tradition. The conflict provides the grounds for an allegorical interpretation centering on the opposition between the wild and the civilized, the beastly and the skilled, the corporeal and the spiritual. Philostratus’ biased portrayal of Antaeus sustains a hierarchical order in which Hercules’ victory represents a triumph over the mother’s nether domination: You see them engaged in wrestling, or rather at the conclusion of their bout, and Herakles at the moment of victory. But he lays his opponent low at a distance above the earth, for Ge was helping Antaios in the struggle by arching herself up and heaving him up to his feet again whenever he was thrust down. So Herakles, at a loss how to deal with Ge, has caught Antaios by the middle, just above the waist, where the ribs are, and set him upright on his thigh, still gripping his arms about him; then pressing his own forearm against the pit of Antaios’ stomach, now flabby and panting, he squeezes out his breath and slays him by forcing the points of his ribs into his liver. Doubtless you see Antaios groaning and looking to Ge, who does not help him, while Herakles is strong and smiles at his achievement.⁵⁹

For Hegel, however, the antithesis between earth and spirit, traditionally entrenched in the allegorical opposition between light and darkness, serves now as a template for two categories, or agents, of knowledge. ⁵⁹ Philostratus, Imagines 2.21. Trans. Fairbanks.

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Reading the myth of Hercules and Antaeus in the light of Hegel’s conception of the role of classical studies in the German education system, we notice a great change in the presentation of the mythological conflict. Antaeus is no longer shown in a moment of defeat. The figures of Antaeus and Hercules now come to represent two equally important forces. Antaeus represents regression and Hercules represents the resistance to this regressive drive. According to Hegel, these two movements should be synthesized to form a dialectical relationship; this might be viewed as the interplay between conscious and unconscious forces. Regression and progress are two interdependent processes, and the acts of preservation and resistance determine and precondition each other. Hegel’s unorthodox interpretation of the myth does not prioritize either of these two sources of knowledge. The novelty of Hegel’s approach is his endorsement of the motherly touch as an invigorating source. His notion of progress, then, is not threatened by a return to the hidden origins of culture. In his vision, modern culture is bound to the ongoing dialectic of recollection (a mnemonic return to the past) involving the modification of memory. The Hegelian relation to the classics involves a duality reflecting both resistance and attraction to the distant past. We can see how making the child–mother dyad the template for the relation of the moderns to antiquity lends a Hegelian twist to the Oedipal pattern. While endorsing the fact of motherly origins, the moderns concomitantly wish to overcome the law of the father. The Hegelian Aufhebung is at work, prescribing, as we have seen already, a dialectic of preservation and modification in relation to the classics: “But, however important the preservation of this soil is, the modification of the relation between antiquity and modern times is no less essential.”⁶⁰ It is through this dialectic that the relationship between the moderns and the ancients receives their Oedipal twist. How, for Hegel, does antiquity relate to the modern age? What kind of modification occurs in the relation between antiquity and modern times? Hegel’s notion of the relationship between the ancient and the modern is complicated in two senses: first, the relationship is not based on a hierarchical order of an ancient primordial beginning and a mature modern civilization, and second, the two forms of existence are not distinct but enmeshed. As we shall shortly see, Hegel’s antiquity does not stand out as an ideal beginning, a primary stage free of repression, regression, and sublimation. Its aura of perfection derives from its eligibility as a model for modern humanity. In other words, there is

⁶⁰ Hegel 1961: 326.

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something already “modern” in the ancient beginning. Hegel is, therefore, far from holding a purist view of antiquity. His antiquity provides a home, a stable for modern subjectivity. His antiquity cradles the modern experience of the unconscious. Hegel’s image of antiquity as a veiled bride is another way to visualize this idea.

2.7 Veiled antiquity Hegel’s educational program would give the classics a prominent place in the curriculum of the gymnasium. As Michael George and Andrew Vincent observe, “The classics of Greece and Rome, allow the child, in Hegel’s educational program, to ‘distance himself ’ from his own immediate interests and particular historical situation.”⁶¹ However, the telos of gaining distance from oneself should, according to Hegel, be achieved through devotion and the experience of totality. Hegel calls on young students to immerse and baptize themselves in ancient Greek and Latin texts. Hegel wants the modern student to recognize in the classical texts a perfect form that could become integral to the modern human spirit: The perfection and glory of those masterpieces must be the spiritual bath, the secular baptism that first and indelibly attunes and tinctures the soul in respect of taste and knowledge. For this initiation a general, perfunctory acquaintance with the ancients is not sufficient; we must take up our lodging with them so that we can breathe their air, absorb their ideas, their manners, one might even say their errors and prejudices, and become at home in this world—the fairest that ever has been.⁶²

Hegel’s invocation to return to antiquity is cast as a homecoming. The image of a home, as the mythical birthplace of the West, accommodates modern longings for a provenance without any particular historicity. Thus, antiquity is an idealized home remembered as an example of perfection and glory, and, at the same time, like any other imaginary home worshiped by tradition, is also a seedbed of error and prejudice. Hegel’s invocation of homecoming derives from his sense of Greek homeliness (Heimatlichkeit). Hegel encourages moderns to relive ancient experience and absorb its intellectual content in all its complexity so that the spiritual example of Greek homeliness will become integral to the modern experience. Greece, for Hegel, has its place in the historical development of the modern. Hegel’s history of philosophy unfolds as a biography of the ⁶¹ See Hegel 1986: xvi.

⁶² Hegel 1961: 324–5.

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human spirit that, analogously to the human life cycle, consists of different ages. However, while constituting an early, historical “moment,” Greece, for Hegel, is not the primary stage in the history of modern consciousness. The infant beginnings of Western spirit, for Hegel, are Oriental: The first phase—that with which we have to begin—is the East. Unreflected consciousness—substantial, objective, spiritual existence—forms the basis . . . It is the childhood of History . . . Continuing the comparison with the ages of individual man, this would be the boyhood of history . . . The Greek World may then be compared with the period of adolescence, for here we have individualities forming themselves. This is the second main principle in Human History.⁶³

This is a crucial point for us. To think of the history of Western civilization as a history of consciousness means to adopt a unique temporal structure for which every beginning is already immersed in a prior stage of consciousness. Rethinking humanity’s origins requires us to understand our multiple origins—being always has more than one stage. Hegel’s metaphor of a Greek paradise, therefore, evokes the primordiality of an earlier mythical realm through the metaphor of the Oriental paradise: “While the first paradise was that of human nature, this is the second, the higher paradise of the human spirit.”⁶⁴ Hence, humanity’s twofold origin means that the heavenly paradise of the human spirit has a depth structure. Ancient Greece is distinct from its primordial stage, and is therefore a second beginning; this means that recognizing classical antiquity as a fundamental stage of the development of the human spirit depends on the discovery of its earlier beginning, just as the development of modern consciousness depends on the discovery of its own earlier beginnings.⁶⁵ This Hegelian structure of discovery offers us a model for recognizing the space of the ancient unconscious. The early history of Western spirit thus progresses from an instinctual childhood to a Greek adolescence. This two-tiered structure of humanity’s early times explains, according to Hegel, why it is rather the Greek and not the Oriental source that signifies the ultimate home of the modern spirit:⁶⁶ This is the second, the higher paradise of the human spirit, the paradise where the human spirit emerges like a bride from her chamber, endowed with a fairer naturalness, with freedom, depth, and serenity. The first wild glory of its dawn in

⁶³ Hegel 1956: 105–6. Cf. above, n. 39. ⁶⁴ Hegel 1961: 325. ⁶⁵ By the same token, the Oriental beginning comprises the paradise of the second, Greek paradise and is consequently constitutive of the temporal structure of modern consciousness. ⁶⁶ Cf. Martin Bernal’s critical reading of Hegel in Bernal 1987: 295.

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the east is restrained by the grandeur of form and tamed into beauty. The human spirit manifests its profundity here no longer in confusion, gloom, or arrogance, but in perfect clarity. Its serenity is not like the play of children; it is rather a veil spread over the melancholy which is familiar with the cruelty of fate but is not thereby driven to lose its freedom and moderation.⁶⁷

Self-consciousness does not belong to an instinctual realm. Rather, this birthplace of Western civilization, having sprung from a first (Oriental) beginning, has now left behind unrefined and unrestrained nature. Envisioning the human spirit within the confines of this second paradise, Hegel refrains from elevating it to the human archetype. This second paradise is the birthplace of humanity’s consciousness rather than of Man. The second paradise, as Hegel puts it, is not a children’s playground. Whereas the first paradise signifies a “wild glory” distinctive in its “confusion, gloom and arrogance,” the second paradise signifies a move to the beginning of the human spirit that has already accommodated ideas of “freedom, depth and serenity.” Hegel calls this human transformation its “grandeur of form,” achieved in the transition from the first to the second stage. This second stage of human history is illustrated by the allegory of the beautiful bride. The bride is a figure of liminality. She is a figure of transition and potentiality. Torn from her mother and losing her virginity mark an irreversible point—an expulsion from the world of childhood. The bride is a figure of expectation. She is on the threshold of entering a new order of life as a wife and mother. In Hegel’s description the bride, on emerging from her chamber, appears as an allegory of veiled melancholy. The melancholic young bride fits the refined, restrained sphere of the second paradise. She is to become part of the conceptual realm, a notion that is defined through her complicated relationship with her parents and her groom. In this sense, she cannot be part of the immediate world of nature. The veiled bride, standing for the human epochal state of collective consciousness, contains a duality: the Greeks are a refined generation celebrating a solemn, beautiful, and respectful stage of human development, together with a dimension of hiddenness. The veiled bride is a liminal figure, straddling past and future, untamed and tamed. The veiled bride introduces the idea that humanity’s second beginning, its classical heritage located in the early stages of consciousness, is inseparable from an innate, yet unknown melancholic experience. The melancholic bride represents a stage of freedom. The bride’s way of being is freer than the earlier form of humanity’s existence. She is ⁶⁷ Hegel 1961: 325 (my italics).

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aware of and remembers “the cruelty of fate.” She left behind a life of natural harmony in which the principle of negation was completely alien. Now, indeed, she is forcefully cut off from her primary nature, but through this transition a new horizon of meaning opens for her and within it she experiences a new sense of freedom. In Freudian terms, Hegel’s transition is a move from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, from an indeterminate modality of being to a challenging and demanding form of life. Her memory of the past is vague, resulting in sublimation. Still deeply familiar with the veiled memory of primordial nature, she is not “thereby driven to lose” her “freedom and moderation.” Hegel’s notion of the different stages of consciousness is rearticulated in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The name of Greece strikes home to the hearts of men of education in Europe, and more particularly is this so with us Germans . . . They [the Greeks] certainly received the substantial beginnings of their religion, culture, and their common bonds of fellowship, more or less from Asia, Syria and Egypt; but they have so greatly obliterated the foreign nature of this origin, and it is so much changed, worked upon, turned around, and altogether made so different, that what they— as we—prize, know and love in it is essentially their own.⁶⁸

In the introductory chapter on Greek philosophy Hegel aligns the Germans with the Greeks on the grounds of their common form of free existence, which he recognizes as being-at-home. The Greeks’ experience of Heimatlichkeit expresses their capacity to make their world their home while forgetting, or putting in the background, their foreign origin. “Burying” their foreign origin “in the darkness of the mysteries which they have kept secret from themselves” is, he writes, “what makes us specifically at home with the Greeks.”⁶⁹ That the Greeks obliterated and modified humanity’s Oriental origins is for Hegel a sign of their spirit of freedom. A similar pattern of experience binds the ancient Greeks and the modern Germans. The moderns too have a foreign nature. Like the ancient Greeks, they succeeded in repressing it by molding a modified, idealized, self-image that has become their second self.

⁶⁸ Hegel 1892: 149–50.

⁶⁹ Hegel 1892: 149–50.

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Freud on the Acropolis

3.1 From Hegel’s Antaeus to Freud’s Oedipus Freud’s theoretical and autobiographical writing are inseparable. Reflecting on the role of antiquity in shaping his cultural identity inevitably led Freud to remember his early upbringing. In Freud’s writing, the sublime image of antiquity conjures unintended childhood memories of his father. In Freud’s writing the authoritative figures of the father and antiquity are interlocked. What is the connection between these two different sources of parenthood? Like many of his intellectual contemporaries at the end of the nineteenth century, Freud was exposed to the multivalent significance of antiquity as a home, a desirable cultural domain, and a figure of spiritual nourishment. Freud’s writing reflects a desire to be part of a modern European identity that defined itself through the idea of an organic connection to antiquity.¹ Freud’s yearning for classical roots was, however, different from the inspiration typical of other German intellectuals of his time. As a Viennese Jew with Galician origins the claim for an organic connection with antiquity could not be made on solid ground.² In light of Freud’s ambivalent cultural identity, his choice of Oedipus as the mythical protagonist of psychoanalysis can be understood. Freud’s fascination with Oedipus, especially his emphasis on the obscurity of a father–son connection, with its ambivalence that can be taken as belonging both to the intimacy of the family and to the longue durée of history, offers us a new prism through which the paradigmatic relationship of the moderns with their classical heritage can be re-examined.³ Hegel, as we saw in the previous chapter, took the native African, Antaeus, as a figure of mediation between the moderns and the ancients. Antaeus’ strong somatic ties to mother-earth offered Hegel a useful ¹ These cultural and intellectual aspirations are a central theme in Armstrong 2005. ² A Viennese non-Jew is perhaps not closer to ancient Greece than a Galician Jew, and yet there is an intellectual lineage that—real or invented or both—makes for that organic link. Traditional Jewish textuality is surely not hermetic. But, in contrast to the Jewish tradition, non-Jewish Europe has long made the claim for an intellectual lineage. I am grateful to Mark Joseph for this observation. ³ Freud’s compulsion for antiquity should be read, I propose, in light of his experience of a conflicted cultural identity. Cf. Richard Armstrong, who presents the two cultural aspects of Freud as separate: “In many ways, Freud’s compulsion for antiquity is a symptom of his being a European intellectual, not a specifically ‘Jewish’ intellectual” (Armstrong 2005: 221).

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metaphor for the modern human condition. Through the analogy between the mythological figure of Antaeus and the figure of the German youth, Hegel aimed at raising a modern kind of self-consciousness. The figure of Antaeus, in Hegel’s view, leads the young generation to recognize its inherent connection to antiquity. Shifting his listeners’ attention toward the symbiotic relationship between mother and son, Hegel’s reinterpretation of the story of Antaeus offered a compelling image for the idea of cultural continuity. Thus, antiquity appears as spiritual soil, a nurturing mother begetting the European spirit.⁴ The mother’s continuous involvement in her son’s life demonstrates, according to Hegel, the vitality of the glorious past. The present is always embedded in and conditioned by the past. As a European Jew, Freud could not adopt Hegel’s ideas of cultural continuity and organic connection to antiquity without qualms. It was not Antaeus—the mother’s son—but rather a different type of son— Oedipus—who provided Freud with a mythic model of subjectivity. Oedipus, for Freud, is an intriguing figure, just as Antaeus has been for Hegel. In contrast to Antaeus, who is physically inseparable from his mother, Oedipus has an ambivalent relationship with his parents and accordingly his story thematizes the relationship with antiquity in an ambivalent way. The son Oedipus is simultaneously connected to and disconnected from his parents. Oedipus, in other words, is both a biological and an adopted son. He is both a stranger in and a native of Thebes. Freud’s fascination with Oedipus’ encounter with his father concealed the pertinence of the myth of Antaeus to psychoanalysis. Thus, in Freud’s brief mention of Antaeus in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, the specter of nation is raised in the context of Freud’s cultural isolation. Unlike Hegel’s reading, which elevates the African Antaeus to the higher rank of an agent of knowledge, Freud’s reference to the giant’s ties with his mother preserves their traditional meaning, making him a figure of patriotism. More specifically, Freud brings up the example of Antaeus in relation to his hometown, Vienna: I would like to go away for three days at Easter and most of all would like to see you. But I am suffering from a bad case of spring fever, hungering for sunshine,

⁴ Since late antiquity, the myth of Antaeus has mainly served political and theological ideologies. Antaeus’ relationship with his mother has been set in opposition to Hercules’ relationship with his Olympian father. Thus, while Hercules’ connection to his father affiliates him with rationality and elevated spirituality, the attraction to the chthonic mother renders Antaeus the complete opposite. Antaeus’ local rootedness thus has political significance in the context of Roman imperialism.

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flowers, a bit of blue water, just like a young man. I hate Vienna almost personally and, unlike the giant Antaeus, I gather fresh strength as soon as I lift my foot from the hometown soil.⁵

Freud alludes to himself ironically. He considers himself to be a pure antithesis to the Libyan giant. Unlike Antaeus, he never gains strength from his “mother” town, Vienna. Freud has an inner sense of not being autochthonic, while, for him, Antaeus’ attachment to his mother manifests, more than anything else, a strong sense of belonging. We may notice that by being a Jew, Freud was dissociated from nativist narratives of the intensely anti-Semitic Vienna of his time. Connected then also to myths or histories of origin in the Mediterranean, Freud is linked in a different way than Antaeus, whose otherness is accentuated by his giant figure and African origins. And yet Freud’s self-irony overrides this apparent similarity and underscores a difference between them. Unlike Antaeus, Freud is motivated by a strong desire to separate from the Viennese “mother,” and does not show interest in developing any filial duty towards her.⁶ In 1900, the strong connection between Antaeus and his mother is enlisted to stir up nationalist sentiments that had since the midnineteenth century been part of the reception of the myth.⁷ And, from this perspective, Antaeus has nothing to offer in advancing the psychoanalytic notion of self-consciousness. Overlooking the iconic figure of the African Other, Freud prefers a Greek hero, a royal figure, and a symbol of sovereignty, to embody the major principles of psychoanalysis. The myth of Oedipus and, more specifically, its fifth-century tragic version, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, continuously engaged Freud throughout his writing. One reason for this is that, for Freud, the story of Oedipus embodies insecurities and ambivalent feelings about his origins. As such, Oedipus as a figure of duality embodies Freud’s mixed feelings towards antiquity. Central to the play is the famous intersection connecting the roads to Corinth, Thebes, and Delphi. This intersection links past and present. The road leading the fugitive son from Corinth to an unknown future intersects with the road that, unknown to him, brings him back to his birthplace, Thebes. Oedipus Rex provides a condensed image connecting

⁵ Letter of March 11, 1900. Freud 1985: 403. ⁶ Cf. Rudnytsky 1987: 73, where he argues that Freud’s “uprooting from his birthplace also plays a decisive part in the development of psychoanalysis.” ⁷ There are several nationalist interpretations of the myth of Antaeus, not only in the nineteenth century but also in the first half of the twentieth century, as we see, for example, in one of Adolf Hitler’s speeches. See Scobie 1991: 20, n. 71.

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different times: past, present, and future. This mythical intersection, as I shall show, is also a symbolic site through which Freud examines his conflicting cultural origins. An intersection also underlies the conjunction, “Freud’s Oedipus.” Freud’s ancient Oedipus merges with his modern conception of the father–son relationship, including his own relationship with his father.⁸ The father–son connection is the missing element, however, in Hegel’s Antaeus. For Hegel it is the relationship with the mother that provides a figurative analogy for modern ties with antiquity. By contrast, Freud’s Oedipus integrates two modalities of relationship, fleshed out by two distinctively different archetypical relationships: with the mother and with the father. Hence, the psychoanalytic subject is comprised of a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, similarity and difference.

3.2 The death of the father and the reawakened past The analogy between Oedipus’ father and Freud’s father has already been proposed by different interpreters who recognize the prominent role of the father, and Freud’s father in particular, in the foundation of psychoanalysis.⁹ Although I do not intend to delve deeper into this wellrehearsed topic, we should, nonetheless, be attentive to yet another important analogy bearing on Freud’s conception of the relationship between modernity and antiquity. As I have argued, for Freud, antiquity did not function as a genuine, all-nourishing mother as it did for German intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Freud could not indulge in the illusion of continuity featuring an immediate and uninterrupted link to antiquity. Such a link was, especially for him, more an expression of wishful thinking than a fact about the anatomy of a culture. It is no wonder that Freud’s writing depends on an equivocal and much more ambivalent image of parenthood. What for Freud plays an important role in construing the enigma of antiquity in modern times is precisely an idiosyncratic sense of fatherhood, embodied in Freud’s biographical

⁸ Armstrong argues that Freud’s conception of the father does not reflect the relationship with his own father. See Armstrong 2005: 228. ⁹ See, for example, Schorske 1981; Mahl 1982: 33–64; Mahl 1985: 99–113. The association between the death of Freud’s father and Freud’s attraction to Oedipus is suggested by Rudnytsky 1987: 109–10, and see also his discussion in parts 1 and 2 of the biographical and intellectual aspects of the dynamic relation between Freud and Oedipus.

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father. Strangely enough, it is a wandering, non-autochthonic, fragile old Jew who throws light on Freud’s deep ties with antiquity. Freud’s tenacity in studying the son’s intricate relationship with his father is thus inseparable from his humanistic endeavor to decipher the bond between antiquity and modernity. Refractions of these relationships find their expression in Freud’s response to the loss of his father shortly after the latter’s death. The death of Freud’s father, Jacob Freud, on October 23, 1896, is known to have had a major effect on Freud’s life and consequently on the emerging field of psychoanalysis, as the letter to his friend Fliess, written only a few weeks after the death of his father, testifies. Freud’s brief statement, “I now feel quite uprooted,”¹⁰ communicates to Fliess the idea that his father’s death has led to a strong feeling of being uprooted. Yet being uprooted does not incapacitate him as it does in the case of Antaeus. On the contrary, the final separation from his father has the opposite effect on Freud. It is the most significant event that actually turns Freud into who he has become, the founding father of psychoanalysis. This understanding is generally shared by most of Freud’s biographers, who consider his father’s death as what triggered Freud to embark on selfanalysis.¹¹ According to Freud’s letter to Fliess, the death of his father brings to the fore an inner connection between the son and the father: “By the time he died, his life had long been over, but in [my] inner self the whole past has been reawakened by this event.”¹² The death signifies two different meanings whose unfolding depends on two different temporal structures. His father’s death is an event that signifies the fact of finitude that Freud has begun to experience prior to the actual event of death. The death is understood as a fact that seals a long process of decline. At the same time, the father’s death signifies a new beginning, a new life, a new event that sets in motion the memory of the past. The past, now stirred up, dominates the present, thus reshaping the future’s horizons. Freud’s self-testimony moves back and forth in time, both employing chronology and succumbing to the disorder of recollection. His description is symptomatic not only of his specific condition, but, moreover, of how for him, psychoanalysis as a process of becoming conscious is

¹⁰ Letter of November 2, 1896. Freud 1985: 202. ¹¹ Freud’s letter of November 2, 1896 to Fliess is taken as an indication of the direct influence of the death of Freud’s father on initiating Freud’s self-analysis. See, for example, Schur 1979: 119. Cf. Rudnytsky 1987: 21. ¹² Freud’s letter of November 2, 1896 in Freud 1985: 202.

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essentially a historical act.¹³ The psychoanalytical telos is to obtain a historical perspective. The process of becoming self-conscious implies, structurally, the discovery of the unconscious. This historical process depends on the liquidation of the unconscious, concomitantly exposing its existence. Psychoanalysis as a historical process is perpetually founded on unconsciousness, and yet, at the same time, the unconscious has no form of existence without the historical drive that brings it into consciousness. A few years after the death of his father, the event was charged with new meanings. This can be clearly attested by Freud’s 1908 preface to the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud writes that the death of the father is “the most important event, the most profound loss of a man’s life.”¹⁴ This emotional statement does more than recreate an autobiographical setting for the composition of The Interpretation of Dreams. It is, beyond this, a commemoration. It pays homage to the father whose memory is embodied, according to Freud’s preface to the second edition, in the son’s intellectual creation. For Freud, “the most important event . . . of a man’s life,” the death of the father, is thus intertwined with another constitutive event in Freud’s life—the publication of his monumental dream work.¹⁵ An equal durability and power to withstand any far-reaching alterations during the process of revision has been shown by the material of the book, consisting as it does of dreams of my own which have for the most part been overtaken or made valueless by the march of events and by which I illustrated the rules of dream-interpretation. For this book has a further subjective significance for me personally—a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death—that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life. Having discovered that this was so, I felt unable to obliterate the traces of the experience.¹⁶

The years that have passed since the initial publication of The Interpretation of Dreams give Freud perspective. Now, looking back at the first edition, Freud finds “little to change in it.”¹⁷ And yet, in reflecting on the book from the vantage point of a few years later, his current attitude to ¹³ In this vein Michael Roth writes, “Freud’s interpretative stance is most powerful when one regards psycho-analysis as a theory of history” in (Roth 1995: 33). Cf. Armstrong 2005: 201–16. Cf. the discussion in Chapter 5 (sec. 5.3.1). ¹⁴ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: xxvi. ¹⁵ Freud refers to The Interpretation of Dreams in the preface to the second edition as “this difficult . . . fundamental work.” Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: xxv. ¹⁶ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: xxvi. ¹⁷ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: xxv.

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the personal character of his scientific work seems to have radically altered. In the 1900 preface Freud was apologetic, even defensive, about the choice of using his own dreams for illustrating his method of interpretation, revealing thus “to the public gaze more of the intimacies of my mental life than I liked.”¹⁸ The 1908 preface, by contrast, exhibits a different attitude towards the book’s personal material. Freud not only shows more confidence in his initial choice but also displays a belated awareness of the autobiographical dimension of his theoretical project, recognizing for the first time its therapeutic value for him. Thus, he is belatedly able to see something new, something he could not recognize back then. The first preface overlooks something important, blurred by Freud’s ambition. The first preface is indeed dominated by Freud’s wanting to neatly posit the book’s main goal, to demonstrate the contribution of dreams to the investigation of mental life. Retrospectively, however, Freud discovers that, apart from this declared goal, The Interpretation of Dreams contains an important meaning that can show itself only after a lapse of time.¹⁹ The preface to the first edition reassesses the original declared goals of The Interpretation of Dreams. This second edition provides Freud with the opportunity to restore the unacknowledged goals of the first edition, that is, goals which he was not aware of, or was not willing to admit to. These restored goals now become integral to the new edition of the scientific text. It is only in the “now” that Freud is able to see what he could not have seen or articulated eight years before. In this sense, Freud’s recognition that the original undertaking of The Interpretation of Dreams was “a portion of my own self-analysis” testifies to the interminable process of his self-analysis, whose systematic beginning could now be related to his father’s death, while continuing far beyond the first edition of the book.²⁰ In this respect, Freud’s impetus for self-disclosure goes hand in hand with the death of his father. The deferral of Freud’s revelation is tied to his attachment to the book’s ambitious objective, to its promising prospect, which now reveals itself as a disguise, or even “an alibi.” Behind the son’s grandiose self-expectations lies the figure of the dead father. Freud’s belated understanding takes the form of a dedicatory gesture to the memory of his late father, acknowledging his salient contribution to the book’s formation. Hence, the creative process of writing The ¹⁸ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: xxiii–xxiv. ¹⁹ A similar effect of afterwardsness can be detected in Alexander Grinstein’s reading of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Grinstein analyzes Freud’s dreams scattered throughout the book and notes in the introduction that only when he selected and arranged Freud’s dreams was he able to clearly see “a unity of psychic organization” (in Grinstein 1983: 16). ²⁰ Rudnytsky 1987: 21. See also note 6 above.

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Interpretation of Dreams has now been discovered to be integral to the work of mourning. Freud’s grief has been transformed: the father’s death is made into a gift, paving the royal road to the unconscious.

3.3 A view from the Acropolis The dead father returns on another occasion in Freud’s oeuvre. In “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” written as an open letter to Romain Rolland (1936), the dead father comes to reclaim his contribution to the discovery of the unconscious. Freud analyzes an old and uncanny memory that has since 1904 continued to occupy him. The memory concerns a journey that Freud and his younger brother Alexander made from Trieste to Athens. While climbing the Acropolis, Freud recalls, his rambling thoughts led him to his dead father. In the analysis, the dead father’s appearance in Freud’s memory turns out to have a more complicated significance than at first seemed. Moreover, the memory of the father, as it becomes clear in the interpretation, appears to provide the key to the explanation of the enigmatic memory of the journey as a whole. At this point, I should say more about the temporal structure of Freud’s essay. It is a first-person narrative unfolding a memory of past events, simultaneously offering itself to the narrator’s inspection. Thus, the narrator has a double role: he is concomitantly the analysand and the analyst. The narrator’s dual perspectives emphasize the narrative’s temporal structure, joining conscious and unconscious elements and creating intersections between different points in time.²¹ The first part of the memory narrative is set in Trieste, which was the brothers’ planned point of departure to Corfu. Following the advice of an acquaintance, however, they change their mind and take a boat to Athens for a three-day trip. The second part of the narrative is located in Athens on the Acropolis. The memory of the journey, Freud recalls, has long continued to echo in his mind. He tells his reader that what specifically intrigued him all these years was the memory’s strange affective aspects, which he eventually was able to unravel by means of self-analysis. Only at a later stage, in 1936, on the occasion of Romain Rolland’s seventieth birthday, did Freud return to the analytic results and reproduce them in the form of a literary vignette. Hence, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” is an amalgamation of different textual phases of Freud’s

²¹ See Kanzer 1969: 324–54.

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memory, and in this sense, the text engages its readers in the activity of remembrance. The analysis of the memory on the Acropolis does not describe the site’s archeological ruins. As the travelers reach the Acropolis, the psychoanalytic narrative gives the ascent of the Acropolis an unanticipated climax; climbing the Acropolis leads directly to an encounter with Freud’s dead father. In Freud’s narrative, the Athenian Acropolis operates as a psychic site unconsciously connecting a son with his dead father. This unexpected encounter between son and father, who died eight years before (1896), encapsulates a welter of other links between different cultural worlds, such as the Judaic and the classical, the Galician and the German, and also antiquity and modernity. Freud’s narrative, therefore, is not only analytical, that is, aiming to demonstrate through deconstruction the unconscious work, but itself, in its unique textual form, mirrors the space of the unconscious through the creation of strange and unexpected linkings. This is a fine example of a poetics of the unconscious employed by Freud in his autobiographical, literaryanalytical writing. In contemplating the meaning of the Athenian Acropolis, Freud’s impressions of this emblematic site of antiquity unconsciously intermingled with threads of thought concerning his father. The ancient place, as I read it, provides Freud with much more than a suitable backdrop for the idiosyncratic relationship with his father to unfold against. Freud’s narrative offers us no less importantly an insight into the inner connections between antiquity and Freud’s unconscious. The figure of the father creates a textual dichotomy. The father is inherent to the work of the text; he leaves marks on the text of remembrance, in his contribution both to the disjunctions and to the links between Freud and the world of antiquity. It goes without saying that, apart from this structural contribution to the unfolding of the psychoanalytic text, the father is a central figure in the manifest and latent content of the working of memory. In “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” antiquity primarily appears as a psychic site where Freud’s relationship with his father, his childhood memories, as well as his current desires and regrets are freely set in motion. Freud introduces the memory as an “unusual, abnormal or pathological” manifestation of the mind, namely, as belonging to the type of phenomenon that has been the target of his scientific work. The meditation on the memory leads him to the diagnosis of specific type of disturbance (Störung). And indeed Freud’s German title Eine Erinnerungsstörung auf der Akropolis refers to a certain disorder of remembrance. In the tradition of German philosophy, Erinnerung is rendered as

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the activity that “unifies the reality with its own knowledge of it,” and “making the external being into something mine.”²² Erinnerungsstörung is an act of disruption symptomatic of disjunctions and disconnections in memory. With this terminology in mind we can assess Freud’s psychological insights as he examines instances of disconnect occurring in his narrative of remembrance. In Freud’s narration, these disconnected moments appear to block the possibility of self-coherence and recognition in the flux of events. The memory of the journey does not render the facticity of his strange mood intelligible. Since the memory remains disconnected and in this sense senseless, it leaves a foreign impression as if it does not belong to or had not happened to him. Freud characterizes the disruption of memory through the terms depersonalization and derealization. These two kinds of the phenomenon of disturbance of memory are identified with two different moments in his journey. Depersonalization is the term with which Freud explains the strange mood of the brothers’ experience in Trieste, and derealization is the term with which he characterizes his strange mood on the Acropolis. These occurrences of strange mood still puzzle him now as he ponders again how, at Trieste, he and his brother were tormented by indecisiveness in reaction to the spontaneous idea of changing plans and embarking for Athens. The analysis retrieves an ambiguous situation in which Freud and his brother had “foreseen nothing but obstacles and difficulties,” and, despite the attractive prospect of visiting a longed-for place like Athens, they embraced this exciting opportunity with gloominess and lack of resolve. Freud analyzes the experience as an example of Entfremdungsgefühl, namely, as an experience of alienation in which the subject feels that “a piece of his own self is strange to him.”²³ The experience of self-alienation repeats in a slight variation of the same phenomenon on the Acropolis. Freud describes this feeling as typical of the mood in which “the subject feels . . . that a piece of reality . . . is strange to him.”²⁴ This phenomenon is defined as derealization and appears in the analysis of the second part of the journey, on the Acropolis. Freud, we now understand, experienced a derealization while standing on the Acropolis. In order to understand the meaning of this unique type of disturbance of memory we need to examine the details preceding its

²² Ziglioli 2016: 104–26. And cf. “Er-innerung is literally an interiorizing by which we become inne or aware and mindful of something, take it up into mind, and perhaps allow the thought of it to acquire a certain Innigkeit, an intensity and depth” (Fóti 1984: 243). ²³ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 245. ²⁴ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 245.

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appearance in the text. Freud describes a certain moment in the afternoon, a twilight time.²⁵ This obscure in-between time of day in which light and waking merge into darkness and sleep allows the following reflection to appear: “When, finally, on the afternoon after our arrival, I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes around upon the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: ‘So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!’ ”²⁶ Climbing the Acropolis and strolling around there leads Freud eventually to a halt. The journey reaches the summit and Freud looks around at the landscape.²⁷ The concrete details of the view are completely disregarded. The open vista brings to life a childhood memory. Reviewing the mythic landscape awakens the memory of a child’s encounter with the ancient world. Instead of providing reassurance for the amazed spectator, the early memory of antiquity strangely invokes a doubt, or even a sense of disbelief in the reality of the Acropolis.²⁸ The affect of incredulity is understood by Freud as symptomatic of an experience of derealization. The attempt to describe this odd experience requires Freud to divide the narrative between two different voices: To describe the situation more accurately, the person who gave expression to the remark was divided, far more sharply than was usually noticeable, from another person who took cognizance of the remark; and both were astonished, though not by the same thing. The first behaved as though he were obliged, under the impact of an unequivocal observation, to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful . . . The second person, on the other hand, was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever been objects of doubt. What he had been expecting was rather some expression of delight or admiration.²⁹

Freud resorts to a dramatic strategy that splits the narrator voice into two distinctive personae. This is an accurate way, according to Freud, to ²⁵ Along with the metaphor of journey in Freud’s writing, Laura Marcus considers that of twilight, seeing it as tied to a play of light and darkness which she describes as “a movement between revelation and disguise, manifest and latent contents, progression and regression.” Laura Marcus, “Introduction: Histories, Representations, Autobiographics in the Interpretation of Dreams,” in Marcus 1999: 19. ²⁶ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 240. ²⁷ The journey that leads to a panoramic view is a central metaphor for psychoanalysis’s intellectual quest and dream textuality: see Frieden 1990: 10–11. ²⁸ Henry Vermorel comments that “the first title given this letter, namely Unglaube [disbelief or incredulity] auf der Akropolis, is certainly evocative of Freud’s identity as an atheist Jew.” “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” in International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis 2005. ²⁹ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 241.

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tackle a situation in which the self speaks a double language. And yet, if we examine closely the confrontation between the two voices, we realize that they are actually separated from each other in time. The speakers belong to two different mental registers organized according to distinct temporal orders. Freud characterizes the first speaker as “though he were obliged . . . to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful.” The second speaker, he continues, “was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever been objects of doubt.” The first voice emerges from the unconscious and is dubbing an experience from the early days of school. The second voice represents the rationalizing part of the self, which is amazed at the revealed unconscious content of disbelief. Already at this stage of Freud’s analysis it is made clear that the site of the Acropolis designates a psychological locus reaching down to the unconscious. For it is on the Acropolis that these two voices, the unconscious and conscious, the perspectives of past and the present, as well as old and new convictions intersect: Or it would be possible to maintain that it was true that when I was a schoolboy I had thought I was convinced of the historical reality of the city of Athens and its history, but that the occurrence of this idea on the Acropolis had precisely shown that in my unconscious I had not believed in it, and that I was only now acquiring a conviction that “reached down to the unconscious.”³⁰

At this point, Freud seems to abandon the first attempt at interpreting the Acropolis episode, on the grounds of its unprovability: “An explanation of this sort sounds very profound, but it is easier to assert than to prove.”³¹ He prefers another interpretive direction based on a connection between the depressed feeling of depersonalization at Trieste and the experience of derealization on the Acropolis: “No. I believe that the two phenomena, the depression at Trieste and the idea on the Acropolis, were intimately connected.”³² Freud’s unequivocal negation, his “No,” catches the reader’s attention and encourages her to reconsider precisely what Freud framed as unprovable, thereby implying that this earlier conjecture is unworthy of further consideration. For why does Freud find his conjecture that as a schoolboy he showed disbelief in the real existence of Athens or antiquity unprovable? Why does he want us to abandon this option?

³⁰ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 241. ³¹ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 241. ³² Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 241.

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Freud argues that a direct access to the unconscious is never possible. The way to obtain an access to the unconscious is through an attentive listening to the language of connections and analogies. This is the reason why he turns to examine the connection between the journey’s two different moods. Following Freud, we are advised to inquire into the connection between the event of depersonalization and the event of derealization, which is also a connection between two episodes of disconnection, from the self and from the historical reality. For Freud, the strange moods of alienation that came over him in the Trieste and Acropolis episodes stem from the same psychic phenomenon: a defense mechanism whose purpose is to fend off disturbances and protect the ego. While in Trieste, Freud resists visiting Athens: He connects this resistance to a memory that then resurfaces on the Acropolis, which he presents as a memory belonging to Freud the child, in a state of doubt about the existence of the ancient world. Thus, Freud connects two different events (the visits to Trieste and Athens), as well as two different times (the 1904 visit to the Acropolis and the years of studying in the gymnasium in Vienna during the 1860s). All these associations are the product of his present perspective of 1936. The two sets of connections disclose, as we shall see, a similar structure of negation: the negation of antiquity. The first resistance to antiquity appears in Trieste in the form of the anticipated “obstacles and difficulties” in making the trip to Athens. The second resistance occurs on the Acropolis in the form of an ambiguous childhood memory in which doubt is thrown on the reality of antiquity. In this respect, the two experiences express a similar act of resistance in the shape of a denial: disavowing the existence of antiquity. Moreover, many years after the journey to Athens—in 1936—the rational self, the analyst, keeps fending this childhood memory off on account of its inconceivability. The unconscious structure of resistance is preserved. Now, though, it is accepting the reliability of the memory of his youthful doubt of the historical reality of antiquity that Freud resists. This resistance is the product of the analyst’s voice of reason. For why should the schoolboy show disbelief in the real existence of Athens or antiquity? And why, again, would the middle-aged Freud deprive himself of the joy of visiting Athens? The logic behind these questions, however, cannot account for the mysterious language of the unconscious that speaks through concealment and riddles. To explain this, Freud makes use of his famous conception of negation. He can thus recognize in the saying that “All this really does exist,” the opposite statement of the unconscious: “So all this really does not exist.” Yet Freud’s interpretation via negation does

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not reach deep enough and still conceals what the ego is defending. Thus, exposing the structure of negation that underlies the affirmation “All this really does exist,” gives access to the strange memory. Freud’s unequivocal negation gives rise to a flow of associations. At this stage of the analysis, Freud is actively engaged in the act of remembering, and recognizes (according to the definition of Erinnerung) traces of himself in the remains of the memory. This process of remembering culminates in clothing the Acropolis in Freud’s biography, which begins as Freud remembers how the ancient landscape became infused into the memories of his deprived childhood. Freud describes how, while standing on the Acropolis, his gaze seems to rest on the urban landscape of his hometown, Vienna. In an address to his brother, the inner vision is communicated in a voice-over, a literary technique which revives the experience of regression: “Do you still remember how, when we were young, we used day after day to walk along the same streets on our way to school, and how every Sunday we used to go to the Prater or on some excursion we knew so well? And now, here we are in Athens, and standing on the Acropolis!”³³ Standing on the Acropolis and letting its slopes fade into the streets of his hometown is what grounds the following revelation of something “distressing and unbearable.” What escaped from “recognising it, considering it, making a judgment upon it, and appropriate action about it” was that thing that the strange resistance in Trieste to visiting Athens had tried to block from sight. It was also the same thing lurking in Freud’s schooldays that was concealed by his early fascination with antiquity. In remembering that obscure moment on the Acropolis Freud finally recognizes what it was. And thus, in recognizing that obscure thing, the thing that was cut off from the continuity of memory, Freud finally reaches a moment of self-recognition: This was linked up with the limitations and poverty of our conditions of life in my youth. My longing to travel was no doubt also the expression of a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home. I had long seen clearly that a great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfillment of these early wishes—that it is rooted, that is, in dissatisfaction with home and family.³⁴

“This was linked up,” Freud writes, and ascribes this association to the unconscious work. Linking the present to the past is done on the

³³ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 247. ³⁴ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 246–7.

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automatic loom of the unconscious.³⁵ The disbelief in the possibility of ever seeing Athens is voluntarily linked to or “rooted . . . in dissatisfaction with home and family.” Freud retraces the footsteps of German philosophy only to reappropriate its notion of antiquity as Heimatlichkeit. His antiquity is, rather, a displacement of home and family, but also a spiritual locus that allows relinking, retrieving, and remembering home, family and . . . the father. Climbing the Acropolis thus captures a most intimate moment that reconnects Freud with an innermost experience. How can the site of the Acropolis, the ancient landscape that brings to life historical and mythic senses of antiquity, open this intimate space of modern selfhood? What is really questioned through the derealization of the existence of Athens is—and here remember the thematics of Erinnerung—the depth of Freud’s relation to the ancient world. That is to say, the issue is not whether the boy, Sigmund, doubted the existence of Athens, but whether Freud could exist within the horizons opened by Athens. What is doubted is not Athens but Freud’s place in relation to antiquity. I think that Freud understands this even if only implicitly. “It is not true,” he writes, “that in my schooldays I ever doubted the real existence of Athens. I only doubted whether I should ever see Athens.” Freud emphasizes how the physical actions of seeing and walking bring out the personal aspects of the Acropolis experience. Indeed the act of physically climbing on the Acropolis is an act of appropriation that renders it, to a certain extent, symbolically “his.” It is for the foot to again touch ancient soil. But, as I have suggested, Freud feels dissociated and as such is unable to identify a maternal sense connecting him to antiquity. Freud, the son, cannot find a mother in Athens—but his compulsion for an inner connection, together with the failure of this quest, gives birth to another, somewhat peculiar paternal trope: his relationship to antiquity takes the form of his ambivalent relationship with his Galician father. Freud, whose ascent to the Acropolis symbolically commemorates his surpassing of his own father, understands that his youthful passion for antiquity was foreign to his Jewish origins: “The very theme of Athens and the Acropolis in itself contained evidence of the son’s superiority. Our father had been in business, he had had no secondary education, and Athens could not have meant much to him.”³⁶ It was not from his father that Freud inherited the philhellenic legacy. Freud became fascinated ³⁵ Freud employs the metaphor of weaving to describe the work of the unconscious. See, for example, Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 243, SE 5: 563. ³⁶ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 247.

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with classical antiquity independently of, and even in spite of, his early upbringing. And yet, despite calling into question the authenticity of his acquired rootedness in classical antiquity, Freud’s narrative nevertheless reveals, against its own logic, that antiquity is the essential link to his innermost self. Freud’s attraction to antiquity is thus linked (even though through an adversarial bond) to the image of an abject and frail childhood. Freud’s text thus speaks a double language: the reality of cultural inferiority and economic deprivation indeed signifies disconnection from antiquity; yet, at the same time, the recollection of Freud’s childhood is stimulated by the physical experience of standing on the Acropolis—his feet on ancient ground.

3.4 Parvis componere magna The very fact that being on the Acropolis opened up a childhood memory and brought back the presence of his dead father implies that the path to the Acropolis is the “royal road to the unconscious.” This can be seen through a free association Freud shares with his brother, again tying their dead father to the present visit to the Acropolis: I might that day on the Acropolis have said to my brother: “Do you still remember how, when we were young . . . We really have gone a long way!” So too, if I may compare such a small event with a greater one, Napoleon, during his coronation as Emperor in Notre Dame, turned to one of his brothers—it must no doubt have been the eldest one, Joseph—and remarked: “What would Monsieur notre Père have said to this, if he could have been here today?”³⁷

Climbing on the Acropolis seems to produce a grandiose effect of transfiguration, an elevated experience of Olympian apotheosis that in Freud’s free associations is tied to the 1804 coronation of Napoleon. Replacing the Acropolis with the Notre-Dame Cathedral, the ascent and the coronation are juxtaposed so that Freud and Napoleon are intertwined. Just as the former, one hundred years later, would turn to his brother Alexander to remind him of their modest background, so Napoleon at the event of his coronation turns to his brother with a sentimental remark. In naming Napoleon’s brother “Joseph” (Freud writes, “it must no doubt have been the eldest one”), the anecdote brings to life Freud’s own father, Jacob, the biblical father of Joseph. Napoleon speaks French with his brother, but Freud translates the emperor’s comment into German ³⁷ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 247.

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except for the three words he keeps in French: Monsieur notre Père. Thus, by restoring the original locution Freud clothes Vater with the French Père.³⁸ By way of alluding to the coronation episode, evoking the father in a language that is not the brothers’ mother tongue, displacing the intimate Vater word, Freud’s narrative constructs the entrance to the ancient confines of the mythical crossroad. Freud’s recollection and comparison show a streak of self-aware embarrassment. But the analogy itself between historical and personal events is a common topos in classical literature: “so too, if I may compare such a small event with a greater one . . . ” In weaving a literary topos into his text, one that recurs throughout the history of European literature, the salient presence of Freud’s rhetorical maneuver invokes a number of literary associations, embedded in Freud’s literary memory.³⁹ Among the various literary examples from the history of European literature featuring this rhetorical figure, the memory in Freud’s letter of Virgil’s First Eclogue has probably the most vital resonance.⁴⁰ Freud’s contemporary reader immersed in the classical literary tradition could not have missed the literary allusion suggested by Freud’s German paraphrase: “Und wenn man so Kleines mit Größerem vergleichen darf.” The typical structure of analogy comparing small with big things exposes an unexpected connection between Freud and Virgil, between antiquity and modern times. These connections bear the unconscious’s distinctive signature of weaving opposite things together.⁴¹ In corollary fashion, when we link Virgil’s parvis componere magna (Ec. 1.23) to Freud’s comparison of himself with Napoleon, Virgil’s text is exposed to the work of the ancient unconscious weaving its ancient associations with modern ones. Before discussing the association of Virgil’s comparison that surfaces in Freud’s “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” I shall say more ³⁸ See Peter Rudnytsky’s discussion of matrem nudam in Rudnytsky 1987: 74. ³⁹ In ancient history smikra tauta megaloisi sumbaleein is a typical strategy connecting things on different temporal and spatial scales. For a comparison between small and large geographical regions, see, for example, Herodotus 2.10. For a comparison between two battles, separated in time and space, see Thucydides 4.36. Lucretius is committed to investigating the value of the analogy between the tiniest particles and the largest phenomena: dumtaxat rerum magnarum parva potest res exemplare dare et vestigia notitiae (Lucretius, DRN 2.123–4). His atomist methodology appeals to Virgil, whose si parva licet componere magnis compares bees and humans. Virgil, Georgics 4.176. ⁴⁰ The First Eclogue was familiar to Freud from his schooldays. Virgil’s Eclogues were included in the curriculum of Freud’s classical studies at the gymnasium. See Gresser 1994. On the centrality of Virgil’s First Eclogue in European cultural consciousness see Curtius: “From the first century of the Empire to the time of Goethe, all study of Latin literature began with the first eclogue. It is not too much to say that anyone unfamiliar with that short poem lacks one key to the literary tradition of Europe” (Curtius 1953: 190). ⁴¹ Freud The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 471.

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about how the unique structure of the comparison discloses an originary relation to the unconscious work. Tying together small and large things demands clarification. Juxtapositions of this sort produce enigmatic connections that require apologetic explanations and justifications. Comparing small things to large involves ambivalent emotions such as embarrassment, a sense of inappropriateness, and guilt. These emotions betray a latent rivalry between small and large things. The very act of connecting different things brings their similarity into question. Are these competing things similar?⁴² The ties between Freud’s letter to Romain Rolland and Virgil’s First Eclogue are created by a rhetorical gesture of comparison, an analogy. Through the identification of the buried Virgilian association in Freud’s letter more thematic, psychological, aesthetic points of similarity surface. Who is responsible for creating these hidden ties connecting an ancient text with a modern one? Are these connections a product of Freud’s unconscious? Or are they a product of the unconscious work of his future readers? Both options suggest that these connections are woven by the unconscious, which is responsible for linking a present already become past, Virgil’s first Eclogue, with its future, Freud’s letter. The unconscious, we should remember, needs the future in order to reveal its work.⁴³ Once identified in Freud’s text, the Virgilian association leads to the eruption of a web of connections tying the ancient text to the modern one. Attending to the various ways in which the Virgilian comparison reverberates in Freud’s German text is essential for recognizing the modern work of the unconscious. Freud’s classical analogies in this letter (the Acropolis and Virgil’s First Eclogue) indicate that, despite his insecurities concerning his cultural disconnection from antiquity, his unconscious freely produces connections and associations from the literary treasure house of antiquity. Drawing attention to the reiteration of Virgil’s parvis componere magna in its Freudian version in the German, and then in the numerous translations of Freud’s letter into other languages, is crucial for recognizing the future reverberation of Freud’s unconscious in the twenty-first-century reception of his text. Writing the letter on the occasion of his friend’s seventieth birthday returns the 80-year-old Freud to the memory of a literary encounter between two old acquaintances in the First Eclogue. Freud re-enacts a

⁴² On Freud’s understanding of analogies and comparisons as distinctive products of the unconscious work, see the discussion in Chapter 5. ⁴³ Taking Freud’s letter as integral to the reception of Virgil’s First Eclogue, my interpretation is congruous with Charles Martindale’s hermeneutic position regarding “the importance of reception in the making of meanings” (in Martindale 1997: 110).

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traumatic modern event by reproducing the disturbances of memory recurrent in the Virgilian text. Here, a few points of relation between the two texts need to be taken into consideration: the political and historical contexts within which each text is situated, and the relation of Virgil’s pastoral framework to Freud’s letter of 1936. Virgil’s First Eclogue is silent about most of the political events preceding its writing. And yet the impact of these events dominates the encounter between the two old farmers. The First Eclogue’s implicit background is Julius Caesar’s assassination, which led to civil wars and the Italian land confiscations of 41 . In Virgil’s First Eclogue it is especially the painful experience of the land confiscations that disturbs the bucolic setting. By giving voice to present concerns, Virgil’s First Eclogue produces a political intervention in the pastoral situation.⁴⁴ The First Eclogue can be seen as a poetic act of disruption. Virgil transgresses the traditional codes of pastoral discourse and contaminates it with the menacing present of Roman political reality. In the First Eclogue the pastoral’s atemporal placidity is disrupted. The intrusion of current political concerns gives voice to the repressed anxieties of the pastoral mood.⁴⁵ This is precisely what makes Virgil’s First Eclogue so novel; it is primarily the audacious union between utopian and historical notions of time. In the First Eclogue the political haunts the pastoral by foreshadowing the end of the prolonged process of the decline of the Roman Republic. Virgil uses the pastoral setting to stage an encounter between two old shepherds or, rather, two Italian farmers, Tityrus and Meliboeus. The dialogue discloses a great disparity between the distressed Meliboeus, who is threatened by the reality of land confiscations, and Tityrus, who is immune to them. Sadly comparing his situation to Tityrus’ protected form of life, Meliboeus deplores a future of being uprooted (exiled) from the fatherland: nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra (“we escape from our land while you, Tityrus, are relaxing in the shade”; Ec. 1.4). The poem has ominous horizons; shadows appear both at the beginning and end. Semantically these shadows signify two separate fields of meaning whose distinctness is obfuscated by a common signifier: umbra. In contrast to Meliboeus, Tityrus remains connected to the soil of Italy. He reclines under a leafy tree. The cool shade is metonymic of his sheltered life but it also represents the locus amoenus of pastoral

⁴⁴ On Virgil’s handling of political issues in the Eclogues, see Tarrant 1997: 173–7; Martindale 1997: 107–24. ⁴⁵ Pastoral poetry rarely presents a completely peaceful picture of nature; through its binary structure and use of analogies it explores the complexity of human nature while celebrating the beauties of the countryside. See Segal 2014; Gutzwiller 1991.

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poetry. The relaxing mood of the pastoral evoked by the word umbra is completely disrupted, however, once Tityrus becomes aware, at the end of the poem, of the passing of time. At this particular moment, the idyllic umbra that has provided an escape from the noonday heat dissolves into darkness. As evening falls, Tityrus’ secure umbra is replaced by the uncanny, threatening appearance of shadows, umbrae, described by Tityrus in the final couplet: Already now, high chimneys are smoking far away from the farm houses And longer shadows fall from the high mountains. Et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant Maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae. (Ec. 1.83–4)

The evening’s melancholic shadows (umbrae) come down from the mountains and drastically change Tityrus’ untroubled pastoral mood. The longer shadows thrown by the heights are ambiguous signs of danger and death. In observing the deep shadows, Tityrus seems to recognize that “the times” are indeed “a-changing,” but this realization remains within visual constraints. Tityrus notes the elusiveness of the shadows. He points to their unreliability: they are longer than real objects. Tityrus shies away from tackling the consequences of the political turn. He suffers from a severe case of derealization. Moreover, his apparently insensitive response to Meliboeus is an example of a disturbance of memory: The light-footed stags will therefore graze in the sky, The waves will leave the fish stranded naked on the shore; Each wandering over the other’s borders, the exile Parthians will drink the Arar, or the Germans the Tigris, long before the impression of his face will fade away from my heart. Ante leves ergo pascentur in aethere cervi Et freta destituent nudos in litore piscis Ante pererratis amborum finibus exul Aut Ararim Parthus bibet aut Germania Tigrim, Quam nostro illius labatur pectore vultus. (Ec. 1.59–63)

Concentrating on the impression of his/its countenance (Octavian? Rome?)⁴⁶ Tityrus’ memory seems to eliminate (repress) the beginning of the conversation. Did he forget that Meliboeus is an exul? Do Meliboeus’ words nos patriam fugimus (Ec. 1.4) no longer echo in his mind? ⁴⁶ Roland Mayer suggests that Rome and not Octavian is the mysterious divine savior. Mayer 2007: 156–77.

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Can Tityrus have become alienated from his addressee’s distress and used the word “exile” casually, only for the sake of a rhetorical game, forgetting its grievous connotation in Meliboeus’ life? As Wendell Clausen writes in his commentary, it is rather “Virgil’s reader,” who, in relation to exul, “will sooner think of Meliboeus and his fellow-exiles than of the warlike Parthians and Germans.”⁴⁷ Meliboeus’ flight from his fatherland is a fact; yet its reality is strangely negated, as Tityrus’ hyperbolic adynaton shows. Exile, uprooted people, and forced migrations are for him only imaginative possibilities that remain impossible in Tityrus’ real world. The subtle percolation of the political into Freud’s self-analysis in “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” associates it with Virgil’s First Eclogue.⁴⁸ The political context of the National Socialists’ rise to power in Germany and Austria “acted,” Miriam Leonard argues, “as the trigger of Freud’s memory.” And she adds, “It is far from coincidence from a ‘national-cultural’ perspective that this memory reoccurred to Freud in 1936.”⁴⁹ As Freud faced the resurgence of anti-Semitism during the 1930s, his concerns intensified and led to the development of new dimensions in the evolution of his Jewish identity.⁵⁰ Nevertheless, the letter to Romain Rolland avoids any direct reference to the troubling times of its composition. In the light of the disturbing absence of the “national-cultural” present, the personal address to Romain Rolland in the postscript attracts the reader’s attention: “And now you will no longer wonder that the recollection of this incident on the Acropolis should have troubled me so often since I myself have grown old and stand in need of forbearance and can travel no more.”⁵¹ How should we understand the postscript if not as an attempt to settle a disruption? For without this unexpected ending Freud’s letter as a whole looks like an example of a disturbance of memory. Without the postscript, the memory of the past incident fends off the menacing present. Read as a whole, the letter displays many textual layers. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” joins different perspectives related to different stages of Freud’s life: childhood, schooldays, professional success in the prime of life, and finally old age facing the shattering future, in Vienna of the 1930s. ⁴⁷ Clausen 1994: 55. ⁴⁸ Theodore Ziolkowski has shown that the foreboding political vision of the First Eclogue had a special appeal for modern poets who were troubled by witnessing the political and cultural changes of the 1930s. Ziolkowski discusses the poetic reception in the twentieth century of Virgil’s First Eclogue in Ziolkowski 2007: 155–70. ⁴⁹ Leonard 2012: 187. Cf. Gourgouris 1996: 12. ⁵⁰ On Freud’s Jewish identity, see, for example, Yerushalmi 1991; Gresser 1994. ⁵¹ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 248.

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Referring to Freud’s self-testimony regarding his inability to travel in 1936 due to old age and ill health, Leonard reads into the manifest text a silent statement tying Freud’s physical inability to travel with the external obstacles to immigration enforced by different countries during the 1930s.⁵² In silencing the historical moment of 1936, Freud calls on the reader to be, in fact, particularly attuned to it (against, as it were, the censorship of the text). Freud’s memory of his visit to the Acropolis pulls him back to a different era (before World War I) and in this sense the letter written thirty-two years later re-enacts a textual disturbance of memory. For the letter’s historical context demands of the reader, against its explicit invitation to dwell on the past, to be aware, no less, of the subtle intrusion of Freud’s troubling present. Hence, Freud’s letter, very much like Virgil’s First Eclogue, re-enacts the politically troubling times of 1936 by imposing on his reader an allegedly tranquil (academic) exercise of self-analysis taking the time to focus on an old memory. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” is not only an investigation of a mnemonic failure; it also produces one. Freud’s letter elides, brackets, and even allows the forgetting of the menacing present by being immersed in the meandering past. Although the picture conjured by the memories is not at all coherent and readable, it captures the multifaceted history of the self. This history or, rather, state of consciousness consists in incompatible experiences from different periods. How can this inconsistent memory make sense? “Do you still remember?,” Freud asked his brother on the Acropolis in 1904, and this question is readdressed thirty-two years later to his friend, as well as to the letter’s future readers: Do you still remember? Freud remembers through the links between different things, small and great. The occurrence of remembering depends on a relation. The analogy stimulates memory. It leads us to remember Virgil’s First Eclogue, to notice the textual stitches binding Freud’s text to Virgil’s. It is Virgil’s trace in Freud’s comparison that leads us to revisit the Freudian unconscious. At the same time, reading Virgil’s First Eclogue in conjunction with Freud’s letter leads us to encounter an ancient expression of the unconscious.

3.5 The future unveiling of Tityrus’ unconscious Virgil puts the analogy of big and small things in Tityrus’ mouth as he tells Meliboeus about his visit to Rome: ⁵² For a similar reading see Brooks 2011: 149.

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The city, Meliboeus they call Rome, I foolish one, thought like this town of ours, whereto we shepherds often drive the tender younglings of the flock: so too I knew puppies resemble dogs, and kids their dams; thus comparing great things with small. But this city rears its head far above all other cities as cypresses above pliant osiers. urbem quam dicunt Romam, Meliboee, putavi stultus ego huic nostrae similem, quo saepe solemus pastores ovium teneros depellere fetus. Sic canibus catulos similis, sic matribus haedos Noram, sic parvis componere magna solebam. Verum haec tantum alias inter caput extulit urbes Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi. (Ec.1.19–25)

The shepherd boasts about knowing how to compare small things with great: parvis componere magna. His knowledge is based on intimacy with the natural cycle of life: little puppies resemble dogs, while baby goats resemble their mothers. Tityrus’ linguistic skill, entangled with a conceptual capacity to grasp a connection between small and great things, is related to his rustic familiarity with the life of organisms: offspring are similar to begetters. Tityrus’ simple taxonomy fails him, however, once he stumbles upon an irregular example contradicting common sense. The outstanding character of Rome in relation to other towns indicates their incommensurability. Rome seems unsurpassed as a parental figure. It towers above other examples of parenthood, and is to be revered. Through the encounter with Rome Tityrus comes to understand the concept of difference. This new sense of difference promotes maturation. Tityrus invalidates his earlier belief in the principle of similarity, which now he deems characteristic of an undeveloped, naive stage of selfhood. These commonsensical analogies were typical of past tenses (putavi, noram). The use of cognitive verbs such as these in past tenses would be characteristic of ordinary talk of an enlightened self. Tityrus’ ontological initiative of seeing similar things as in fact different now takes the lead. This is the rationalizing Tityrus who separates the “then” from the “now.” At the same time, a reading of Tityrus’ analogy in relation to Freud’s reveals the work of the ancient unconscious. A comparative reading between the ancient and modern texts dismantles the claim to logical differentiations and returns to the picture the unconscious with its anachronic flow of associations. Tityrus’ memory, that of an old man, contains contradictory life experiences. Rural and urban, simple and

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mature, and different temporal layers coexist. Life’s unexpected occurrences have taught Tityrus a lesson. He who grew up in nature living according to its organic law of continuity and similarity, recognizes in his old age the inevitable law of difference. The future textual reception of Tityrus’ unconscious makes possible the retrieval of its traces.

3.6 Virgil’s unveiling of Freud’s unconscious Freud’s apologetic comparison between a (modest) personal memory and a great historical anecdote recapitulates in a nutshell the project of a whole life. “I began,” he writes to Rolland, “by attempting this upon myself and then went on to apply it to other people and finally, by a bold extension, to the human race as a whole.”⁵³ As he reminds Rolland, Freud has always created links and analogies between the idiosyncratic and the universal, between personal discoveries based on self-analysis and general investigations of the human psyche and culture. The analogical structure by which Freud juxtaposes small and great things is, however, inherent to his thought in yet another way. For Freud it is a key for sorting out the relationship between the past and the present, which he often thinks about in terms of the relationship between father and son. Are father and son similar? Are they different? Does the fact of Freud being Jacob’s son deprive him of a connection to the classical world of antiquity? Or is his difference from his Galician father evidence of his being a legitimate son of European culture? Standing on the Acropolis also summons the memory of towering Rome.⁵⁴ Is he a legitimate (similar) descendant? Freud reveals his ambivalent relationship with antiquity, mixing feelings of admiration and intimidation, accommodating both acts of assimilation and separation characteristic of his relation to his Jewish father: The very theme of Athens and the Acropolis in itself contained evidence of the son’s superiority. Our father had been in business, he had had no secondary education, and Athens could not have meant much to him. Thus what interfered with our enjoyment of the journey to Athens was a feeling of filial piety.⁵⁵

⁵³ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 239. ⁵⁴ Freud’s text reflects not only philhellenic sentiments but a general admiration for the Greek and Roman legacy. For Rome as a present absence in “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” see Bellamy 1992: 38–81. ⁵⁵ Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 247–8.

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The son’s philhellenism is a mark of his Oedipal rivalry, while his being Jewish, and at a time of historical crisis, signifies identity and similarity with the father. Miriam Leonard sees these two poles of filial experience as mutually exclusive: “Judaic filial piety ultimately wins out over Hellenic Oedipal rivalry.”⁵⁶ And yet is it possible to get over the opposition between different identities? Can we see Freud’s concluding reflection as a sign of his acceptance of the exclusivity of his Jewish identity? We cannot, I think, free the text from its inherent dichotomy. A trace of this ambivalent cultural identity can be detected at the end of Freud’s essay. Freud appeals to his reader by conjuring his old age, his sickness, his fragility. Against the present political crisis that carries the threat of a life awaiting him as a refugee and exile, Freud recapitulates the trajectory of his analysis by employing a Virgilian image: pietas. “The very theme of Athens and the Acropolis,” Freud writes, brings up a connection to and identification with the father. Freud employs the Latinized term “Pietät”⁵⁷ to characterize his relation to his father. It is precisely through the specific Virgilian rendition of pietas that Freud models his relation to his father in terms of filial piety. Naming his epic protagonist, Aeneas Pius, Virgil refers, inter alia, to Aeneas’ piety towards his old father, Anchises. Through the Virgilian connotation of “Pietät,” Freud expresses his lament for his father, the destruction of a world that cannot anymore contain the compound identity of a European Jew. Freud reasserts his Jewishness as he directs our gaze to the image of the son carrying his father on his shoulders against the background of a burning city.

⁵⁶ Leonard 2012: 186. ⁵⁷ “Was uns im Genuß der Reise nach Athen störte, war also eine Regung der Pietät.” Cf. the discussion on pietas in Chapter 5.

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4

Childhood memories Homeric digression and Freudian regression

Consider the following Homeric picture, which, through its long reception history, has become part of our collective memory: two old people seated near a fire place, a beggar attended by a maid washing his feet. This generic scene of hospitality in the ancient household is about to change when the powerful intervention of memory, or, better, of a memory, transforms the respectful encounter between the two supposed strangers into a tantalizing scene of recognition. As the old maid touches the stranger’s foot, she recalls the texture of a familiar scar. In touching the scar, the dormant past is revivified and childhood memories surface. Freud’s reflections on childhood memories will continue to engage us in this chapter, dealing as it does with the already ancient return to a primordial past. In “Screen Memories,” Freud radically questioned the originality of childhood memories, taking them not as exact depictions but as approaches “relating to our childhood.” Childhood memories, according to Freud, are formed in later periods, and they “show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused.”¹ Yet Freud’s notion of the unconscious construction of childhood memories does not negate the possibility of harking back to one’s infantile past, as his own self-analysis shows. In particular, his account of his response as a reader to ancient Oedipus captures a movement of turning back that brings about a recollection of his own infancy. Freud’s movement of turning back is central to this chapter, which provides a reading that juxtaposes two ancient texts: the Homeric digression of Book 19 of the Odyssey and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Both Oedipus and Odysseus suffered a great injury in their childhood. These traumatic childhood events left marks on their bodies. The scars appear as a means of identification for those who know Oedipus and Odysseus from childhood. In turning to these scars as sites of a distant past, the stories of Oedipus and Odysseus reveal

¹ Freud, “Screen Memories,” SE 3: 322.

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their complex relation to this past. Remembering and forgetfulness are entangled in Oedipus’ and Odysseus’ regressions.²

4.1 Freud’s alte Zeiten During a long process of self-analysis, preceding the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recorded his dreams with the aim of analyzing repressed and forgotten childhood memories. Freud understood the dream to be a container of childhood impressions “which date back to earliest childhood, and which seem not to be accessible to waking memory.”³ In that period, making a connection between Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and his own childhood memories afforded Freud a glimpse into what he considered the depths of modern psychological experience. The emergence of Freud’s childhood memories is thus connected with Freud’s return to the ancient classical text. Freud’s recollection involves, then, an act of self-recognition. Freud finds in the figure of the ancient Oedipus “ancient traces” of his own forgotten childhood memories. Freud shares these discoveries with his friend Wilhelm Fliess in the famous letter of October 15, 1897:⁴ A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of ] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood . . . If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the objections that reason raises against the presupposition of fate . . . the Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he senses its existence within himself. Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy, and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression which separates his infantile state from his present state.⁵

In the letter to Fliess,⁶ Freud regards the ancient Oedipus as proof of the primary existence of the now repressed psychic structure. The evidence depends on a memory test. The myth of Oedipus, like litmus paper, brings to mind a forgotten memory. The myth has the power to expose ² There is much to say about the connection between the story of the scar and the story of trauma as narratives of a belated experience. See Caruth 1996. ³ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 189. ⁴ The year 1897 marks an important stage in Freud’s biography in which he becomes disillusioned with his theory of seduction and initiates a theoretical transformation. ⁵ Freud 1985: 272. ⁶ For a further discussion of this important letter, see Chapter 5.

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an internal compulsion so that it can be recognized. Sophocles’ play has a similar mnemonic effect in reminding its audience of forgotten infantile fantasies.⁷ Oedipus (whose name is metonymic of both the myth and the play) compels the modern subject to recoil in horror (schaudert jeder zurück). Richard Armstrong rightly sees in this recoil a strong indication that Freud structures the narrative of his self-recognition around a theatrical paradigm. In using schaudert jeder zurück Freud reproduces “a gothic shock of recognition at seeing upon the stage a figure who fulfills our hidden childhood experience.” Armstrong notes that Freud’s narrative of self-revelation makes a connection between the Gothic shock of tragedy and the specific content of his self-revelation regarding the “monstrous set of feelings toward our loved ones.”⁸ But there is another sense of the gesture of recoil, involving its complex form of temporality. It has less to do with the monstrous content of the revelation, and more with the gesture’s temporal structure and affect. We might recall that the letter to Fliess gives the impression that Freud’s remark about Oedipus is the product of a sudden intuition, an insight hit upon during the process of self-analysis.⁹ Thus, the verb “recoiling” records a typical experience of the psychoanalytic process related to emotional aspects of insight that involve unexpected and sudden moments of recollection. These moments stimulate a variegated spectrum of feelings and moods (horror is only one possibility). The psychoanalytic insight consists of a mental return in time, a regression whose movement backwards Freud perceives as abrupt and unintentional. The effect of this unconscious backwards movement is shocking because it creates an unexpected temporal clash between the present and the past. In psychoanalytic terms, turning back means that the present includes, by the act of facing latent desires, wishful thoughts and fantasies originating in the past. In a letter of October 27, 1897, Freud relates to his friend Fliess the emotional effects of the intense period of self-analysis. Depression and ⁷ Recent readings of this passage take Freud’s remarks on Oedipus Rex as specifically responding to tragedy’s aesthetic commitments, and suggest investigating them within the wider context of nineteenth-century German philosophy. See, for example, Leonard 2015: 108–22. In my view, Freud’s turn to Oedipus as exemplar of the paradigmatic human experience does not depend exclusively on Sophocles’ tragic form. For Freud, Sophocles’ play and the myth of Oedipus are interchangeable with respect to their mnemonic force. Both the ancient tragedy and “the Greek legend” turn us into spectators of our own repressed memories and revive lost childhood impressions. ⁸ Armstrong 2012: 480. ⁹ Rachel Bowlby puts her finger on the intuitive nature of Freud’s remark about Oedipus in his letter to Fliess: “No secondary reading seems to have intervened either to reinforce or to undermine the outline” (Bowlby 2007: 30).

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frustration are present as well as bursts of sheer happiness that surround moments of discovery and enlightenment. The process of Freud’s selfanalysis, which he refers to as the “inner work,” is thus reflected in his changing mood: All of what I experienced with my patients, as a third [person] I find again here— days when I drag myself about dejected because I have understood nothing of the dream, of the fantasy, of the mood of the day, and then again days when a flash of lightning illuminates the interrelations and lets me understand the past as a preparation for the present.¹⁰

Impasse and failure of interpretation are overcome by instant discovery. Freud faces ambiguity and unintelligibility as he attempts to make sense of his dreams, fantasies, and moods. A sudden turn, however, paves the way for hermeneutic creativity. Freud describes the pathway of interpretation as breaking open by means of “a flash of lightning”—a bright intuition. The metaphor consists of the unexpected movement of lightning making the inscrutable transparent. This (en)lightening insight resolves the hitherto insoluble expressions reflecting the encoded connections between different times and experiences. As expressions of the unconscious, the dream, the fantasy, and the mood consist of “interrelations” that weave together different experiences into temporally multilayered texts. Thus, drawing out points of similarity between discrete things is not presented here as the product of an external interpretation. Freud insists that the illuminating event (a “flash of lightning”) exposes interrelatedness, thus allowing us to recognize an inner structure of the mental apparatus.¹¹ As a hermeneutic event, this illumination prepares the grounds for the interpretation: it reflects a psychic structure through which the past is construed “as a preparation for the present.” The understanding that the past prefigures the present¹² derives from an experience of being gripped by and immersed in events of the past. During Freud’s period of self-analysis two temporal movements, progression and regression, intersect. The hermeneutic activity of selfanalysis is stirred up by giving in to the faculty of memory. In order to capture the meaning of this paradoxical experience, Freud brings an analogy from the modern everyday. In a passage that has become a locus classicus, Freud asks his reader, Fliess, to consider the correlation ¹⁰ Freud 1985: 274. ¹¹ Cf. “It is no doubt true that some trains of thought arise for the first time during the analysis. But one can convince oneself in all such cases that these new connections are only set up between thoughts which were already linked in some other way in the dreamthoughts.” Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 280. ¹² For a further discussion of the past as figura futurorum, see Chapter 5.

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between self-analysis and a train journey: “I am gripped and pulled through ancient times [alte Zeiten]¹³ in quick association of thoughts; my moods change like the landscapes seen by a traveler from a train.”¹⁴ The image of the train journey opens an imaginary grid through which Freud draws the outline of the “inner work.”¹⁵ The train rushes forward, while the changing landscape seen from the train window moves backwards. The modern metaphor allows Freud to externalize the fleeting movement of associations, images, and memories.¹⁶ It is the train’s forward movement (with the perceptual effect of the landscape sliding backwards) that generates an illusion of regression. Freud’s (the passenger’s) gaze is disconnected from the landscape seen from the window. However, by turning his gaze outside, Freud experiences an intense recurrence, which is structured, spatially and temporally, as a return, inward and backwards, to alte Zeiten.¹⁷ Referring to the same letter, Laura Marcus relates Freud’s associative experience of the past to the nineteenth century’s “new forms of perception and mentation brought about by the experience of railroad travel.”¹⁸ For Freud, however, this modern everyday experience remains thin and limited without a depth perspective. The extensive resonance of a modern phenomenon is in itself not sufficient to illuminate obscure aspects of mental life. We can see how the understanding of the work of the unconscious involves explorations of cultural history whose mental repercussions permeate the everyday experience of the present. To be in an analytic mode means to be open to a wide range of links that tie subjective experience to a history of consciousness. Thus, Freud’s train of associations forges an immediate connection to a contemporaneous experience (railway travel), but at the same time hits upon a much older history linking the analytic experience to the mental gesture of turning back. We see this as Freud, talking to Fliess, jumps intuitively to a

¹³ Jeffrey Masson notes that the reading here is uncertain: “probably alte Zeiten, or possibly alle Zeiten (all times)” (Freud 1985: 275, n. 2). ¹⁴ Freud 1985: 274. ¹⁵ The description has attracted interpreters’ attention because of its connection to the technique of free association, whose use Freud recommends from the very beginning of the psychoanalytic treatment. Freud again uses the analogy of the railway traveler in instructing the reader on how to free-associate. See Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I),” SE 12: 134–5. ¹⁶ For a discussion of psychoanalysis’s dependence on new forms of perception brought about by railway travel, see Marcus 2007: 155–76. See also Lewin 1970: 71–89. ¹⁷ Freud 1985: 274. ¹⁸ Marcus refers to Sternberger 1977 and de Certeau 1984 in elaborating the role of modern life in shaping Freud’s modes of perception. See Marcus 2007: 171.

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few lines from Goethe’s “Dedication Poem” that prefaces Faust.¹⁹ Goethe composed it in 1797 on coming back to Faust for revision after a long absence. Freud recognizes in it a familiar pattern. The literary reference thus adds cultural depth to the technological analogy, or sublimates it, to use Freud’s language, ennobling it: And as the great poet [Goethe] using his privilege to ennoble (sublimate [Sublimierung]) puts it: And the shades of loved ones appear; With them, like an old, half-forgotten myth, First love and friendship.²⁰

The poet re-encounters figures both fictitious and real. Faust’s characters, as well as the poet’s friends, who are by now dead or half-forgotten, emerge as shadows from the past. Quoting these lines reveals Freud’s fascination with the movement of return for which the structure of temporal interface is crucial. The coalescence of the present with the past²¹ goes along with emotional flooding. Freud links this poetic catalogue of fleeting images to the unconscious train of thoughts. The railway-like movement of free association is now set within a narrative framework. Freud hints through this poetic reminiscence that the unintentional inner movement has a somewhat teleological aspect. It is first of all a movement that traditionally is imagined as directed downwards. Thus, Goethe’s scene of recollection restores typical features of epic descriptions of descent to the underworld.²² In the history of consciousness the return of the dead is typically structured through a dual backward and forward movement: the remembering subject turns back to meet approaching shadows. Freud’s reading of the “Dedication Poem” finds psychoanalytic value in the mythic structure of return. Facing the end of life is bound up with a return to life’s beginning. Thus, for Freud, Goethe’s re-encounter with the dead entices him to trace the earliest ¹⁹ In Freud’s writing, notes Siegel (2007: 125), Freud intended to use these lines as a motto for The Interpretation of Dreams. See Siegel 2007: 125–6. ²⁰ Freud 1985: 274. ²¹ In his autobiography Goethe singles out this experience as essential for his creativity: “One feeling which prevailed greatly with me, and could never find an expression odd enough for itself, was a sense of the past and present together in one; a phenomenon which brought something spectral into the present. It is expressed in many of my smaller and larger works, and always has a beneficial influence in a poem, though whenever it began to mix itself up with actual life, it must have appeared to everyone strange, inexplicable, perhaps gloomy” (Goethe 1882: 198). ²² There are several themes that connect Goethe’s “Dedication Poem” to narratives of descent to the underworld: the frustration of trying to pin down fleeting shadows; failure to achieve eye contact with the dead; and the temporary revival in imagination of a lost world.

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roots of life. He comments to Fliess that Goethe’s poetic recollection is tinged with “first fright and discord,” arising from this encounter with the past: “Many a sad secret of life is here followed back to its first roots [ersten Wurzeln]; many a pride and privilege are made aware of their humble origins [bescheidenen Herkunft].”²³ In turning back a connection is made between an inexplicable sadness that accompanies our lives and our beginnings. The turn backwards requires, Freud argues, an encounter between a mature stage of life and “the humble origins” of that life. Freud’s understanding of the encounter between the different moments of a life fuels our discussion of ancient childhood memories. Turning back is a major gesture in ancient poetry, offering a cure for forgetfulness. And in this sense, ancient poetic constructions of the primordial often aspire to retrieve “the humble origins” of being. Can we hear in this gesture echoes of the ancient unconscious?

4.2 From mythic to psychological memory Fascination with the primordial is a central feature of ancient Greek literature. Archaic Greek poetry, in particular, is invested in retrieving lost pictures of earlier stages of the world and human history. Hesiod’s desire to catch a glimpse of a moment anterior to human existence reflects a common human drive that is among the determinants of our experience. Thus, the child’s puzzlement about its origins—“Where was I before I was born?”—reverberates in the first philosophical and scientific investigations into the beginning of the world. Childish curiosity about the origin of existence and the adult’s cosmological and cultural inquisitiveness both have a similar feature. They are driven by the unfulfillable desire to turn back or to recreate a sense of a world that is no longer available. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the child’s question unconsciously assumes inexplicable and obscure knowledge of the primal scene, knowledge that stimulates a desire to unravel it. Since this is not a domain which memory can access, the movement backwards calls for imagination. The movement back proves vital, therefore, for the emergence of fiction. In turning backwards, the imagination contributes to the birth of fiction; this is well attested to by Hesiod’s Theogony. As Hesiod begins his genealogical account (Th. 108–15), his aim is to capture and represent a world as yet empty of things. Hesiod envisages a

²³ Freud 1985: 274.

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linear path beginning (“ex arches,” Th. 115) with the inception of the four cosmological elements and progressing towards the maturation of the phenomenal world. The Theogony cannot fully realize this wishful scheme. The originary picture preceding the four elements is precisely what cannot be retrieved because it has not been experienced or remembered. Hesiod, therefore, finds himself riveted to the sights of the world: gods, earth, rivers, the boundless sea, shining stars, and the broad sky. From this plethora of cosmic phenomena the poet turns back, through a leap of imagination, to their anterior existence. Through imagination Hesiod crafts, or reconstructs, a lost picture of an absolute beginning (arche) that is otherwise beyond our grasp.²⁴ And yet Greek poetry associates this immemorial stage of things with the actual power of memory. In turning to primordial times ancient Greek imagination employs different mnemonic strategies through which it transgresses temporal boundaries. A double derivation is at play sourcing ancient poetry in memory. On a metaphoric level, Homeric poetry conceives of itself as an outcrop of memory, being under the sway of the Muses, the daughters of the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. On a metonymic level, at its oral core, Homeric poetry substitutes and stands for the work of memory.²⁵ To remember past events in epic poetry means dredging them up from somewhere else, to discover them in an external source. The immemorial might seem a strange way to qualify the mnemonic aspects of ancient poetry, for it might seem to miss the originary experience of the past. The Homeric singer who faces the grandiose task of enumerating every Greek leader by name, along with their retinue and vessels, as they set sail for Troy, asks the Muses to help, for it is they who remember: Tell me now, Muses who have your homes on Olympus. For you goddesses are present, and you know everything, and we hear only the rumour and know nothing. Who were the leaders and the kings of the Danaans? I could not tell nor name the crowd, not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, not if I had an unbroken voice and a heart made of bronze,

²⁴ I discuss Hesiod’s notion of arche in Lev Kenaan 2011: 18–19. ²⁵ One has to distinguish between the mythic perception of the past associated with the Muses’ power to access it, and the techniques of remembrance employed by the epic singer. On the attempt to reconstruct these techniques by means of reading strategies, see, for example, Strauss 2007: 233–53. For a study of memory from a cognitive perspective in understanding the Homeric epic, see Minchin 2001.

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not unless the Olympian Muses, daughters of Zeus of the aegis, remind me all those who came beneath Ilion. (Homer, Il. 2. 484–92) ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχουσαι: ὑμεῖς γὰρ θεαί ἐστε πάρεστέ τε ἴστέ τε πάντα, ἡμεῖς δὲ κλέος οἶον ἀκούομεν οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν: οἵ τινες ἡγεμόνες Δαναῶν καὶ κοίρανοι ἦσαν: πληθὺν δ’ οὐκ ἂν ἐγὼ μυθήσομαι οὐδ’ ὀνομήνω, οὐδ’ εἴ μοι δέκα μὲν γλῶσσαι, δέκα δὲ στόματ’ εἶεν, φωνὴ δ’ ἄρρηκτος, χάλκεον δέ μοι ἦτορ ἐνείη, εἰ μὴ Ὀλυμπιάδες Μοῦσαι Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο θυγατέρες μνησαίαθ’ ὅσοι ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθον.

This appeal to divine authority supposes that it is the locus of a true knowledge. The basic assumption of epic poetry is that the human voice, broken as it is and bound to a restricted field of vision, cannot be a means to reveal the contents of the past, not even, unaided, its major events. Human poetry, then, is in need of another voice, and is itself an echo of that other inclusive voice that does remember, the voice of the Muses. It is hence difficult to identify in the fundamental action of Homeric poetry a subjective form of remembrance; the remembrance that issues from divine inspiration is not experienced personally. The past is not seen as immersed or hidden within a forgetful consciousness, and certainly not as the poet’s repressed or unconscious experience. The singer reciting these verses shows no trace of a subjective consciousness returning to the past. A turn to the past, mediated through personal memory, is an experience that can be related to the Homeric protagonists, the epic heroes. But precisely because of its mythic grounds, recollection, anamnesis, was not extensively studied as subjective experience, at least not until the 1980s. Myth and ritual offer common frameworks for studying the ancient conception of poetic memory. Jean-Pierre Vernant, for example, in “Mythical Aspects of Memory and Time,” rules out any point of similarity between mythical and psychological modes of memory: The effort to recollect what is so much praised and exalted in myth is not evidence of an awakening of interest in the past nor of an attempt to explore human time. As regards the temporal sequence as the individual apprehends it in the course of his affective life and as he conceives it in terms of nostalgia and regret, anamnesis is concerned with this only to the extent that it seeks to escape from it. It seeks to transform this time of individual life—time lived through, incoherent and irreversible—into a cycle reconstructed as a whole. It seeks to reintegrate human time into cosmic periodicity and divine eternity.²⁶ ²⁶ Vernant 1983: 90.

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For Vernant, ancient manifestations of anamnesis do not recover human time. Moreover, Vernant seeks to keep the mythic discourse of recollection entirely free of psychology. The archaic figure of the inspired poet is imbued with events of the distant past located far beyond historical time. In this sense, the ancient poetic tradition reflects notions of temporality and memory congenial to mystical and philosophical renditions of anamnesis. Pythagoras and Plato, for example, do not associate the phenomenon of anamnesis with a subjective experience of time. Their recovery of the past does not involve a reconstruction of the different temporal layers of the self. “Nowhere,” writes Vernant, does anamnesis “appear to be linked with any development of a truly temporal perspective. Nor has it anything to do with the category of the ego.”²⁷ But is this indeed the case? Is the mythical concept of anamnesis so other to the ego and its temporality? What is the scope of Vernant’s claim? Furthermore, does not the generalization it involves obscure an important dimension of memory, a dimension we see in the epos? We should notice that although the concept of temporal perspective encompasses human time, it nevertheless does not contain all aspects of the subjective experience of time. The role of the unconscious in the study of ancient recollection is evident when we consider the latter’s indifference to temporal perspective and periodicity. Hence, in pointing to the depersonalized aspects of ancient anamnesis, we do not necessarily lose touch with the ego.²⁸ It seems that concealed within Vernant’s position is an interesting possibility for our inquiry. We shall see, moreover, that, despite his refusal to recognize the subjective aspects of anamnesis, Vernant’s analysis of ancient anamnesis embraces the structure of psychological recollection precisely in exposing the intimate relationship between remembrance and forgetfulness. Hesiod’s Theogony, for example, relies on this dialectic by ascribing to the Muses the mnemonic power of their mother, Mnemosyne, together with their therapeutic capacity to release the human mind from its present painful condition. The Muses “through their poetry, may provide lesmosyne, ‘forgetting,’ of sadness and of worries for humankind.”²⁹ Thus, Hesiodic poetry brings to our attention a difference between the poetry of the Muses and of human beings. Whereas the daughters of Memory tell of “the present, the future and the past” and “fit them together with voice” (Th. 38–9), the inspired poet can tell only of “things to come and things of the past” (Th. 32). Human poetry, in other words, ²⁷ Vernant 1983: 92. ²⁸ Cf. the discussion of Freud’s depersonalization in Chapter 3. ²⁹ Nagy 1989: 30.

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cannot contain the meaning of the present.³⁰ This difference, which refers to a forgetfulness or even an absence of the present, can be regarded as the trace that the unconscious leaves on human poetry. Accordingly, epic poetry is simultaneously a reminder of a remote past and that which suppresses the singer’s impoverished present. Freud’s reflections on a return to one’s humble origins come to mind where, in his case, these origins were repressed, while the memory of a greater past was nourished. The young boy’s immersion in antiquity, thus, provided him with a refuge from a deprived childhood.³¹ As a Boeotian poet, Hesiod’s awareness of the mythical collaboration between amnesia and anamnesis seems natural. For the capacity of the Muses’ song to effect forgetfulness finds an expression in a ritual linked with the famous oracle in the city of Lebadea in Boeotia, founded by Trophonius, its sacred protector. According to Pausanias, hearing the oracular message required a descent into the sacred space of the adyton.³² This ritual passage downwards was staged as a descent to the underworld.³³ The oracular rites in Lebadea bear similarity to the Homeric notion of the underworld. The dead lose their memories and disappear from the consciousness of the living. In the Homeric descent to the netherworld, the encounter with the dead is made possible only through liturgical mediation, which restores the ability of the dead to remember. The dead congregating in the murk of the underworld are blind shadows, empty souls, without consciousness. Drinking the blood of sacrifices instantly, if momentarily, returns them to remembering consciousness.³⁴ The Homeric description of the power of memory revived through magic and rite is testimony to an archaic wishful thinking, and to its fruition in the fantastic imagination. The Homeric description of katabasis and the Boeotian ritual both entwine their respective temporal movements with forgetfulness. The encounter with the dead demands a dialectical interplay between forgetfulness and memory. The Homeric dead can for a moment remember, and then fall back into forgetfulness. Before the descent at Lebadea, the initiated drinks from the nearby streams, Lethe (forgetfulness) and ³⁰ On the present’s accessibility to the Muses and its exclusion from the scope of human poetry, see Lev Kenaan 2008: 52–3. ³¹ See the discussion above of bescheidenen Herkunft, p. 97, and the discussion of “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” in Chapter 3. ³² The descent begins from a large grotto; from there one enters a smaller orifice. See Ustinova 2009: 107. ³³ Pierre Bonnechere writes that, according to Herodotus (8.134) and Dicaearchus (fr. 13a-22, Wehrely), “consultation at Lebadea was already a descent to the underworld, designated by katabainein, and katabasis” (Bonnechere 2003: 174). ³⁴ See Od. 10.526–30; 11.35–50.

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Mnemosyne (memory), thus reenacting the experience of the Homeric dead.³⁵ Yet, the ritual at Lebadea conjures in a different sense than in Homeric ritual. Whereas Homeric katabasis directs its movement to the past, the ritual at Lebadea consists in a movement to another form of time, a time apart from linear, historical time. Vernant understands this time as eternal, not human. According to Vernant, the mythic experience of achieving contact with an ahistorical form of temporality involved forgetting present human time. Forgetfulness is thus explained as instrumental for entering a primeval cosmic realm associated with the eternal: Before venturing into the mouth of hell, the questor, who had already undergone rites of purification, was taken to two springs named respectively Lethe and Mnemosyne. He drank from the first and immediately forgot everything to do with his human life and, like a dead man, he entered the realm of night. The water of the second spring was to enable him to remember all that he had seen and heard in the other world. When he returned he was no longer restricted to knowledge of the present moment: contact with the beyond had revealed both past and future to him.³⁶

Rejecting the psychological significance of the mythic dialectic of forgetfulness and remembrance, Vernant does not make room for exploring the subjective experience of anamnesis represented by ancient fiction. And yet today, several decades after the original publication of Vernant’s “Mythical Aspects of Memory and Time” in France in 1965, the call to dissociate manifestations of forgetfulness and psychological resistance from ancient subjectivity requires rethinking.³⁷

4.3 Memory as a digression Homeric remembrance is multifaceted. A direct look backwards, retrieving the past in its entirety, that power of the poetry of the Muses, is not ³⁵ Pausanias, 9.39.7–8, 11. Bonnechere 2003 is devoted to the mysterious character of the cult of Trophonius. ³⁶ Vernant 1983: 81. ³⁷ Nicole Loraux has taken an important step in this direction. In her study of memory and forgetting in ancient Athens, Loraux examines the mythic and psychological significance of forgetfulness in order to understand its role in the Athenian construction of memory. Loraux refers to Homeric notions of forgetfulness as contributing to our understanding of political amnesia in ancient Athens (Loraux 2002: 158). For Loraux, forgetfulness offers itself not only as an object of inquiry but also as a methodological principle. Thus, she explicitly acknowledges (74–8) the influence of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism on shaping her historical methodology. Pointing in this direction she says, “Any historian who wants to catch Greek memory in the process of repression must learn to work with blank spaces of history and to focus on those obscure moments when the ways of murder become blurred and many sink into anonymity” (68).

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thought of as a human ability. The memory of the Muses involves an enormous ability to contain going far beyond the capacity of human experience. Moreover, for the Muses the past is immediately tangible and accessible. While the Muses can always know the past, to draw up the past into a remembering consciousness is only a wish as far as humans are concerned. In the Homeric epic, anxiety nestles in the mind faced by loss of memory. The fear of death is linked to its identification as an abyss of forgetfulness. Hence, an important objective of Homer’s heroes is to be remembered by others, even after death.³⁸ The bard’s poetry is taken to be a vessel of memory that commemorates the name and splendor of the hero, and that, passed on to the audience, invites them to be its future transmitters. Remembrance has a polysemic function. It is central for the Homeric heroes, who rely on memory to orient themselves in their labyrinthine lives. In the years at Troy they remember home, and recall details of their previous lives; they recount their personal histories.³⁹ After the sacking of Troy, these treasured remembered details shield and sustain the heroes confronted with the ravages of time and the hardships of their journey back home. How does Homeric poetry understand the intrusion of memories into the present? Does the intrusion of the past into the present entail a structure of recollection? Can we, in fact, recognize in ancient episodes of remembrance personal and subjective moments of recollection? These questions surface especially in the context of the famous scene in Book 19 of the Odyssey which has caught wide attention since the publication of Erich Auerbach’s monumental study Mimesis, first published in German in 1946 and then in English in 1953. Returning to this well-known scene in the Odyssey, I return then also to its renowned twentieth-century reader, Erich Auerbach, one of the founding fathers of the field of comparative literature. Auerbach’s exegetic contribution to our understanding of the work of the unconscious will be discussed in the next chapter. Here the focus is rather on his comparison between the Homeric episode of the scar and the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac.⁴⁰ Auerbach’s discussion of the scar episode opened a general controversy over how to interpret the Homeric epic, ³⁸ The Homeric kleos is crucial for understanding the importance of the song as it relates to the past. Memory celebrated by the bard is the goal most valued by the hero. See Martin 2011. ³⁹ On personal narratives in Homer, see Petropoulos 2011: 33–8. ⁴⁰ On the difference between Homeric philology and Auerbach’s comparative position, see Porter 2008: 127, and cf. 137 n. 45. On Auerbach’s reading of the biblical “Akedah” in conjunction with and in opposition to the wounded Homeric Odysseus, see Shahar 2011: 618–25.

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but also attracted diverse responses to his specific conclusions regarding the aesthetic, ethical, and psychological values of the scar episode. The scar episode (19.361–475) depicts a highly dramatic event in the plot of the Odyssey. Odysseus has at last come home after twenty years of absence, a stranger at home. Penelope requests Eurycleia, Odysseus’ old nurse, to wash his feet. While Eurycleia prepares the water for the basin, Odysseus suddenly moves into the darkness lest his old nurse recognize him by the scar on his feet. But in the darkness, while washing his feet, Eurycleia touches the scar with her hands. At this intense moment, the Homeric narrator, as Auerbach so aptly observes, brings the story to a halt. This is done precisely at the moment when the listeners are most eager to hear how Eurycleia will respond upon recognizing Odysseus and whether her reaction will publicly expose Odysseus. But instead of relieving the audience’s curiosity and meeting their concerns, the narrator turns instead to describe at leisure two episodes from Odysseus’ early life: the story of Odysseus’ naming immediately after his birth, and the story of the boar hunt. Auerbach is reluctant to understand the two childhood episodes as examples of Homeric childhood memory. He does not think of these two episodes as moments of recollection. According to Auerbach, these two episodes cannot be seen as memories because they are not subordinate to a singular perspective.⁴¹ Moreover, in bringing these past events into the foreground, their typical Homeric lucidity, visibility, and uniform completeness in respect to details disqualify them from consideration as recollections. In contrast to representations of remembrance, Odysseus’ childhood episodes render psychological processes without leaving things hidden and unexpressed.⁴² Auerbach writes in conclusion, “Any such subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depth of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.”⁴³ Writing on the development of the literary representation of reality in European literature, Auerbach focuses on Homeric style and techniques. Hence, Auerbach ties Homer’s incapacity to catch “a glimpse of unplumbed depths” to the unique Homeric pattern of description: the digression. As the hallmark of oral poetry, Homeric

⁴¹ Such a subordination was deliberately avoided: “It would have been perfectly easy to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar, where the motifs ‘Odysseus’ and ‘recollection’ were already at hand” (Auerbach 1974: 7). ⁴² Auerbach 1974: 6. ⁴³ Auerbach 1974: 7.

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digression is defined as “an anecdote describing action outside the time of the poem.”⁴⁴ The Homeric digression produces delay and retardation.⁴⁵ Norman Austin enumerates some of the critical responses to Homeric digression that allude to its paratactic style, incongruity, and ornamentalism.⁴⁶ Digression “brings time to a complete standstill”⁴⁷ and veers off to describe the origin of precious objects, mythic events, genealogical accounts, and other subject matter by the wayside. The Homeric narrator is like someone who stops at the roadside to contemplate what has deflected his attention. Getting delayed by a detail that temporarily derails the plot usually means the insertion of a segment of past time (concerning an object or event from the past) into the present. Apart from questions about the effect of interruption created by digression,⁴⁸ interpretation of the Homeric text focuses on the mechanism that links digression and narrative continuity, and is concerned with the connection between past and present. In general, therefore, there is unanimity regarding the temporal nature of digression. Digression halts the flow of narrative and steals time while being unraveled; it therefore leaves time’s scar on the text. While listening to a digression, time not only passes by, but is also thematized and acknowledged in its meandering flow. In the Homeric epic, the movement of digression structurally assumes the mythological course of katabasis. Digression has a psychopompian effect on its listeners, leading them into the past. Like katabasis, digression is a bidirectional movement in time. Using the journey to the land of the dead as a metaphor, digression takes the form of a walk back from the present to the past, and yet one which induces, at the same time, the reverse movement in which the temporarily awakened dead return from the past to the present. A good place to learn about the nature of digression is Odysseus’ account of his katabasis, itself structured as a long digression from the narrative.⁴⁹ As such, its ultimate object, the encounter between the living and the dead, reveals the very essence of

⁴⁴ Austin 1966: 300. Homeric philologists, therefore, study Homeric digression as a particular phenomenon of oral poetry. ⁴⁵ Auerbach 1974: 5. ⁴⁶ Austin 1966: 296–7. ⁴⁷ Austin 1966: 312. ⁴⁸ Eric Auerbach’s analysis stimulated a debate over the effect of digression. While Auerbach argues that a digression such as Odysseus’ scar resolves tension, others argue that it amplifies it. Norman Austin, for example, writes that “The digressions, are not, then, a release from tension but a concentration of tension” (Austin 1966: 311). ⁴⁹ Margalit Finkelberg sees remembrance of the past, reminiscence, as a certain kind of digression that appears in the Iliad in public speeches, and in the Odyssey as a main ingredient in the retrospective tale of Odysseus’ wanderings (Finkelberg 2014: 66). These first-person accounts comprise a different type of digression from the scar scene, which until recently was most commonly considered to be a narrative subordinate to the perspective of an omniscient narrator.

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digression, which is to connect the present and the past. Because of this complex temporal entanglement, Homeric digression is an important source for studying ancient representations of recollection. I shall, then, offer a reading of Auerbach against his main agenda. To read Auerbach against Auerbach will allow us to see how he recognizes the temporal and other structural features of the Homeric digression that conjure, precisely contrary to his thesis, its “subjectivistic-perspectivistic” meanings. In Mimesis, the explicit role of Homeric digression is to exemplify an immature stage in the European history of the literary representation of reality.⁵⁰ Nevertheless, Auerbach’s characterization of the Homeric digression uncovers a different role taken by it in the representation of reality. In recognizing the affinity of the Homeric digression with regression described by Freud—“one of the psychological characteristics of dreaming”⁵¹—we come to see the Homeric digression as an indispensable part of a history of literary representation of the unconscious expression. There are definite links between Homeric digression and Freudian regression. Homeric digression evokes features of unconscious experience and, as such, calls for a re-evaluation of these features as primary moments in the literary tradition of dream poetics.⁵² Auerbach describes Homeric poetry as making us “forget our own reality for a few hours.”⁵³ It is a kind of poetry that moves aimlessly “back and forth”⁵⁴ in the foreground. Although Auerbach does not spell it out, his characterization of Homer’s freedom, retardation, and paratactic continuity⁵⁵ captures its dreamlike textuality: “his reality is powerful enough in itself; it ensnares us, weaving its web around us, and that suffices him.”⁵⁶ We learn about the unique contribution of Homeric digression to the tradition of dream poetics from its capacity “to win the reader over wholly to itself as long as he is hearing it, to make him forget what had just taken place.”⁵⁷ In ⁵⁰ “Homer’s realism is, of course, not to be equated with classical antique realism in general; for the separation of styles, which did not develop until later, permitted no such leisurely and externalized description” (Auerbach 1974: 23). Cf. H. Fränkel’s view on Homer’s archaic notion of time in Fränkel 1955: 1–22. ⁵¹ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 543. ⁵² On the tradition of dreamlike poetics, see Lev Kenaan 2004: 247–84. ⁵³ Auerbach 1974: 15. ⁵⁴ Auerbach 1974: 5. ⁵⁵ “The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another . . . bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection” (Auerbach 1974: 6). Auerbach seems to tie Homeric paratactic continuity with its freedom. He explains that in contrast to “tyrannical” narratives claiming to truth, Homeric poetry does not seek “to overcome our reality” with any unifying rationale (Auerbach 1974: 14–15). ⁵⁶ Auerbach 1974: 13. ⁵⁷ Auerbach 1974: 4. Auerbach refers here specifically to the digression unfolding the story of the boar hunt that interrupts the recognition scene in Book 19. On hypnotic narrators, see Lev Kenaan 2004: 247–8.

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identifying an amnesiac effect in the Homeric form of reminiscence, Auerbach leads us to see that the art of digression involves a dialectic of forgetfulness and memory. This is where his notion of Homeric digression becomes particularly relevant for recognizing the work of the ancient unconscious.⁵⁸ In comparison with other Homeric digressions, there is no doubt that the episode of Odysseus’ scar is a special case of a recollection scene.⁵⁹ The uniqueness of this seventy-two-line digression lies in its exploitation of the structure of digression in order to invoke an experience of regression. The narrator’s digression is metonymic of the protagonist’s regression on having his feet washed, and the unique character of the digression has to do with the particular material of the recollection that goes back to infancy and childhood.⁶⁰ In order to acknowledge the digression as standing for an unconscious experience of remembering, we need to go back to the scene preceding the episode of the scar, in which Odysseus’ childhood memories surface even while he denies and resists their exposure.

⁵⁸ Not every digression focusing on past events necessarily expresses the unconscious work of memory. So, for example, Odysseus, in his speech in the second book of the Iliad, summons a memory from nine years earlier, before the ship set sail from Aulis for the shores of Troy. He begins, “Yesterday and before, at Aulis, when the ships of the Achaians were gathered . . . ” so as to recall a unique event engraved in the memory of the community of warriors (Il. 2.303–32). The event recalled was the fossilization of a snake that had devoured a swallow along with its eight chicks. The prophet Calchas took this as a sign that the Greeks would fight at Troy for nine years and conquer it in the tenth. Although Odysseus stresses that the event he is telling about belongs to the past, it is a static sort of memory, ready to be enunciated. Odysseus’ digression is, therefore, a representation of a past event and not a subjective reminiscence. ⁵⁹ Comparing the scar episode to first-person accounts of the past (e.g. the digression in 2.303–32), Homeric philologists have been reluctant to interpret it as a recollection scene, most commonly understanding it as a narrative from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. This common view was for the first time contested, however, by Irene F. de Jong, who argued that the scar episode should be read as a recollection scene from Eurycleia’s point of view, in de Jong 1985: 517–18; and see further de Jong 2001: 477, concerning Eurycleia’s “embedded focalization.” ⁶⁰ Ruth Scodel has moved beyond de Jong’s narratological analysis, reading the scar episode as a dramatic setting for representing the action of memory, which is in her view central to Homeric poetry. Scodel argues that Homeric recognition scenes do not rely on rational inferences. Signs, like the scar, are meaningless unless they bring about a personal memory in their beholders. For Scodel, the connection between sign and memory in Homeric poetry is indicative of the significance of memory for the Homeric poet. Taking the difference between semantic memory (memory with no direct experience) and flashbulb memory (autobiographical memory) postulated by cognitive psychology, Scodel analyzes the narrative of the scar as “a physical link between the flashbulb memories of Euryclea and Odysseus.” Scodel explains that “each remembers as a story what the other remembers as a powerful moment of lived experience and their memories thus overlap” (Scodel 2002: 99–116).

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4.4 Remembering and forgetting The feet-washing scene occurs right after a conversation between Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, and Penelope. The encounter, as the Homeric narrative emphasizes, is between the lady of the house and a foreigner, xeinos, between the female questioner and the mysterious man who provokes her question, “What man and from where are you? Where are your city and parents?”⁶¹ The stranger refuses to answer this question on the pretext that it amplifies his suffering.⁶² She persists: “But, even so, tell me of your race, where you’re from.”⁶³ The dramatic dialogue reveals what readers of the Homeric epic well understand: the question of identity “Who are you?” τίς πόθεν εἶς ἀνδρῶν forces one to turn towards the past. The spatial dimension of questions of identity and geographical origins evokes a turn to face the past. It requires a psychic movement in a temporal space: the movement from here to there is essentially temporal, a movement from now to then. Odysseus’ concealment of identity and family history, with which Homer’s readers are familiar, also works on a temporal level. The disguised Odysseus throughout his journey carefully guards his name and thus plays among time’s layers and makes sure to prevent parts of the past penetrating the present. In view of this, the conversation between the woman and her husband is unique among other episodes in which Odysseus hides his identity and past from his various hosts, who do not know him personally. With Penelope it is different. Their conversation takes place in an intermediate zone between the familiar and unfamiliar. The subtext of their dialogue involves veiled intimacy but also a concealment that calls for exposure. The two converse about the missing husband whose real presence threatens to burst onto the scene, despite the strict limits placed on speech by the stranger. So, although he is careful not to let on who he is, he does in fact betray a special relationship with the absent man. “Tell me what kind of things were those he wore around his body,” Penelope says, “and what sort he himself was, and his comrades who went with him.” In response to her enquiry, Odysseus recalls the image of the man he was, and this despite the passage of twenty years: “My lady, it’s difficult for me, away for such a long time, to tell you, since it’s the twentieth year for him,

⁶¹ ξεῖνε, τὸ μέν σε πρῶτον ἐγὼν εἰρήσομαι αὐτή: / τίς πόθεν εἶς ἀνδρῶν; πόθι τοι πόλις ἠδὲ τοκῆες; (Od. 19.105). ⁶² Od. 19.115–21. ⁶³ Od. 19.162.

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from when he went from there and left my fatherland, but I’ll tell you as my heart depicts it to me.”⁶⁴ ὦ γύναι, ἀργαλέον τόσσον χρόνον ἀμφὶς ἐόντα εἰπέμεν: ἤδη γάρ οἱ ἐεικοστὸν ἔτος ἐστὶν ἐξ οὗ κεῖθεν ἔβη καὶ ἐμῆς ἀπελήλυθε πάτρης: αὐτάρ τοι ἐρέω ὥς μοι ἰνδάλλεται ἦτορ.

Guided by Penelope, Odysseus brings to life impressions that have stayed with him for twenty years. The Homeric poet chooses the heart, etor, the seat of desire and emotions, to be the place from which the stranger dredges up a picture of the man he was. And yet, a few lines earlier, the poet uses the term thumos to speak of the heart by which Odysseus not only feels pity for his grieving wife but also is capable of putting these emotions under constraint. The description is of an internal clash between an untethered emotion and its inhibition: so her fair cheeks melted as she shed tears and cried for her husband, sitting at her side. Then Odysseus felt pity in his heart for his groaning wife, but his eyes, as if they were horn or iron, stood without a tremor in his eyelids, and he hid his tears with guile. (Od. 19. 208–12) ὣς τῆς τήκετο καλὰ παρήϊα δάκρυ χεούσης, κλαιούσης ἑὸν ἄνδρα παρήμενον. αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς θυμῷ μὲν γοόωσαν ἑὴν ἐλέαιρε γυναῖκα, ὀφθαλμοὶ δ’ ὡς εἰ κέρα ἕστασαν ἠὲ σίδηρος ἀτρέμας ἐν βλεφάροισι: δόλῳ δ’ ὅ γε δάκρυα κεῦθεν.

In the Homeric drama of recollection memory emerges through the interplay between Penelope’s heart-wrenching tears and Odysseus’ resistance.⁶⁵ The scene shows Odysseus in his typical duality: being and appearance. And yet, in this specific moment of intimacy, this duality has a different role. It externalizes a principle of negation through the representation of inhibition and suppression. Odysseus does not cry when he sees his wife in tears. He makes sure his eyes are “as if they were horn or iron.”⁶⁶ The Homeric portrait offers archaic symptoms of a modern neurosis. Thus, the Homeric poet gestures towards the human difficulty involved in retrieving a twenty-year-old memory. The memory the stranger provides is of a man in a crimson cloak with a golden brooch and a chiton, this being the attire of Odysseus twenty ⁶⁴ Od. 19.218–24. ⁶⁵ On Odysseus’ memory of the clothes as flashbulb memory, see Scodel 2002: 106–8. ⁶⁶ Od. 19.211.

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years before. As Ruth Scodel shows, the Homeric sema is meaningful as a recognition sign only if it stimulates a personal recollection.⁶⁷ Though the clothes described by the stranger do not exist anymore as real objects, their remembrance does stir Penelope’s memory.⁶⁸ The scene is concerned, then, with the awakening of memory and the need to feed memories with intimate talk and physical contact. On a metaphorical level, the scene recapitulates the dual elements of Odysseus’ journey: the opposing movements of forgetfulness and memory. Going on a journey, leaving behind those who know the wayfarer, is a way of diminishing the effects of memory. Coming home is a struggle against the forgetfulness that geographical distance produced, and helps in regaining a vivid memory of the past. The encounter between Penelope and the stranger presents us with a common psychological phenomenon: shared memories bring us closer. Consider the moving depiction of the growing intimacy between the couple: Stranger, though you were pitied before, you’ll now be both dear to me and respected in my palace, for I myself gave him these clothes, the kind you speak of, from my chamber, and I folded them, and put the shiny brooch on it, to be a thing of glory for him.⁶⁹ νῦν μὲν δή μοι, ξεῖνε, πάρος περ ἐὼν ἐλεεινός, ἐν μεγάροισιν ἐμοῖσι φίλος τ᾽ ἔσῃ αἰδοῖός τε: αὐτὴ γὰρ τάδε εἵματ᾽ ἐγὼ πόρον, οἷ᾽ ἀγορεύεις, πτύξασ᾽ ἐκ θαλάμου, περόνην τ᾽ ἐπέθηκα φαεινὴν κείνῳ ἄγαλμ᾽ ἔμεναι.

The stranger (xeinos) continues to conceal his true identity; and yet he becomes a friend (philos) because of the harmony between his memories and those of Penelope. The Homeric digression focalizes on the nonexistent, already perished clothes. The plot is interrupted, but delay and retardation are powerful, effecting recollection. Although the memory of the clothes makes us forget the plot to some extent, it at the same time returns something repressed, something important to it, something vivid and tangible. The ⁶⁷ Scodel 2002: 108. See also n. 60 above. ⁶⁸ In Euripides’ Ion, emphasis is put more on the reliability of memory than on its subjective dimension. Creusa, Ion’s mother, separated from him in his infancy, is asked to describe the baby’s clothing from memory in order to affirm her true identity. Only when she has described the garment down to the last detail is it produced in evidence of the reliability of memory, and as proof of there being no appeal against her identity as Ion’s mother. In the Homeric episode, however, the clothes do not exist anymore. Euripides, Ion 1412–25. ⁶⁹ Od. 19.253–7.

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memory of Odysseus’ beautiful clothes functions, then, to evoke the body of the young Odysseus. It thus restores Odysseus’s bodily history to the plot, his disguised body, the body that has been trapped by the lapse of time, transformed by the journey and decayed into frailty and old age. The memory of the body comes to life concomitantly with forgetfulness, distraction, and even denial of it in the conversation scene. Exposure of the body arises as a latent thought in gestures of hospitality, including bathing. The stranger is unconsciously ambivalent towards exposure of his body. He is clearly reluctant to expose it, but unconsciously also wishes to reveal it. This duality is also represented by the different reactions of Penelope and the stranger to the washing gesture. Penelope gives much more attention and care to the stranger’s body than the stranger is willing to receive. She calls for a number of servants to bathe the man and have him retire to a couch with elegant bedding, and to massage him with oil the following morning.⁷⁰ Odysseus, however, refuses all these bodily pleasures. His refusal is an expression of his well-known guile, his ability to hide his true identity.⁷¹ And yet, contrary to his usual behavior, Odysseus displays here another type of refusal, a kind of resistance, a “no” saying that works against him, and is bound to raise suspicion. The following negative utterance comes as a surprise after Odysseus has already turned down Penelope’s suggestions. Consider what is being negated here: Neither is water for foot washing at all pleasing to my heart nor will any woman touch our foot, of those who are female servants in your home, unless there is some old woman, an ancient one, expertly devoted, one who’s suffered in her mind as much as I have. I wouldn’t begrudge her touching my feet.⁷² οὐδέ τί μοι ποδάνιπτρα ποδῶν ἐπιήρανα θυμῷ γίγνεται: οὐδὲ γυνὴ ποδὸς ἅψεται ἡμετέροιο τάων αἵ τοι δῶμα κάτα δρήστειραι ἔασιν, εἰ μή τις γρηῦς ἔστι παλαιή, κεδνὰ ἰδυῖα, ἥ τις δὴ τέτληκε τόσα φρεσὶν ὅσσα τ᾽ ἐγώ περ: τῇ δ᾽ οὐκ ἂν φθονέοιμι ποδῶν ἅψασθαι ἐμεῖο.

Odysseus turns down the indulgent welcome offered by Penelope. But he also mentions a particular detail absent from Penelope’s original offer: the foot washing. Penelope only suggested that the female servants bathe Odysseus: “But come, women, wash the stranger and make his bed” (Od. 19.317). Hence, Odysseus’ negative clause, a specific interdiction ⁷⁰ Od. 19.317–20.

⁷¹ Od. 19.335.

⁷² Od. 19.343–8.

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against having his feet washed, seems superfluous. Why turn down what has not, after all, been offered? Practically, this negation does not contradict what Odysseus has been saying all along, but its eruption discloses a repressed thought at work.⁷³ The “no” declared against foot washing shows, then, a latent thought related to the feet. Odysseus repeats the word “foot” (pous) three times and thus unconsciously draws attention to the obscure presence of his foot. What though does come to mind with this emphatic invocation of the foot? What does the resonance of the latent thought of the pous leave behind? What does verbal exposure of the foot tell about Odysseus’ unconscious thinking? For now, the emergence of the foot in the Homeric narrative discloses its denial, and hints at a certain forgetfulness that is about to be overtaken by remembering consciousness. Odysseus’ denial underlines the foot as a sensitive area, as a place that has special significance for him. The repression of the foot achieves its strongest expression, however, in Sophocles’ tragedy, in that play’s obstructions to any vivid recall of Oedipus’ scarred feet.

4.5 οἳ δ᾽ εἰσὶ ποῦ γῆς; (Where on earth are they?) Oedipus Rex is a text founded on erasure and repression. Its protagonist, unlike Odysseus, suffers from memory lapses. The signs of the old wound engraved on Oedipus’ infant body are an obscure example of repression. We are, then, dealing with a reminder of a traumatic event, an event that could not be fully grasped by the infant as it occurred. What is there to remember of an event belonging to infancy? What does Oedipus the adult remember of the founding event undergone by him as a newborn? What memory remains of his parents abandoning him, and what do the signs of the perforation of his feet by his father remind him of ? The cruel act of scarification endures as marks on Oedipus’ body, but their significance, the once vivid experience, is completely removed from his remembering consciousness. Only at a later stage of the play is Oedipus compelled to remember what has already been erased and blurred. This is, of course, not a simple case of recollection. The case of an injured infant is particularly complicated and cannot embrace a strict divide between forgetting and remembering.⁷⁴ The event belongs to an early stage in life that is immemorable to begin with. ⁷³ Freud, “Some Additional Notes on Dream-Interpretation as a Whole,” SE 19: 235–42. ⁷⁴ In the case of an infant victim the experience of trauma involves “latency,” a Freudian term that, as Cathy Caruth explains, “is the period in which the effects of the experience are

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The interplay between forgetfulness and remembering that is my concern here takes place in Oedipus’ adulthood and does not involve the primal experience of trauma. It has to do rather with Oedipus’ inclination to forget the existence of the scar, which demonstrates how for him the scar is an unpleasant reminder of an unknown past: Messenger At that moment, child, I was your savior. Oedipus And what was the pain for which you took me in your arms? Messenger The joints of your feet can testify. Oedipus Ah me, why do you mention this ancient calamity? Messenger I untied your pierced ankles. Oedipus A horrible blemish that I took from my swaddled infancy.⁷⁵ Ἄγγελος σοῦ τ᾽, ὦ τέκνον, σωτήρ γε τῷ τότ᾽ ἐν χρόνῳ. Οἰδίπους τί δ᾽ ἄλγος ἴσχοντ᾽ ἀγκάλαις με λαμβάνεις; Ἄγγελος ποδῶν ἂν ἄρθρα μαρτυρήσειεν τὰ σά: Οἰδίπους οἴμοι, τί τοῦτ᾽ ἀρχαῖον ἐννέπεις κακόν; Ἄγγελος λύω σ᾽ ἔχοντα διατόρους ποδοῖν ἀκμάς. Οἰδίπους δεινόν γ᾽ ὄνειδος σπαργάνων ἀνειλόμην.

When the messenger directs Oedipus’ gaze to his feet as evidence of his real identity, Oedipus responds in horror, betraying thus his denial, the temporary forgetfulness of the scarred feet that have become an integral component of his being: “Why do you mention this ancient calamity?” Oedipus’ language unknowingly gives expression to a prelingual experience. He names the originally unnamed: kakon, that is, evil or calamity. He intensifies the oldness of the scar: archaion kakon.⁷⁶ The scar signifies not apparent,” and she adds, “The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of reality that can hence never be fully known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself.” See Caruth 1996: 17. ⁷⁵ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 1030–5. ⁷⁶ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 1033. Another example of temporal exaggeration is palaias aitias, Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 109.

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for Oedipus a place beyond the memorable, a point of primordiality which imposes a regression. Thus, the reminder of the immemorable means a turn backwards, expressed in Oedipus’ regression. This is the moment when Oedipus is addressed by the messenger as a child, teknon. Intense feelings of fear and shame emerge as the symptoms of his regression. Oedipus’ fear and shame do not reflect moral responsibility for the horrible deed of the past, the event of unwittingly killing his father. Fear and shame arise, strangely, in relation to a traumatic infantile experience of which Oedipus is completely oblivious and which now returns. The inexplicability of these emotions surfacing in the grown-up Oedipus is connected to the regression to the infantile, premoral stage. Oedipus’ regressive reaction reflects a return to what Freud euphemistically calls, in the letter to Fliess, “humble origins,” bescheidenen Herkunft.⁷⁷ In seeing the scars as ancient (archaic), Oedipus seems to excuse his forgetfulness. He seems to be saying that forgetting signs from a remote past is only to be expected.⁷⁸ And yet the implied equation between ancient and forgotten as two different modes of referring to a remote event bears a trace of negation. Oedipus’ silence about his punctured ankles is particularly remarkable in the light of Jocasta’s testimony.⁷⁹ How is it that the memory of his injured feet is not reawakened when Jocasta tells Oedipus that Laius pierced his baby’s ankles immediately after birth?⁸⁰ What does his forgetfulness of his scars mean then? Although many readers do not attribute an unconscious to the mythical Oedipus,⁸¹ Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is founded on forgetting and repression.⁸² The focus on forgetting the scarred feet has, however, first and foremost to do with Oedipus’ name and identity. The scars on his ankles provide fixed answers to the future questions “Who are you?” and “Where are you from?” But denial of the existence of the scars persists throughout the play and, as can be seen, is inseparable from the exclusion ⁷⁷ Freud 1985: 274 and also the discussion above, p. X. ⁷⁸ Oedipus’ use of hyperbolic language is an expression of his unconscious. Characterizing the scar as archaion or describing the crime as palaias (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 109) allows Oedipus to take distance from it. These adynata reflect Oedipus’ self-alienation and are symptoms of a repression mechanism. ⁷⁹ On the basis of line 1031 Dawe argues that “Sophocles intended his Oedipus to know about his pierced feet. If so,” he continues, “he ought to have latched on to the vital clue given him by Jocasta at 717–19 . . . but Sophoclean characters in other plays besides this one seem at times to suffer from dramatically convenient transitory amnesia.” Dawe seems to take Oedipus’ pathological manifestations of amnesia as dramatic manipulation. ⁸⁰ Sophocles Oedipus Rex 718. ⁸¹ See, for example, Vernant 1988b: 85–112. ⁸² The mechanism of repression protects Oedipus and Jocasta, for as soon as the memory of the trauma penetrates their conscious memories, it causes an uncontrollable outburst of violence towards themselves: Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus blinds himself. I am grateful to Noga Weiss for this observation.

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of yet another important dimension of Oedipus’ biography: his engagement with the Sphinx’s riddle. The encounter with the Sphinx is one of the most popular stories from the Oedipus myth, and the riddle was familiar already to a fifth-century  audience.⁸³ It is interesting to notice, though, that the content of the riddle does not appear in Sophocles’ tragedy. Why does Sophocles prevent his audience from hearing it? How should we interpret the erasure of the riddle? Why does Oedipus avoid repeating his solution to the riddle as we might have expected from a king who is consistently preoccupied with the explicit assertion of his unique wisdom? We are accustomed to the dramatic convention that allows ancient playwrights to assume their spectators’ pre-knowledge without addressing the background of their mythological plots explicitly and in detail. But in Oedipus Rex the omission of the content of the riddle has a different significance. Its omission does not simply require the usual filling in of gaps left by dramatic versions of mythological plots. In Oedipus Rex, the omission of the riddle parallels, rather, the fact that it ultimately remains hidden within the play. Oedipus mentions the event of the encounter with the Sphinx to Tiresias, but only briefly and partially. Something is surprisingly missing from his provocative protest: When the singer, the sphinx, was in your country, why didn’t you speak a word of deliverance to its citizens? And yet the riddle’s answer was not the province of a chance comer. It was a prophet’s task and plainly you had no such gift of prophecy from birds nor otherwise from any God to glean a word of knowledge. But I came, Oedipus, who knew nothing, and I stopped her. I solved the riddle by my own wit alone. Mine was no knowledge got from birds.⁸⁴ πῶς οὐκ, ὅθ᾽ ἡ ῥαψῳδὸς ἐνθάδ᾽ ἦν κύων, ηὔδας τι τοῖσδ᾽ ἀστοῖσιν ἐκλυτήριον; καίτοι τό γ᾽ αἴνιγμ᾽ οὐχὶ τοὐπιόντος ἦν ἀνδρὸς διειπεῖν, ἀλλὰ μαντείας ἔδει: ἣν οὔτ᾽ ἀπ᾽ οἰωνῶν σὺ προυφάνης ἔχων οὔτ᾽ ἐκ θεῶν του γνωτόν: ἀλλ᾽ ἐγὼ μολών, ὁ μηδὲν εἰδὼς Οἰδίπους, ἔπαυσά νιν, γνώμῃ κυρήσας οὐδ᾽ ἀπ᾽ οἰωνῶν μαθών: ⁸³ Edmunds 1981. The earliest testimony to the existence of the riddle appears around 530 . ⁸⁴ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 391–8.

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Oedipus recalls his victory over the singing sphinx, that he solved the riddle, but does not mention the riddle’s actual content, nor even its solution. Why is the Sphinx’s famous riddle kept out of the dramatic text? The reason for the riddle’s erasure becomes clear when the riddle’s content is reconstructed from other ancient sources: “Who is it who walks on the earth with two, and also four, legs, has one voice, but also has three legs, and of all creatures on earth is the only one who changes?”⁸⁵ According to these sources, Oedipus’ solution is “man.” Although he has found the solution to the riddle, Oedipus does not grasp the singular idiosyncratic significance the riddle carries for him.⁸⁶ Oedipus’ universal answer is indeed correct, but its truth is too general.⁸⁷ In putting forward the solution “man,” Oedipus misses the personal and concrete meaning that the riddle holds for him. The riddle, like Odysseus’ unconscious negation, echoes the image of the foot three times in succession, while Oedipus still remains deaf to it. To the Greek listener, the riddle emphasizes the word pous, foot: Who is the creature that is at one and the same time dipous (a biped) and tripous (tripedal) as well as tetrapous (goes on all fours)? Always returning to the word pous, the riddle sounds out the essential syllable in Oedi(pus)’ name. But Oedipus does not hear it. The familiar sound from his name does not have any particular meaning for him, and evokes nothing personal; the sound remains sealed, perhaps denied. It seems that the role of pous in the riddle of the Sphinx has a double meaning: it conjures Oedipus’ name, and at the same time stands as a painful reminder of his scarred feet. The Sphinx’s riddle, both absent and present, reminds spectators of what Oedipus would rather not feel and of what remains unnoticeable for him: his name. Oedipus missing these senses of the riddle is not an isolated occurrence, but continues as persistent forgetfulness of his scarred feet, a forgetting woven into his daily existence. Sophocles alerts us to Oedipus’ imperviousness towards his feet, achieved by forgetting the meaning of his name, exactly at the moment he calls himself by his name; so he says something he does not understand: Oedipus is also oida pous, “knowing the foot.”⁸⁸ Oedipus’ (unconscious) statement gains strength when he proudly describes himself to Tiresias as Oedipus the ignorant who has nevertheless solved the riddle. Oedipus’ self-presentation provocatively ⁸⁵ The riddle had popularity in antiquity and there is evidence for it and its association with the Sphinx from the sixth century . See Katz 2005. ⁸⁶ On Oedipus’ oversight, see Vernant 1988a: 113–40. ⁸⁷ Benardete 1966: 105–22. ⁸⁸ The messenger discloses another meaning conveyed by the name Oedipus. He explains that it is because of his punctured feet that he was given the name Oedipus, swollen foot. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 1036. See Vernant 1988a: 124.

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puts the king’s knowledge above that of the prophet. And yet the compound expression used by Oedipus remains partly senseless to him. Thus, while stating in self-reference that he is ignorant, ho meden eidos Oidipous (O.R. 397), Oedipus’ words concomitantly express another meaning of which Oedipus is unconscious. His stated ignorance is contested by the meaning of his name, which remains for him latent. Thus, Oedipus is not attuned to the paradoxical sense of his language: the ignoramus who knows the foot. This oxymoron renders the side of Oedipus’ memory that is busy forgetting. The inherent contradiction is an expression of negation. Oedipus negates the knowledge of his name: he does not recognize the one who knows the foot. Oedipus suffers, therefore, from a disturbance of memory. It is clear from the beginning of the play that Oedipus suffers from amnesia, for although his determination to find the king’s killers is evident, his words evoke a different resonance and arouse suspicion in the heedful listener: Does Oedipus not hear what he has just said? Where on earth are they? Where shall now the hard to trace footstep of an ancient crime be found? οἳ δ᾽ εἰσὶ ποῦ γῆς; ποῦ τόδ᾽ εὑρεθήσεται ἴχνος παλαιᾶς δυστέκμαρτον αἰτίας; (O.R. 108–9)

Oedipus’ questions are troubling, since, as we shall see, they unconsciously disclose traces of the speaker’s guilt. Is it possible that the speaker is deaf to the sound of his questions? Oedipus seems to have no recollection of his past. The present crisis does not bring to consciousness his responsibility for a similar crime in the past. The obscurity (dustekmarton) of the footprint of an ancient crime is another way of naming Oedipus’ memory problem as a fundamental stumbling block. The crisis in the city’s life, the fatal plague (loimos, Sophocles O.R. 28), reflects Oedipus’ pathological condition: he suffers from a serious case of self-alienation. Oedipus faces only obstacles and difficulties despite the proximity to the solution of the mysterious object of his investigation, namely, himself. While the first question concerns the murderers (where are they?), his second question diverts the focus from the murderers towards the traces of a long-ago crime. Deflecting from human agents to mute objects results in avoiding direct and literal language. Oedipus suddenly resorts to metaphor and metonym. One has to make sense of this transition, the change and discontinuity between the two linguistic registers. The transition to symbolic language brings back something that has been left hidden, buried, in the first question “hoi d’eisi pou ges?,” which literally means “Where are they?” The idiom, pou ges, is so common that the speaker and the audience would not pause to notice

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its hidden meaning signified discretely by the word ge. Thus, only when the word ichnos, footprint, in the second question appears does it lead us back to the special resonance of ge. This resurfacing of earth reconnects to the image of “the hard to trace footprint of an ancient crime” and opens a channel for Oedipus’ unconscious thoughts. Oedipus veers off unwittingly and falls into the anaphoric trap that his questions have set: the footprint created by pous echoes twice in the three consecutively spoken words: pou ges? pou . . . ? Oedipus’ questions twice sound out the syllable echoing the word “foot” which is an echo of his identity and his identification with the murderer. The disclosure of the foot in this detached fragment of his speech (pou ges? pou . . . ?) entangled in phonemes and questions., is an impediment to Oedipus uncovering what the process of analysis can reveal: Pou? Pous is Oedi-pous.⁸⁹

4.6 The return of the primordial washing scene A scar is an old sign, a wound that has scabbed over and became fused with the skin surface. A scar is a junction of forgetting and remembering. In the Odyssey, the scar has a mnemonic function in the recognition scene. The Homeric scar is a sema, which etymologically connects the sign to a thought, noos, and to a homecoming, nostos.⁹⁰ The scar brings home something that has collapsed into forgetfulness. Thus, Odysseus’ scar triggers a homecoming through a digression: So he spoke, and the old woman took the shining basin with which she washed feet, and poured a lot of cold water in it, then added the warm on top. Then Odysseus sat down at the hearth, but suddenly turned toward the darkness, for in his heart he anticipated that, as she touched him, she might notice the scar, and his deeds would be revealed. She drew near and began to wash her lord, and straightway recognized the scar of the wound which long ago a pig had inflicted on him with his white tusk, when Odysseus had gone to Parnassus.⁹¹

⁸⁹ For the need to break speech into arbitrary and fragmentary pieces for the purpose of extracting involuntary thoughts, see Freud’s discussion of spoken words in dreams: Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 417–25, 448–9. For a discussion of the punning of Oedipus’ name, see Goldhill 1984. ⁹⁰ On the relationship between sema, noos, and nostos, see Nagy 1990: 202–22. On sema as a tomb, see Od. 2.222. ⁹¹ Od. 19.386–94.

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ὣς ἄρ᾽ ἔφη, γρηῢς δὲ λέβηθ᾽ ἕλε παμφανόωντα τοῦ πόδας ἐξαπένιζεν, ὕδωρ δ᾽ ἐνεχεύατο πουλὺ ψυχρόν, ἔπειτα δὲ θερμὸν ἐπήφυσεν. αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς ἷζεν ἐπ᾽ ἐσχαρόφιν, ποτὶ δὲ σκότον ἐτράπετ᾽ αἶψα: αὐτίκα γὰρ κατὰ θυμὸν ὀΐσατο, μή ἑ λαβοῦσα οὐλὴν ἀμφράσσαιτο καὶ ἀμφαδὰ ἔργα γένοιτο. νίζε δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἆσσον ἰοῦσα ἄναχθ᾽ ἑόν: αὐτίκα δ᾽ ἔγνω οὐλήν, τήν ποτέ μιν σῦς ἤλασε λευκῷ ὀδόντι. Παρνησόνδ᾽ ἐλθόντα

Odysseus succumbs to the encounter with his old nurse, Eurycleia, an encounter uniting the strange and the familiar, the past and the present. Just before she washes his feet, Eurycleia notices that the stranger bears a striking likeness to Odysseus: “I’ve never seen anyone who was so like him as you are like Odysseus in form and voice and feet” (19.380–1). This triad with its crescendo specifying the feet, not the form or the voice, shows the feet to be the primary site of identification and recognition. The encounter with the feet, though, is not immediate; it takes time, and happens in stages. The existence of the scar hovers, appears not as an object of thought, but as involuntary recollection, an echo from the past. No sooner has the scar made a flimsy impression in memory than Odysseus, turning away from the fireside, manages to conceal it in the darkness (Od. 19.390–1). The scar is hidden as soon as it becomes an object of thought. Consequently, when the scar figures as a physical and tangible object in the sensual field of experience, it summons the memory of its creation (Od. 19.393). Only when the scar is present as an object integral to the body, current and tangible, does it, when touched, awaken the memory of its creation, and resuscitate the child’s experience. Indeed, as Auerbach shows, the emergence of the scar brings about a digression. For Auerbach it means that the narrated past “fill[s] the present entirely.”⁹² The fusion of the past with the present, which for Auerbach is inherent to the structure of the Homeric digression, explains in our context its connectedness to the peculiar temporal structure of psychoanalytic regression: the Homeric digression is a return to an earlier state, and the digression of Book 19 is a re-enactment of an infantile memory. When Auerbach describes how the detailed digressive narrative wins the reader over, making her forget what had just taken place during the foot washing, he has the aged Eurycleia and the middle-aged Odysseus vanish from the stage and make room for their past selves: the young Eurycleia

⁹² Auerbach 1974: 4.

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and the baby Odysseus. Thus, Auerbach’s characterization invites a reading of the Homeric digression as a regression. Something vanishes from the foot-washing scene and allows an old memory to take its place. The current setting makes room for a primal scene, and the present dissolves into the past. To understand the mnemonic affect of the Homeric footbath episode, and especially its complex form of temporality, we need to attend closely to the sound of the splashing water. We need to attend to the mixing of cold water with the hot as they fill the slippery basin. The water filling the basin brings up an association, or even a blurry memory, of a womb-like place, the place of fetal growth, out of which a baby will emerge into the light of the world. Odysseus’ intimate proximity to his nurse, his eagerness to have his feet bathed in her old hands, not only accelerate the imaginary birth of a baby but also allow the memory to break through. The extrication of memory is connected to the reconstruction of a past custom and its translation into the present: The picture of old Eurycleia preparing the footbath re-enacts a daily ritual from Odysseus’ early childhood and youth: she behaves now as she did then, when she used to bathe the child and, in time, the young man of the household. The focus on the everyday actions of the old woman is what sparks involuntary thoughts of the scar on his feet, as if they were suddenly brought out of the depths of forgetfulness. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud sees regression as the typical movement of the dream. “Dreaming,” he writes, “is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.”⁹³ For Freud, the dream has a mnemonic quality, just like the scar in the Homeric tale. The dream invokes a sense of primordiality. Freud finds himself philosophically aligned with Nietzsche, and cites him from memory, saying⁹⁴ that the modern dream revives “some primaeval relic of humanity.”⁹⁵ Freud’s choice of the image of a relic is interesting. The relic is reminiscent of a forgotten past. As a fragment of the past, the relic serves as testimony to a missing whole, to the disappearance of the time that it belonged to. Hence, the psychoanalytic value of dreams does not derive ⁹³ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 548. ⁹⁴ The quotation has not so far been traced in Nietzsche’s writing. Perhaps it is a paraphrase of something Freud read and attributed to Nietzsche. Ronald Lehre notes that Freud’s quotation is not exact and that the reference could be either to Nietzsche 1986: 1, sec. 13 or to Nietzsche 1997: 4 sec. 312. See Lehre 1994: xi; Assoun 2000: 38–9. ⁹⁵ In the German: “ein uraltes Stück Menschtum fortübt, zu dem man auf direktem Wege kaum mehr gelangen kann.”

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from any promise that they will restore what they represent. Dreams do not stage primal scenes. Even childhood experiences cannot be fully preserved in the dream thoughts. The dream’s relation to childhood experience is sought after thorough analysis of the dream’s displacements and condensations. The dream is not a revival of a lost childhood, but rather, preserves a structure of a return, “a harking back to older psychical structures.”⁹⁶ This direction of thought can be detected, for example, in Nietzsche’s Daybreak in the section entitled “The Forgetful Ones”: In outbursts of passion and the delusions of dreams and madness, man rediscovers his own primitive history, and that of humanity: animality and its savage grimaces. For once his memory stretches back into the past, while his civilized condition is developed from the forgetfulness of these primitive experiences, that is to say, from the failing of this memory.⁹⁷

Nietzsche views the dream as a source for recovering things that cultural sublimation has erased from memory. Freud invokes Nietzsche as a source of his phylogenetic insight about memory:⁹⁸ Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood—a picture of the development of the human race, of which the individual’s development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation influenced by the chance circumstances of life . . . and we may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man’s archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him. Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we could have imagined possible; so that psycho-analysis may claim a higher place among the sciences which are concerned with reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginning of the human race.⁹⁹

The dream leads “to a knowledge of man’s archaic heritage.” The knowledge of the psychically innate is not knowledge based on content. We should not expect the dream to preserve some forgotten archaic experience. The dream does not uncover a collective experience of the primordial past. I would like to suggest instead that Freud’s phylogenetic insight reveals the dream’s universal structure. In the same section of The Interpretation of Dreams dealing with the regressive character of dreams, Freud clarifies that while the dream moves backwards towards the sensory layer, transmitting memory traces of earlier impressions, the psychic apparatus of memory is, by contrast, progressive,

⁹⁶ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 548. ⁹⁷ Nietzsche 1997: 4.312. ⁹⁸ “We can guess how much to the point is Nietzsche’s assertion that in dreams ‘some primaeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path’.” In Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 549. ⁹⁹ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 548–9.

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namely, arranged in a forward-structured sequence.¹⁰⁰ To understand the bidirectional movement of the dream’s thoughts, we should keep in mind Freud’s paradigmatic analogy of railway travel. Freud, as we recall, used this image to describe a return to the past that releases a train of involuntary associations and memories. It is, I would like to suggest, precisely in the constitutive double movement of the train analogy that the unconscious, dreamlike movement of the footbath is revealed. The dream contains a memory of a progressive movement from baby to adult typical of the psychical apparatus, but at the same time it also incorporates a retrogressive movement from adult to baby. This two-way movement explicates the manner in which dreams and unconscious thoughts weave together present and past experiences.

4.7 The scar and the dream navel The Homeric sema, the scar, just like the dream, itself preserves a harking back to older psychic structures. Plato was the one to capture the retrogressive structure of the Homeric scar by hearing the primordial image of a phylogenetic scar in Aristophanes’ speech on Eros in the Symposium. According to the Platonic myth the human race grew out of a primordial human form that differed from its present instantiation. Indeed, although this primordial knowledge is not engraved in human memory, the body carries its imprint. This is the scar that Apollo left on the human body when he split the splendidly whole human species into two halves. The divine operation left a mark, a navel, in the center of the belly: He [Zeus] also told Apollo generally to heal their wounds. So Apollo twisted their heads around, and pulled the skin together from all over their bodies on to what is now called the stomach . . . leaving only a single opening in the middle of the stomach, which we call the navel, where he tied the skin up into a knot. Then he smoothed out most of the wrinkles . . . he left a few wrinkles, however, the ones in the region of the stomach and the navel, to act as a reminder of what happened all that time ago.¹⁰¹

The scar is where Apollo twisted the face of the severed humans. The scar has become a new physiognomic detail, the navel, bestowing on the bodies of future human beings a knowledge of this archaic heritage, ¹⁰⁰ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 537–8. ¹⁰¹ Plato, Symposium 190e–191a, trans. Robin Waterfield.

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psychically innate in every human being. The scar-sign evokes the experience of loss by awakening vague memories of a distant childhood that remains unrestorable and unrepresentable. In the Odyssey, the scar awakens two very early and related childhood memories. The first has to do with Odysseus’ birth in Ithaca, while the second brings back an event from Odysseus’ puberty, on Mount Parnassus, where his maternal grandfather lived. Bringing these memories to the foreground, Auerbach argues, depends on the degressive movement produced by discovery of the scar. The scar triggers the movement back as if in an attempt to answer the questions that still reverberate in Odysseus’ ears: “What man and from where are you? Where are your city and parents?”¹⁰² This longing for origins produces a regression. Thus, the questions, elicited from the outside, are internalized when Odysseus has his feet washed. When he turns his attention to the scar, the question “Who am I?” takes shape. The narrator tells a story known to Odysseus since childhood. Eurycleia would have often recited it to him. His mother’s father, Autolycus, was visiting the palace in Ithaca when the news of his grandson’s birth was conveyed to him. With Autolycus present, the wet nurse, Eurycleia, took the infant on her lap for him to receive his name. The grandfather promised that when the baby was grown and came to visit him on Mount Parnassus, he would give him many presents. This memory revives two aspects of Odysseus’ identity: the domesticated and the wild. On the island of Ithaca, surrounded by the sea, at home, in a woman’s warm lap, he receives his name from his savage grandfather—Odysseus, meaning “the angry one.” The grandfather, a man of the wild mountains who lives with his tough hunter sons on Mount Parnassus, makes a surprise visit and places his mark on the future of the baby even while he is peacefully and contentedly nursing, giving him a name and a promise. It is a memory of a meaningful connection between grandson and grandfather. These memories (like free associations) weave a tangled connection between a number of points of view in the present and past. The infant memory of Odysseus is inseparable from memories of his puberty, and the memory of visiting Parnassus is connected to Odysseus’ present perspective on Ithaca as a stranger in his own home. The scar’s very coming to light means that this complex tangle of temporal layers is woven together. The Homeric text links the two signs, the scar and Odysseus’ name, and thus presents their different occurrences in the past as interrelated. In Freudian dream terminology, the event of the scar and the event of naming are superimposed.

¹⁰² These are Penelope’s questions in Od. 19.105.

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Having reached puberty, Odysseus first traveled away from his parents’ home to his grandfather’s abode in the mountains “so he’d give him splendid gifts” (19.413). This journey, the fulfillment of an old promise by a distant grandfather, also the fulfillment of a grandchild’s wish, turns out to be a ruthless initiation, whose impressions are to be repressed in the mind of Odysseus the adult. The memory of the journey contains a difficult (and repressed) scene that was compensated by the grandfather’s desirable gifts. Receiving the gifts turns out to be conditional on proving Odysseus’ manhood. The initiation ceremony, especially from a modern point of view, involves severe abuse by the men of the family. There is nothing pleasant in the memory of the test of masculinity that awaits Odysseus on his arrival at the house of his grandfather and his wild uncles. The boy who bursts onto the stage of Odysseus’ memory is fresh from the protective feminine environment of his mother and his nurse. On the face of it, the encounter between Odysseus the youth and his mother’s family is described as a celebration, but it is impossible not to get a different and frightening impression, through the child’s eyes, a point of view which only a regression can bring to life. It is certainly the experience of Odysseus the man-child that is re-enacted now, on Ithaca decades later. The boy is sent to a strange place to meet a group of bold men he does not know. Memory uncovers a wild site that for the modern reader resonates with what Freud in Totem and Taboo identifies as a primordial experience. In the child’s point of view, as it is now reconstructed in the Homeric text, he takes part in a feast centered on the cruel killing of a 5-year-old ox. The slaughter is described in detail, but unlike other descriptions of sacrifice in Homeric poetry, here the description is subordinate to the point of view of a small child who watches the slaughter in terror: the animal is flayed and cut up at the center of the circle of uncles, who take and roast their shares on skewers (19.420–7). In the morning, the test of the boy’s masculinity reaches a crescendo when he joins a wild-boar hunt. The men reach the dark thick of the forest, where the eye of Helios the sun god never glances. And there a great pig was lying in a thick lair, through which the fierceness of the wet winds could not blow, nor the rays of the bright sun could beat, nor could the rain pierce through it, so thick it was, but in it there was a very huge pile of leaves. (19.439–43) ἔνθα δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἐν λόχμῃ πυκινῇ κατέκειτο μέγας σῦς: τὴν μὲν ἄρ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἀνέμων διάει μένος ὑγρὸν ἀέντων, οὔτε μιν Ἠέλιος φαέθων ἀκτῖσιν ἔβαλλεν, οὔτ᾽ ὄμβρος περάασκε διαμπερές: ὣς ἄρα πυκνὴ ἦεν, ἀτὰρ φύλλων ἐνέην χύσις ἤλιθα πολλή.

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It is here that the child is brought, where he tries to prove that he is worthy of belonging to the society of hunters. He hurls the lance, killing the boar, but not before it has torn his leg, leaving him wounded and bleeding. The child is sent home only after his grandfather and uncles have healed him. Back at his parents’ home, they want to know the meaning of the wound, testimony to a fresh memory, the story still easily told (19.444–66).¹⁰³ These two memories of infancy and youth are intertwined and do not allow a simple linear telling of a sequential narrative from one point of view. At the heart of these memories is an image signifying a primordial place reached by the youth Odysseus, an unruly place that he leaves as an experienced young man. Let us focus on the tangled lair of the dangerous boar. It is a wild but protected place, dark and inaccessible. The adjective piknos is twice used: “A great pig was lying in a thick lair” (19.439–42). This adjective also comes up in the context of another thick place in the fifth book of the Odyssey. Although the two places are apparently unconnected, the formulaic Homeric language connects them by repetition. The formula reveals a hidden link between different past events in Odysseus’ life. I refer specifically to Book 5: after departing from the island of Calypso, and having gone through tumultuous difficulty, Odysseus is thrown up by the sea, naked and bereft, on the land of the Phaeacians. On dry land he explores this place of refuge and comes to an uncultivated forest, at a moment when he himself has been stripped of all signs of culture. In this regressed and animal-like condition he looks for shelter amid a tangle of branches (5.471). He crawls in beneath two olive trees, one wild and one domesticated, grown into each other (5.480).¹⁰⁴ There is an almost word-for-word similarity to the description of the wild boar’s lair in Book 19: He made his way to the woods, and found that he was near the water in a glade. He crawled beneath two bushes growing from the same place, a wild olive and a cultivated olive. Through them the fierceness of the wet winds could not blow, nor the rays of the bright sun could beat, nor could the rain pierce through them, so thick they were intertwined with each other. Odysseus crawled beneath them.

¹⁰³ Lillian Doherty reads the boar hunt as a “mise en abyme in that it recapitulates in a single adventure the essential elements of Odysseus’ entire ‘career.’ ” See Doherty 1995: 156. ¹⁰⁴ Ruth Scodel takes the Boar’s den to be a flashbulb memory: “In modern psychological terms, we could speculate that the recent night spent in such a dark grove on Scheria has brought back the memory of the grove where the boar hid” (Scodel 2002: 111). See also n. 60 above.

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Straightway he scraped together a broad bed with his dear hands, for there was a very huge pile of leaves. (5.475–83) βῆ ῥ᾽ ἴμεν εἰς ὕλην: τὴν δὲ σχεδὸν ὕδατος εὗρεν ἐν περιφαινομένῳ: δοιοὺς δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὑπήλυθε θάμνους, ἐξ ὁμόθεν πεφυῶτας: ὁ μὲν φυλίης, ὁ δ᾽ ἐλαίης. τοὺς μὲν ἄρ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἀνέμων διάη μένος ὑγρὸν ἀέντων, οὔτε ποτ᾽ ἠέλιος φαέθων ἀκτῖσιν ἔβαλλεν, οὔτ᾽ ὄμβρος περάασκε διαμπερές: ὣς ἄρα πυκνοὶ ἀλλήλοισιν ἔφυν ἐπαμοιβαδίς: οὓς ὑπ᾽ Ὀδυσσεὺς δύσετ᾽. ἄφαρ δ᾽ εὐνὴν ἐπαμήσατο χερσὶ φίλῃσιν εὐρεῖαν: φύλλων γὰρ ἔην χύσις ἤλιθα πολλή

The dim place untouched by breezes and sunlight is womb-like and embraces this refugee who in the near future will be reborn as Odysseus the king of Ithaca. It is from here that Odysseus will emerge at the Phaeacian palace, the final station of his journey home. In this place, prefigured by the wild boar’s lair of his childhood, where a traumatic event occurred long before what is related in Book 5, Odysseus falls asleep: so did Odysseus hide himself with leaves. Then Athena poured sleep upon his eyes, closed his dear eyelids to most quickly put an end to his toilsome exhaustion. (5.491–3) ὣς Ὀδυσεὺς φύλλοισι καλύψατο: τῷ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ Ἀθήνη ὕπνον ἐπ᾽ ὄμμασι χεῦ᾽, ἵνα μιν παύσειε τάχιστα δυσπονέος καμάτοιο φίλα βλέφαρ᾽ ἀμφικαλύψας.

Sleep suggests a state of consciousness concealing a thicket of memories, and, as a mode of consciousness, it needs to be understood as nourishing the memories that the scar has awakened. The revelation of childhood memories, as we have seen, needs dream-work, work that can be seen as the weaving of a text. Freud postulates the dream as a textual body whose open structure he likens to a mushroom growing out of the intricate form of the mycelium.¹⁰⁵ The botanical image of the open dream text, which has so intrigued Freud’s interpreters, reflects the insoluble web of its past and present contents. This is how I read the enigmatic and muchcelebrated passage of the dream’s navel with its relation to the mushroom image in chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams: There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content

¹⁰⁵ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 525.

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of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.¹⁰⁶

Freud calls attention to a certain place “in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream” that “has to be left obscure.”¹⁰⁷ The interpreter, Freud writes, is encouraged to leave this place in the dark once he notices it during the work of interpretation: “a tangle of dream-thoughts arising which resists unraveling but has also made no further contribution to the dream content.”¹⁰⁸ Freud proposes here to give that place an anatomical signification: “This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.”¹⁰⁹ Recalling the Freudian dream navel, Lacan explains it as a signifier of the unsignified, which he identifies as a gap, or abyss,¹¹⁰ and elsewhere as a rupture that leaves a scar.¹¹¹ Lacan misreads Freud, writes Samuel Weber, because the tangle (Knäuel) of dream thoughts is not simply béance, a gap or abyss.¹¹² Examining the tangle of the dreamthoughts through its symbolic location, the navel, reveals a point of connection and disconnection, a point of continuity and discontinuity. This bodily sign bears an obscure memory of a nourishing source, a fertile womb from which the tangle of dream-thoughts is disconnected: What can be more reassuring and familiar, more primordial and powerful than this reference to the place where the body was last joined to its maternal origins? That this place is also the site of a trace and of a separation, but also of a knot, is a reflection that carries little force next to the reassuring sense of continuity, generation, and originality connoted by the figure.¹¹³

The navel, which signals a junction of forgetfulness and recollection, is presented as a generative source of dream-thoughts that are “necessarily interminable and branch out on all sides into the netlike entanglement of our world of thoughts.”¹¹⁴ The tangle of dream-thoughts specifies a crossroads, two different directions, two different movements: a ¹⁰⁶ The passage has received a great deal of attention; among other treatments, I will mention the short discussion by Jacques Lacan in Lacan 1977: 23; Derrida 1996: 10–25; Weber 2000: 101–20; Felman 1993: 112–16; and Sigler 2010: 17–38. ¹⁰⁷ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 525. ¹⁰⁸ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 525. The translation is modified after Weber 2000: 112. ¹⁰⁹ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 525. ¹¹⁰ Lacan 1977: 23. ¹¹¹ Lacan 1977: 22–3, 26. ¹¹² Weber 2000: 116–17. ¹¹³ Weber 2000: 113. ¹¹⁴ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 525. The translation is modified after Weber 2000: 112.

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movement forward which takes the shape of the infinite ramification of dream-thoughts encroaching on “our world of thought,” and a retrogressive movement imprecisely retrieving an intimate and intricate trace left by the severed umbilical cord. The intersecting movements create a conjuncture where different temporal aspects, including the vague memory of a primordial past, converge. This is the place whose form of textuality Freud describes as obscure and impenetrable. Thus, Freud’s metaphor of the dream navel turns our attention to the insoluble ties between the ancient and the modern unconscious.

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The unconscious as a figura futurorum When in the course of a piece of scientific work we come upon a problem which is difficult to solve, it is often a good plan to take up a second problem along with the original one—just as it is easier to crack two nuts together than each separately. —Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (SE 4: 135)

5.1 From universalism to a theory of analogies The discovery of the unconscious depends on a general theory of analogy centering on the connectedness between the ancients and the moderns. When Freud wrote to Fliess in excitement, “I have found, in my own case too, the [phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father,”¹ he was announcing that his personal and theoretical discoveries are based on a cultural analogy, one that reconciles an ancient Greek myth with modern experience.² Freud’s comparison strikes one as uncanny, however. His feeling “at home” with Oedipus entails at the same time something foreign. An effect of strangeness is produced in the discovery of an echo of Freud’s life in the remote myth. Embracing difference and similarity, the analogy between modern and ancient experiences retains an ambiguity and tension which in contemporary criticism of Freud’s universalism are rarely appreciated. Against the background of current readings of Freud’s Oedipus complex, it is important to recognize the vitality of a dialectic of difference and similarity in his theory of analogy. We will discuss in a while how this dialectic is connected to the discovery of the unconscious, ancient and modern alike. For now, let us begin with some remarks on

¹ From the famous letter of October 15, 1897. See Freud 1985: 272. ² Peter Rudnytsky has shown “how Freud’s assertion of the universality of Oedipus’ fate is itself the outgrowth of his own personal history.” In Rudnytsky 1987: 6. Freud’s texts interweave literary interpretations with self-discoveries incorporated into self-narrations and intellectual and scientific analyses. Consider, for example, the weaving of the Oedipus story into the autobiographical piece in Freud, “Some Reflections on Schoolboy Psychology,” SE 13: 243–4.

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Freud’s mythological analogy,which according to some of his critics produces an imaginary (and even unreliable) bridge between times and cultures. What can Freud’s analogy tell us about the connection between the moderns and the ancients? For Freud a correspondence between two historically different paradigms of subjectivity suggests points of similarity and identity binding these two cultures together. It also conveys an idea of continuity between historical periods. In Freud’s case, the sense of continuity is initially experienced through personal identification with the ancient myth. Interpreters have understood this process as part of his movement from an idiosyncratic example to a general theory. “Because he [Freud] has discovered oedipal feelings in himself,” Richard Armstrong writes, “he leaps to the conclusion that everyone must have them.”³ Armstrong describes Freud’s move from personal experience to psychoanalytic theory as a “leap,” conveying thus the prevalent skepticism towards Freud’s universal conjecture. Indeed, from a historian’s point of view, the integration of a modern personal experience with an ancient myth is understandably explained in terms of a leap of faith. From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, the incompatibility and disconnection between two different experiences cannot ultimately obliterate their inner connections, which continue to be operative in the unconscious. (In dreams, for example, the dreamer’s present experience coalesces with memories, impressions gleaned from the cultural environment, and images of remote cultures and times.) Psychoanalytic theory is open to the usefulness of unconscious analogies and applies them in its investigations. Yet, from the philologist’s point of view, an analysis mainly based on the similarity between two different periods is methodologically wrong. In using analogies as analytical tools, psychoanalysis has been recurrently accused not only of projecting foreign meanings onto ancient classical texts, but of using unscientific and non-positivist methods. Jean-Pierre Vernant, for example, reminds us that an ancient text such as Oedipus Rex calls for a linguistic, thematic, and dramatic analysis which can illuminate its historical, social, and mental contexts. Knowing about these fundamental aspects of its formative environment contributes to a recovery of the play’s particular meanings. Moreover, in his view, it is only through the text’s cultural particularity that meaning should be explored.⁴ Freud’s reading of Oedipus Rex transgresses each of ³ Armstrong 2005: 47. ⁴ Vernant 1988b: 87–8. Vernant is not, of course, a typical positivist philologist. As an ancient historian and anthropologist, he was one of the brightest and most influential

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these demands and does not hesitate to appropriate the ancient protagonist as a model for modern experience. Freud’s interpretive liberty has provoked suspicions and sparked an interminable debate. Among classical scholars the fundamental resistance is to accepting a hermeneutics that binds ancient Oedipus to the horizons of the modern subject. The philologists’ protest has come about as a response to the great impact of Freud’s Oedipal theory on the reception of the tragic Oedipus.⁵ Freud’s reading contested age-old prevailing views of Oedipus as “a paradigm of disaster . . . one that was uniquely horrible, caught up in circumstances of extreme specificity that could hardly be repeated.”⁶ Armstrong argues that the release of Oedipus from his abominable role as a tragic scapegoat is ultimately the reason for his transformation into “a paradigm of universal experience.”⁷ Freud’s reading replaced the mythic setting of the drama of Oedipus with a drama of everyday life, adjusting the ancient play’s horrendous extremity to the average measures of human existence. Armstrong’s spotlight on Freud’s revolutionary turn should be considered within the wider context of Freud’s intellectual background. Freud is “a true son of the century of Schopenhauer and Ibsen,”⁸ as well as of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. He is also a descendant of the German idealists whom Miriam Leonard identifies as influential in shaping “Freud’s unambiguously totalizing formulations.”⁹ Invested in uncovering the intellectual origins of Freud’s universalizing vision, Leonard understands Freud’s commitments to universalism specifically through the history of reading tragedy within the philosophical tradition of German idealism: “But it is a nineteenth-century philosophical reading of tragedy that provides the conceptual apparatus for reconciliation between subjectivity and universalism that is at the heart of Freud’s deployment

interpreters of Greek myths after Freud. Hugh Lloyd-Jones sees Vernant’s critical position towards Freud’s reading of Oedipus as typical of European anthropologists who “were tolerant of diversity and unwilling to accept Freud’s unitary view of the human psyche.” In Lloyd-Jones 1985: 171. ⁵ Hugh Lloyd-Jones conceives the relationship of classical scholars with psychoanalysis to be, in general, under the sign of disillusion: “Many assumed that psychoanalysis would provide them with a golden key.” His criticism of Freud’s explanation of the myth of Oedipus is that it is “disappointing” (164), and this encapsulates his antagonism to Freud’s universalism: “How seriously one takes Freud’s suggestion will depend on one’s attitude to Freud’s belief in the universality of the Oedipus complex, one that is not shared by most modern psychologists” (Lloyd-Jones 1985: 165). Lloyd-Jones’s positivist argument is based on the authority of (unspecified) “modern psychologists.” If they do not accept Freud’s universality, why should the classicists? Or, in other words, modern psychologists do not accept Freud’s universality, let alone the classicists. ⁶ Armstrong 2005: 48. ⁷ Armstrong 2005: 48. ⁸ Mann 1968: 415. ⁹ Leonard 2015: 112.

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of Oedipus.”¹⁰ This insight into Freud’s claim for the universality of Oedipal existence reformulates the old and prominent concern from a new angle.¹¹ Today the problem of universality is addressed by thinkers from the fields of philosophy and feminism. Feminist criticism explores the ways in which Freud’s reading of Oedipus shaped narratives of gender.¹² Today Freud is chided for unifying, through his reading of Oedipus, multiple modes of subjectivity. Freud’s indifference to the diversity of gender identities testifies to an incommensurability of Freud’s and post-Freudian humanism.¹³ As we have seen, Freud’s Oedipus provoked critical responses raising methodological concerns in different fields in the humanities and social sciences. In this chapter I bracket postmodern resistance to Freud’s universalism, and explore the connection between the ancients and moderns through his discussion of Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams. Shifting the focus from Freud’s universalism to examine, instead, his proclivity for juxtaposition involves a new disciplinary perspective. The pairing of ancient and modern figures will allow us to acknowledge the close affinity between the fields of psychoanalysis and comparative literature. In both fields the tendency to use comparisons, analogies, and connections between different things is essential for deciphering unconscious–textual networks. Freud’s analogy between ancient Oedipus and the modern subject is typical of his unique theoretical prose. Freud’s use of the language of analogies is different from scientific writing committed to logical consistency, where difference either overrules similarity or is overruled by it. In Freud’s case theoretical writing produces ambiguities and even contradictions by way of analogies. Similar things are different at the same time. Freud’s way of thinking never loses touch with unconscious thoughts for which analogies are central. Indeed, unconscious analogies and other kinds of connections evoke ambiguities which positivist ¹⁰ Leonard 2015: 113. ¹¹ The threat to the validity of Freud’s universal claim began with new investigations in the fields of anthropology and social psychology that questioned supposed harmonizations of different times and cultures. James A. C. Brown locates the source of the antagonism towards Freud’s “fixity of human nature” in the 1930s, “when Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead produced a series of studies which demonstrated how very flexible human nature is when observed against different cultural backgrounds” (Brown 1961: 117). ¹² Luce Irigaray was a pioneering critic of Freud’s vision of sexuality. For an early discussion of the feminist readings of the Oedipus complex, see Mitchell 2000 (orig. 1974): 61–73. ¹³ Miriam Leonard argues, however, that even in contemporary philosophical and feminist writings that challenge Freud’s reading of Oedipus, new aspects of human universalism have made a comeback. See Leonard 2015: 122–30, and especially her discussion of Judith Butler and Bonnie Honig’s “Politics of Humanism” at 125–6.

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discourses usually strive to rule out. In linking, the association that brings two things together (through similarity) coincides with the very understanding that they are two different things. This self-contradicting feature makes analogy a typical figure of the language of the unconscious. Thus, even though Freud never gives up on the scientific objectives of The Interpretation of Dreams, the text absorbs the dream logic of analogies that underlies his theory of dreams. Freud’s writing is closely connected and attuned to the unconscious flow of associations. His theory collaborates with unconscious thought by adopting its spontaneous movements of juxtaposing different things and letting their minute and hidden relations come to light. His theoretical prose re-enacts the discovery of the unconscious. Hence, in linking Oedipus to the modern subject Freud brings the theoretical and the spontaneous, associative dimensions of thought into contact. This means that linking Sophocles’ protagonist to the modern subject has a dual aspect. Oedipus is both similar to and different from the modern subject. This duality exposes an important feature of the unconscious and makes the relationship between antiquity and modernity fundamental for its discovery. As we shall see, in The Interpretation of Dreams in general, and before his discussion of Oedipus in the section “Typical Dreams” in particular, Freud makes extensive use of analogies and comparisons by means of which he demonstrates the work of the unconscious.

5.2 Linkings 5.2.1 GROUP IMAGES In The Interpretation of Dreams analogy plays an important role in structuring the logic of the unconscious. Freud refers to the type of analogies created in dreams as the “logical connection by simultaneity in time” (logischen Zusammenhang wieder als Gleishzeitigkeit).¹⁴ His emphasis on the temporal dimension of this type of analogy is of particular importance for us. Analogies create temporal composites that Freud primarily identifies as imaginative products typical of artists and dreamers. Dreams are anachronic productions which assemble and mingle different thoughts into a single situation or event. What strikes Freud as especially significant in the dream’s way of connecting different ¹⁴ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 314.

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Fig. 5.1. Raphael, The Parnassus, The Palace of the Vatican, 1509–11

dream-thoughts is its proclivity for temporal disruptions. Dreams tend to transgress time’s regular sequences; they do not abide by the law of linearity. Freud insists on developing a new methodology for considering the dream’s strange negotiation with time. Raphael’s wall painting in the Vatican Palace (Fig. 5.1) provides Freud with a visual conceptualization of the dream’s anachronic texture. Homer, Virgil, and Dante, along with other figures of ancient and contemporary poets, mingle in the same scene of “Mount Parnassus.”¹⁵ “It is true,” Freud writes, “that they were never in fact assembled in a single hall or on a single mountain-top; but they certainly form a group [Gemeinschaft] in the conceptual sense.”¹⁶ The representation of the poets on Parnassus has nothing to do with chronology. Raphael’s Parnassus does not even attempt to draw a literary genealogy, that is, a linear history of poetry. Freud takes, rather, the representation of the gathered poets to convey a conceptual image of poetry. We can see how Raphael’s Parnassus assembles various figures and creates a singular poetic event. ¹⁵ Freud also mentions Raphael’s School of Athens. ¹⁶ “Wohl aber für die denkende Betrachtung eine Gemeinschaft bilden.” Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 314.

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It fashions for poetry a unique situation, bringing together a variety of poetic sources. The fresco’s unitary image of poetry preserves its original plural condition. Hence, Raphael’s fresco does not create a universal image of poetry. It conveys, rather, a conceptual image of a poetic community, an image of a poetic family. Accordingly, Freud employs Raphael’s image of poetry to demonstrate the importance for dream analysis of focusing on the relations between the different parts of the dream.¹⁷ Raphael’s visualization of poetry thus offers Freud a paradigmatic illustration of the language of associations, analogies, and connections common to poetry and dreams. Indifference to chronology leads us to the dream’s anachronic character, to its conglomerate structure. The dream resists frames of progress, succession, linearity, or uniformity. Thus, Freud insists that relations between different things are the key to deciphering the enigmatic dream: In the first place, dreams take into account in a general way the connection [Zusammenhang] which undeniably exists between all the portions of the dreamthoughts by combining the whole material into a single situation or event [in einer Zusammenfassung als Situation oder Vorgang].¹⁸

Since dreams connect and combine different events, episodes, and times, the practice of psychoanalysis accordingly requires proficiency in the art of comparison. Freud insists on the importance of developing an ear for how analogies work and provides a logical formulation to illustrate their workings.

5.2.2 AN “A” AND A “B” Freud turns his attention from the group image (Gemeinschaft) to an analysis of the dyadic structure of analogy, which is the smallest manifestation of the group image: Two thoughts which occur in immediate sequence without any apparent connection are in fact part of a single unity which has to be discovered; in just the same way, if I write an “a” and a “b” in succession, they have to be pronounced as a single syllable “ab.” The same is true of dreams.¹⁹ ¹⁷ Raphael’s painting may serve as a visual illustration of Auerbach’s thesis about the Homeric style. It too knows “only a uniformly illuminated . . . present,” and lacks “development of the concept of the historically becoming” (Auerbach 1974: 7, 23). Freud, however, does not see Raphael’s confounding of chronological order as a sign of an immature style in representing reality. ¹⁸ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 314. ¹⁹ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 247. Cf. ibid. 314.

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Freud takes the first two letters of the alphabet and considers them as two different signs representing two different thoughts, or textual elements. Juxtaposed, “a” and “b” create an enigmatic unity that calls for interpretation. In the case history of Dora, Freud returns to the syllable of “a” and “b” that produces “an internal connection” (verborgener Zusammenhang) between these two letters: It is a rule of psycho-analytic technique that an internal connection which is still undisclosed will announce its presence by means of a contiguity—a temporal proximity—of associations; just as in writing, if “a” and “b” are put side by side, it means that the syllable “ab” is to be formed out of them.²⁰

A close juxtaposition of two different things guarantees, for psychoanalysis, that there is a special, intimate connection between them.²¹ This inner connection, however, is in itself not an indication that the combination is significant. Take, for example, the phonetic combination of “ab,” which seems to be arbitrary and senseless. The juncture “ab” is an image of contingency. It represents a dream-product, whose meaningfulness depends on a dream-logic. Freud emphasizes that the syllable preserves a difference between “a” and “b”: “in psycho-analysis one learns to interpret propinquity in time as representing connection in subject-matter.”²² Sequential temporal contiguity (in dreams or free associations) brings together elements themselves originally, or essentially, temporally far apart, or independent. In light of this clarification, Freud’s choice of the consecutive letters of the Latin alphabet,²³ “a” and “b,” is curious given that it is meant to represent an enigmatic proximity, namely, one which cannot be explained through linear and logical consecutiveness.²⁴ Freud’s choice of “ab” might have derived, James Strachey suggests,²⁵ from Goethe’s poem dealing with an image of a hunter chasing a fox in the woods. The poem introduces a logical puzzle in pictures:

²⁰ Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” SE 7: 39. ²¹ Cf. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 314. ²² Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 247. “In einer Psychoanalyse lernt man die zeitliche Annäherung auf sachlichen Zusammenhang umdeuten” (Freud 2009: 254). ²³ Interestingly the Latin and the German preposition ab denotes a separation, meaning “from” and “away from.” ²⁴ Referring to this puzzle, Jan Mieszkowski writes, “It is curious that he [Freud] does not choose two that would combine to create a distinctly new sound (au, ie, ei), rather than forming a syllable in which their phonetic values are presented one after the other without change. If a and b do nonetheless work together in composing the syllable ab, there is no sense that what is thereby revealed, or betrayed, is a ‘verborgener Zusammenhang’ between them.” In Mieszkowski 2014: 606–20. ²⁵ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 314.

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Hard ’tis on a fox’s traces To arrive, midst forest-glades; Hopeless utterly the chase is, If his flight the huntsman aids, And so ’tis with many a wonder (Why A B make Ab in fact), Over which we gape and blunder, And our head and brains distract.²⁶ Schwer, in Waldes Busch und Wuchse Füchsen auf die Spur gelangen; Hält’s der Jäger mit dem Fuchse, Ist’s unmöglich, ihn zu fangen. Und so wäre manches Wunder Wie AB, Ab auszusprechen, Über welches wir jetzunder Kopf und Hirn im Kopf zerbrechen.

The picture of the hunter chasing a fox creates an endless circle. In this vicious circle the hunter’s added speed only aids the fox’s flight. This joint movement is hence what the poem is about. Furthermore, the movement of the poem itself is at stake here. Goethe uses the image to advance an idea: “Wie AB, Ab auszusprechen.” The idea reflects the paradoxical nature of poetic language where two different things are pronounced together, as one. In wondering about this puzzle, the poem uses the figure of the fox hunter to demonstrate how a simile works. The chase reveals the simile’s inherent movement. The AB thus offer a formalization of the chase image. The two letters create a phonetic figure “Ab,” which the pictorial figure of “a fox hunter” embodies, namely, A chases B. Like “Ab” the figure of the fox hunter encapsulates an inseparable pair that never overcomes the gap between them. The proximity of the consecutive letters “a” and “b” cannot supersede or cancel out the inherentand, hence, unbridgeable gap. Freud adopts Goethe’s AB compound; yet his perceptive accommodation of it to psychoanalysis brings about a new insight: In the same way, in our system of writing, “ab” means that the two letters are to be pronounced in a single syllable. If a gap is left between the “a” and the “b,” it means that the “a” is the last letter of one word and the “b” is the first of the next one.²⁷

²⁶ Goethe 1885: poems. ²⁷ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 314. “Es ist wie in unserem Schriftsystem: ab bedeutet, daß die beiden Buchstaben in einer Silbe ausgesprochen warden sollen. a, und b nach einer freien Lücke, läßt a als den letzten Buchstaben des einen Worts und b als den ersten eines anderen Worts erkennen” (Freud 2009: 318).

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Following Goethe, Freud uses the language of formal logic. And like Goethe, who studied biblical Hebrew, Freud too knows that the letters Aleph and Bet, the first letters of the Hebrew alphabet, create a meaningful unity in the enigmatic syllable “ab”: a “father.”²⁸ An individual letter is meaningless on its own. It needs to be part of a word, and the word part of a sentence, and so on. Hence, as one letter “a” follows another “b,” the Hebrew syllable pronounces the name of the father.²⁹ And as Socrates reminds Agathon in the Symposium, “a father is the father of something” (just as the hunter is the hunter of something); so too “it’s of a son . . . that a father is the father.”³⁰ Likewise, in the Hebrew ab two things resonate in one syllable. It invokes the image of a pair: a father: ab, ‫אב‬, abba, and the son whose task it is to name him. The letter Bet ending the word ab is also the letter beginning the word, ben, ‫בן‬, son. Hence, I read Freud’s ab as an invitation to bring in the ab-ben, ‫בן‬-‫אב‬, the collocation of father and son. Furthermore, considering Freud’s enigmatic utterance, “if a gap is left between the ‘a’ and the ‘b,’ it means that the ‘a’ is the last letter of one word,” my first association would connect “a” with abba, the longer and more intimate form of ab. Freud goes on to say that “the ‘b’ is the first [letter] of the next one”; now abba brings to mind the figure of the son, ben. It is the notion of “collocations in dreams” (die Traumkombinationen) that is analogous to the phonetic creation of ab and these phenomena are dramatized, or rather find their mythic embodiment in, the encounter of father and son. It is at this moment in The Interpretation of Dreams that Freud introduces his “dream-theory” together with his theory about Oedipus.³¹

5.2.3 JUNCTURES The bonded phrase father-son is a binary form. There are of course other central variations of binary forms that shape our personal and collective histories, such as man and woman, mother and daughter, father and daughter, or mother and son. Father-son, as a unitary entity embracing divided elements, is, however, the dominant figure in Sophocles’ Oedipus ²⁸ Freud writes “in our system of writing” (in unserem Schriftsystem). “Our” has a double meaning—referring in Freud’s case to both the German and Hebrew alphabets, and carrying the resonance of the compound that was German-Jewish identity. ²⁹ Ab is actually pronounced av, as the “b” and the “v” are interchangeable. ³⁰ Plato, Symposium 199D. ³¹ On this point, I disagree with Geoffrey Hartman, who writes: “Freud never brought his theory of ‘dream-work’ together with his theory about Oedipus” (Hartman 1971: 347–8).

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Rex. The figure constitutes a link. It creates an intersection. The hyphen joining father and son, following Geoffrey Hartman’s analysis of an array of portmanteau words, hendiadyses, and other condensed, hybrid phrases, is “at once disjunctive and conjunctive.”³² A dialectic of disjuncture and juncture, difference and similarity, constitutes the relationship between Oedipus and Laius whose enigmatic nature the play investigates. In this sense, the dialectics of the father–son relationship comprises the play’s inner structure. At the beginning of Sophocles’ play there is a distance and difference between the present king of Thebes, Oedipus, and the late king, Laius. Whereas the dead king was a native of Thebes, the present king is known as a newcomer, a stranger from Corinth. The action of the play reduces the distance between the two to nothing. It elides the difference between the two figures, as Hartman argues: we can say that Oedipus, killing his father and marrying his mother, simply elides individual identity and is allowed no being properly his own. The oracle takes away, from the outset, any chance for self-development. Oedipus is redundant: he is his father, and as his father he is nothing, for he returns to the womb that bore him. His lifeline does not exist.³³

Hartman reminds us of the Oedipal sense of the mythic “maxistructure” of bonded figures. Without the split, the tmesis, between the unit’s elements, without opening an indeterminate middle, a breathing space between the binary poles, a son loses any chance for growth, for individuation and progress. In his reading of Oedipus Rex in the Poetics, Aristotle discerns an overarching structure of disjunction and conjunction, which he takes to be unique to the play, a linking of peripeteia (reversal) and anagnorisis (recognition).³⁴ According to Aristotle, their synchronicity underscores the play’s exemplary form—at the moment of the messenger’s arrival leading to the king’s downfall, Oedipus discovers what he has failed so far to see.³⁵ The moment when Oedipus realizes that the murder of Laius and his killing of the stranger are one single event is a reversal of fortune.³⁶ In response to Aristotle’s insight, the modern commentator creates a hybrid phrase, a conjunction of two tragic moments: “Recognition and reversal are so closely interwoven in Oedipus that attempting to separate them is pointless. The climax of Oedipus is hence not a reversal ³² Hartman 1971: 346. ³³ Hartman 1971: 348. ³⁴ Aristotle, Poetics 1452a, 32–3. ³⁵ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 924–1085. ³⁶ This is a central ambiguity in Oedipus Rex concerning whether there are “one or two” different murder cases. The possibility that the two collapse into one threatens the investigator of the murder.

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plus recognition but something closer to a ‘reversal-recognition.’”³⁷ This unique structure of “reversal-recognition” cuts across both of Oedipus’ perspectives: as investigator and as object of the inquiry. The reversal of fortune deriving from the decipherment of the murder—“I killed the king”—is inseparable from the recognition: “I’m the king’s son.” Thus, the structure of “reversal-recognition” is echoed by the image of the juncture that polarizes and collapses two figures into one. The image of the juncture represents, according to Peter Rudnytsky, a “principle of ‘condensation’ that governs the structure of the play as a whole.” And this structure of condensation “conveys the psychological truth that for Oedipus, who is at once a ‘son and husband,’ the present is his past.”³⁸ In the Oedipus, an ambiguity always surrounds the relationship between father and son, who are similar and dissimilar at one and the same time. Oedipus asks Jocasta what the previous king, her dead husband, looked like. She replies that he was “dark, just beginning to go grey, and not much different from your build” (OT 742–3). Jocasta sees Oedipus and remembers the figure of Laius. Oedipus is now the same age that her late husband was at the time of his murder. From her point of view, the figure of Oedipus creates a condensation: OedipusLaius. Oedipus, however, struggles to see things differently. Striving perhaps to bar from consciousness the ominous implications of his strange resemblance to Laius, Oedipus describes the murdered man as presbys (OT 807), an old man, and as xenos (OT 813), a stranger. But the similarity which Jocasta finds between the two men will indeed be proven to exist between two strangers who are genetically the closest.

5.2.4 GENEALOGICAL LINKS In the father–son connection, Freud discovered a tragic polarity, the site of primordial rivalry and animosity between father and son, an antagonism which modern culture has been continuously trying to forget and whose painful traces it wants to efface. Oedipus Rex supplied Freud with the evidence. Freud wished to use this ancient testimony to support a cultural analysis whose aim was to bring to consciousness a determining principle at work between the lines of human history. In Totem and

³⁷ Hardison 1968: 170. ³⁸ Rudnytsky (1987: 274) refers to the double functions of Jocasta (both wife and mother to Oedipus), the Corinthian messenger (a messenger and the man who gave Oedipus to Polybus and Merope in infancy), and the Theban herdsman (both a witness to the murder of Laius and the man who took the infant Oedipus from Jocasta).

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Taboo, Freud uses the principle of conjunction and disjunction to sew together the father–son dyad. The point of their connection is marked by the figure of a scar which is a painful reminder of their inevitable separation.³⁹ Yet, like every other scar, this one too, as a place of conjuncture and disjuncture, is both a reminder of an ancient wound and its elimination from remembering consciousness. With this duality Freud constructs the ambivalent relationship of son and father, a template for the history of the relations between the living and the dead, and younger and older generations. According to the principle of connection and disconnection, the bonds characteristic of a genealogy are markers of its fractures: If we follow the changing relations between survivors and the dead through the course of ages, it becomes obvious that there has been an extraordinary diminution in ambivalence. It is now quite easy to keep down the unconscious hostility to the dead (though its existence can still be traced) without any particular expenditure of psychical energy. Where, in earlier times, satisfied hatred and pained affection fought each other, we now find that a kind of scar has been formed in the shape of piety, which declares “de mortuis nil nisi bonum.”⁴⁰

The sons’ respect for the fathers, the reverence of contemporary society for its ancestors, and a culture’s preservation of its ancient traditions, all these participate in the fabrication of a relationship. Freud employs the Roman notion of pietas to name the respectful countenance of a scar formed through a long cultural process. Pietas, cultivating devotion and respect towards the dead fathers, the ancestors, covers an old wound caused by the ambivalence of pained affection. As a scar, pietas does not testify to a falsified relation, but rather represents a weaving of what has not been settled, the unfinished fabric of father-and-son relationships. Here, again, the image of Aeneas carrying his old father on his shoulders returns. Virgil produces a well-trimmed text, a scar, suturing an open wound left by history. Virgil’s image of linkage stitches together two separate figures. In the history of Roman literature, as already mentioned, the central representation of the father–son unit takes its place under the Augustan ideology of Roman pietas.⁴¹ Following Freud’s intergenerational image of the scar, pietas disguises an inherent divide. Virgil’s famous description of pius Aeneas carrying his old father on his shoulders at the sack of Troy reverses the more conventional picture of a child carried on his father’s ³⁹ The scarred father–son relationship is in this sense a special case of the general phenomenon of parent–child relationships. See the discussion of the umbilical scar in Chapter 4. ⁴⁰ Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” SE 13: 66. ⁴¹ Cf. the discussion in Chapter 3.

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shoulders. Using this moving image, Virgil transmits to future generations a visual memory dictating the meaning of filial devotion: “Come then, dear father, mount upon my neck; on my shoulders I will stay thee, nor will such task o’erburden me.”⁴² Ergo age, care pater, cervici imponere nostrae; Ipse subito umeris, nec me labor iste gravabit.

In Virgil’s poetic grammar, the father–son relationship takes the shape of a linkage. The image of connectedness is not only central for Aeneas and Anchises, but also for Aeneas and his son Ascanius. Thus, the relationships within this ancient model of three generations of fathers and sons helps Virgil to establish a sacred connection with the future, with Roman ancestors of generations to come, who line up in his vision of the underworld in Book 6 of the Aeneid. The shoulder is a paternal–filial juncture. It is a bodily joint linking younger and older generations. The shoulder is also the cultural juncture connecting the ancients and the moderns. John of Salisbury in The Metalogicon (1159), quoting from Bernard of Chartres, compares the intellectuals of his own time to dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. This image of antiquity and modernity provides an upside-down version of the Virgilian “totem pole” piling a father on top of the son.⁴³ The hybrid composition of giants-dwarfs is patterned according to the lineage principle that places a younger generation above an older one. The dwarfs who usurp the child’s conventional position on the father’s shoulders also therefore convey a sense of the future, a promise that has not yet been fulfilled, or, at any rate, a figure of change.⁴⁴ This iconographic tradition of fusing different perspectives disguises a divide. The images of father– son/ancients–moderns are hence expressions of divisions that collapse into fusion. The father–son and ancients–moderns junctures designate for Freud figures of the unconscious whose mental processes present a tension between preservation and change, between identification and individuation. This tension is about time, and it reframes Hamlet’s question: To make time be (in movement), or not be (frozen)? In phantasy, the father–son connection is impervious to time. They are “not ordered temporally . . . the idea of time cannot be applied to them.”⁴⁵ The temporal fusion between father and son, disallowing their difference, recurs in ⁴² Virgil, Aeneid 2.707–8. Trans. Rushton Fairclough. ⁴³ On the figurative use of dwarfs and giants in the twelfth century, see Stock 1979: 370–4. ⁴⁴ Cf. Uzzi 2007: 78. ⁴⁵ Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” SE 18: 28. Cf. Freud, “The Unconscious,” SE 14: 187.

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Freud’s theoretical analogy between the modern neurotic and the ancient Oedipus. Employing the comparative method of psychoanalysis, Freud reproduces in theory the same principle of junction and disjunction that, as we saw, underlies the father–son relationship in Oedipus Rex. He thus recreates the stage on which the encounter between the familiar strangers, father and son, antiquity and modernity, is made possible.

5.2.5 THE MODERN NEUROTIC AND THE ANCIENT OEDIPUS As a preface to his discussion of the ancient Oedipus, Freud begins by referring to one of his patients whose pathological history offers a modern analogy to the Oedipus play:⁴⁶ “On another occasion I had an opportunity of obtaining a deep insight into the unconscious mind of a young man whose life was made almost impossible by an obsessional neurosis.”⁴⁷ The man is characterized by Freud in an Aristotelian manner as “a man of equally high morals and education.”⁴⁸ The unnamed patient in his thirties who is tormented by an obsessional neurosis suffers from terrible guilt feelings, the basis of his neurosis: “He was unable to go out into the street because he was tortured by the fear that he would kill everyone he met. He spent his days in preparing his alibi in case he might be charged with one of the murders committed in the town.”⁴⁹ Freud’s psychoanalytic method allows the memories of a 7-year-old boy to surface. At this stage, the patient recognizes for the first time that there ⁴⁶ The link between the unnamed neurotic patient (Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 260) and the ancient Oedipus conceals, as Peter Rudnytsky shows, another important link between Freud the patient, the object of his self-analysis, and a particular neurotic patient. Rudnytsky emphasizes Freud’s identification with this patient, seeing him as Freud’s double or alter ego. Furthermore, Rudnytsky explains that in the famous discussion of Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 260–4) Freud suppresses the connection made in his letters to Fliess between his personal experience and the ancient Oedipus. He prefers to conceal his somewhat analogous neurosis to that of his patient in order to enhance the progression from his own personal case to the general argument of psychoanalysis (Rudnytsky 1987: 56, 68). See also Douglas Davis who sees Freud’s identification with his patient as evidence for “the full complexity of psychoanalytic countertransference.” In Davis 1990: 197. ⁴⁷ Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 260. The patient, as Rudnytsky shows, was mentioned briefly in the letter to Fliess of October 31, 1895, as one who “dares not go out into the street because of homicidal tendencies.” In the same letter, Freud anticipates that this case of a neurotic patient is destined to help him to solve another riddle. Rudnytsky writes that though this patient figures prominently in The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, there has not been until now any other way to identify him. See Rudnytsky 1987: 56. ⁴⁸ Rudnytsky considers Freud’s reference to the patient’s “high morals and education” as a salient sign of his identification with him (Rudnytsky, 1987: 66). ⁴⁹ Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 260.

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is a direct connection between his present allegedly groundless fear and his past experience of a murderous impulse specifically directed at his father: “The analysis . . . showed that the basis of this distressing obsession was an impulse to murder his somewhat over-severe father. This impulse, to his astonishment, had been consciously expressed when he was seven years old.”⁵⁰ The patient is astonished to discover through this memory that his present phobia transfers a child’s fear of a father onto strangers. This cathexis, however, prompts the psychoanalyst to connect the patient’s murderous wish to a much earlier experience. Uncovering the earlier origins of the child’s wishes is, according to Freud, the only way to obtain a full understanding of the patient’s feelings of remorse after his father’s painful death. The patient’s belated reaction of selfreproach upon his father’s death is a clear manifestation of the return of the repressed. An infantile impulse, inaccessible in the present, continues to reverberate and to fuel a strange phobia. Simulating the neurotic’s unconscious voice, Freud explains, “A person, he felt, who was capable of wanting to push his own father over a precipice from the top of a mountain was not to be trusted to respect the lives of those less closely related to him; he was quite right to shut himself up in his room.”⁵¹ Freud’s account of the life of the neurotic patient is followed by a version of the life of Oedipus which is designed to disclose a common structure. Freud, however, is careful to distinguish the myth from Sophocles’ tragedy. He turns to the myth before attending to its particular elaboration by the ancient dramatist. In retelling the myth of Oedipus, Freud adopts the chronological structure of the fabula, deferring the discussion of the Sophoclean sjuzet until the moment in which its relation to the psychoanalytic plot is revealed.⁵² Let us read Freud’s retelling of the myth of Oedipus with an eye to its resemblance to the neurotic’s biography: Oedipus, son of Laius, King of Thebes, and of Jocasta, was exposed as an infant because an oracle had warned Laius that the still unborn child would be his father’s murderer. The child was rescued, and grew up as a prince in an alien court, until in doubts as to his origin, he too questioned the oracle and was warned to avoid his home since he was destined to murder his father and take his mother in marriage. On the road leading away from what he believed was his home, he met King Laius and slew him in a sudden quarrel. He came next to Thebes and solved the riddle set him by the Sphinx who barred his way. Out of

⁵⁰ Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 260. ⁵¹ Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 260. ⁵² I employ the Russian formalist terms fabula and sjuzet to point to the difference between the mythic story of Oedipus and Sophocles’ idiosyncratic construction of the play.

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gratitude the Thebans made him their king and gave him Jocasta’s hand in marriage. He reigned long in peace and honor. And she who, unknown to him, was his mother bore two sons and two daughters. Then at last a plague broke out and the Thebans made enquiry once more of the oracle. It is at this point that Sophocles’ tragedy opens.⁵³

The biographies of the mythic king and Freud’s highly educated patient unfold through a series of actions performed in blindness to their full significance. Both biographies specify a common crucial infantile/childhood stage of which neither of their protagonists is aware till they reach full maturity. This initial state of ignorance (concerning their history) influences the form of the relationship with their parents. Doubts concerning his parents’ true identity align Oedipus with the modern neurotic who at puberty feels hostility towards his over-severe father. They experience estrangement from their parental figures.⁵⁴ Both feel threatened by an ordained call (external or internal) to kill the father. A strong resistance to killing his father forces Oedipus to run away from home, while guilty feelings about being the cause of his father’s death result in the neurotic’s fear of killing everyone he meets and consequently lead to self-confinement in his room. The neurotic’s unconscious identification of strangers with the figure of the father pairs him with Oedipus. Rachel Bowlby’s reading of Oedipus’ autobiographical testimony (Oedipus Rex 774–99), renders its neurotic promise: “When he [Oedipus] is threatened with the prospect of patricide and incestuous fathering, he runs away altogether. It is as if he imagines he would be passive to the perpetration of the dreaded acts; only to be in the same place as his parents would bring closer their possible happening.”⁵⁵ As a neurotic, Oedipus suffers from temporary forgetfulness, being unable to see the connection between the identity of his true father (which he doubted) and the stranger he encounters at the crossroads. Furthermore, he is blind to any connection between the prophecy he received concerning the murder of his father and the event of his murder of the stranger.⁵⁶ Does

⁵³ Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 260. ⁵⁴ In the case of Oedipus, the feeling of estrangement is towards both his biological and adoptive parents. The visit to the oracle plays an important part in separating Oedipus from his adoptive parents, for he keeps it hidden from his parents: see Oedipus Rex 787. Rachel Bowlby identifies this separation as ending the “untroubled first stage of a simple trio of father, mother, and son,” and as “a significant moment in the development of the Freudian child.” See Bowlby 2007: 170. ⁵⁵ Bowlby 2007: 172. ⁵⁶ See also the discussion of Oedipus’ repression of his scarred feet in Chapter 4 pp. 112–18.

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Oedipus’ lapse of memory make him an ancient analogue of the neurotic? Even if it does, their connectedness cannot elide an inherent divide.

5.2.6 “OEDIPUS-HAMLET” In studying condensations and composites as special products of the dream-work, Freud was able to capture the dream’s textuality through its linking capacities. The structure of the dream composite is also a product of Freud’s theoretical thought, as his comparative reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet shows. The creation of a dream composite and, in this case, Freud’s reference to the two canonical texts together represent a first stage in his evolving theory. As in a dream, a connection is made between the two figures, and only at a later stage, in retrospect (as the unconscious is made conscious), does Freud realize that this literary juncture embraces a difference. The literary junction Oedipus-Hamlet disintegrates so that the two texts reclaim their respective particularity. Hence, in his self-analysis, Freud reports having a textual revelation whose articulation takes an intuitive form, a sort of dream composite: “Oedipus-Hamlet.” Freud refers Fliess to the latest step in his discovery of the unconscious, reproaching him for ignoring the textual link he has made: “You said nothing about my interpretation of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet.”⁵⁷ Seventeen years later, when Freud began to align himself in his writing with Jewish biblical history, he examines another composite image in “The Moses of Michelangelo.”⁵⁸ This visual compound of Jewish, Christian, and pagan traditions reminds him of his earlier linking of Oedipus and Hamlet, which he commemorates as one of his great exegetical achievements for the fields of both psychoanalysis and literature: Let us consider Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet, a play over three centuries old. I have followed the literature of psycho-analysis closely, and I accept its claim that it was not until the material of the tragedy had been traced back by psychoanalysis to the Oedipus theme that the mystery of its effect was at last explained. [Cf. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 264–6.]⁵⁹

⁵⁷ Sigmund Freud, Letter of November 5, 1897, in Freud 1985: 277. ⁵⁸ James Porter refers to Freud’s later interest in the biblical figure of Moses in Moses and Monotheism (1934–8) as not uncommon, “an obvious option for intellectuals [also, e.g., Erich Auerbach] who were seeking to oppose the political realities of the time.” Porter 2008: 136. ⁵⁹ Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo, SE 13: 212.

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Freud cunningly promotes his original insight, his theoretical compound Oedipus-Hamlet, as a well-accepted “claim” in “the literature of psychoanalysis.” He wants us to see how his proposed interpretation from The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 264–6 has permeated psychoanalytical discourse, achieving canonical status by being formulated as the central claim of the field, which Freud accepts as a reassuring sign of his own accomplishment.⁶⁰ Freud recognized Oedipus Rex as a fertile source inspiring his later construction of the Oedipal complex. But Oedipus Rex alone could not sustain Freud’s evolving theory, and he conceived the meaning of Oedipus through a mirror image. From the very start of his reflections on infantile love of the mother and jealousy of the father, Freud relied on the dyadic figure: “Oedipus-Hamlet.” The specular relationship between these two figures helped Freud acknowledge the historical depth of the phenomenon. Moreover, it also helped him to recognize that the significance of incest and parricide as psychic phenomena derives from their reverberations in different narratives. Jean Starobinski’s essay “Hamlet and Oedipus” is a careful study of Freud’s relationship with these two literary figures and shows that, in the context of Freud’s analysis, the Sophoclean Oedipus could make a meaningful appearance only through his Shakespearean double. Conversely, Freud argued, only through Oedipus could Hamlet’s enigmatic language and actions be deciphered as characteristic of “a world-famous neurotic.”⁶¹ Freud remarks on Oedipus’ crucial role in deciphering the enigmatic Hamlet: “From understanding this tragedy of destiny it was only a step further to understanding a tragedy of character—Hamlet, which had been admired for three hundred years without its meaning being discovered or its author’s motives guessed.”⁶² Through the Greek staging of the myth of Oedipus, Freud is able to introduce Hamlet as an “ideal” patient. “Freud,” writes Starobinski, “gives a name—Oedipus—to what Hamlet stubbornly conceals, to what all his loquaciousness hides.”⁶³ Hamlet is a masked and repressed Oedipus. Compared with the masked Hamlet, the ancient Oedipus seems incapable of containing his own complex. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Freud finds a self whose destiny had been determined by Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. From the historical-cultural perspective, the two figures are separate and Freud insists on preserving their distinctiveness by ⁶⁰ See, e.g., Ernest Jones’ seminal article “The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet Mystery: A Study in Motive” (Jones 1910). ⁶¹ “I am reminded on such occasions of the words of a world-famous neurotic—though it is true that he was never treated by a physician.” Freud, “On Psychotherapy,” SE 7: 262. ⁶² Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” SE 20: 63. ⁶³ Starobinski 1989: 163.

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introducing them as two different paradigms of ancient and modern selfhood. Consequently, he construes the relationship between ancient and modern experiences through the relationship between primary and secondary processes. And yet Freud’s discovery, as we shall see, depends on a double appearance of an inseparable dramatic couple: Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the changed treatment of the same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind. In the Oedipus the child’s wishful fantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and—just as in the case of a neurosis—we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences.⁶⁴

Though the above passage reasserts the two protagonists as the cultural products of “two widely separated epochs,” it nevertheless retains the impression of their inseparability at the moment of Freud’s selfdiscovery. It was the bonded image of this dramatic couple that sets in motion Freud’s theory of the unconscious. “Oedipus-Hamlet” bursts out as a sparkling intuition, the product of a brilliant vision, a dream composite where the two reverberate as one. Freud’s juxtaposition of Oedipus and Hamlet is a mimetic act that imitates dream-work, a stunning intuition, or rather “a flash of lightning,”⁶⁵ that, like the composite figure of a dream, is in need of decomposing for the process of interpretation. In the dream, a composite figure appears as one entity, just as mythological hybrids or, as Freud explains, composite animals, “have already assumed stereotyped shapes in our thought.”⁶⁶ Outside the dream thought, however, analysis seeks to reveal the meaning of the composite by resorting to dissection: “In all these cases the combination of different persons into a single representative in the content of the dream has a meaning; it is intended to indicate an ‘and’ or ‘just as,’ or to compare the original persons with each other in some particular respect.”⁶⁷ Switching from the role of dreamer (intuitive thinker) to that of dream-interpreter (scientific writer), Freud must now resort to decomposition. Freud is obliged to recognize the distinctive features of each of the two components of the literary composite. Relying on literary and historical criteria, Hamlet is cut off from Oedipus and they are now viewed as two separate dramatic figures. They belong to two distinct ⁶⁴ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 264. ⁶⁵ In Freud’s letter to Fliess of October 27, 1897 (Freud 1985: 274). Cf. the discussion of this letter in Chapter 4. ⁶⁶ Freud, “On Dreams,” SE 5: 651. ⁶⁷ Freud, “On Dreams,” SE 5: 651.

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dramatic genres—the tragedy of destiny and the tragedy of character— that are also set apart historically. The dream-interpreter concludes that Oedipus and Hamlet represent two different stages in the history of civilization.⁶⁸ According to Freud, Oedipus Rex does not portray a psychological self in the way Hamlet does. And yet, although its plot is driven mainly by external forces such as fate and destiny, we still find it moving. The ancient play continues to mesmerize audiences across time and culture because of the “particular nature of the material.” In other words, the terrifying destiny awaiting Oedipus—marrying his mother and murdering his father—moves “a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one.”⁶⁹ Yet Freud’s aesthetic judgment is far from unanimously accepted. Why is it necessarily the “material” that moves the spectators of Sophocles’ play?⁷⁰ Freud, however, views any interpretation that denies and resists the resonance of the protagonist’s aggression towards the father and the desire for the mother in the spectator’s mental life as denoting repression. Oedipus moves us because he mirrors us, allowing us to recognize what is otherwise concealed from our introspective gaze. Through the undisguised “material,” we gain access to our repressed memories. Oedipus serves Freud by exposing the teleological principle behind Hamlet’s psychology. He is Hamlet without inhibitions, and recovers a latent stratum in Hamlet’s past. Oedipus dramatizes the infantile stage before Hamlet became neurotic and before the Oedipus complex took shape in the adult’s life:⁷¹ “Analysis confirms all that the legend describes. It shows that each of these neurotics has himself been an

⁶⁸ Reflecting on the historical difference between Oedipus and Hamlet, Starobinski writes in The Living Eye, 156, “Shakespeare’s play was in fact written in a period when the traditional image of the cosmos was disintegrating. It was born at a time when subjectivity was beginning to establish its separate kingdom, inaccessible in principle.” ⁶⁹ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 262. ⁷⁰ In his seminal study of literary and philosophical works since the French Revolution, Peter Rudnytsky shows the centrality of Sophocles’ Oedipus for the two centuries preceding Freud. Rudnytsky’s reference to Corneille (Discourse on Tragedy 1660), however, acquaints us with a different response to shocking material in Oedipus Rex. Recognizing the Aristotelian affects of pity and fear as the central emotions evoked by Oedipus Rex, Corneille denies any reaction of fear among contemporary spectators: “I do not think that any of those seeing him represented presume themselves in fear of killing their father or of marrying their mother” (Rudnytsky 1987: 99). See also E. R. Dodds’s view on the same issue: “As it is, we feel both pity, for the fragile state of man, and terror, for a world whose laws we do not understand” (Dodds 1983: 180). ⁷¹ At one point Cynthia Chase identifies Oedipus “as the one person in history without an Oedipus complex” because she sees the murder of Laius as the focal crime, “a first scene, i.e., a deed and not a thought or a psychic phenomenon.” See Chase 1986: 180.

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Oedipus or, what comes to the same thing, has, as a reaction to the complex, become a Hamlet.”⁷² Freud suggests two ways of recognizing Oedipus as inherent to the life of the spectator-patient. “Oedipus” conforms to the one that “we” once were or, rather, to the one “we” are doomed to forget. In Freud’s reading, Oedipus is the embodiment of a specific temporal structure. He is a past experience or, more precisely, a primal present dissolving into a dormant past that pertains to an adult present. Oedipus thus integrates two aspects of temporality: a present that will be forgotten and a forgotten past. He is the embodiment of a future-past. The way Freud construes the Oedipus-Hamlet hybrid seems to leave Oedipus bereft of an unconscious and, in this sense, ruptures the composite. For what is a hybrid? What is the hybrid’s psychoanalytic signification? Is “Oedipus-Hamlet” necessarily a duality that preserves a hierarchy based on chronology, linearity, and development between its two components? Or is this hybrid composition possibly a new creation that undermines linearity and progress? A Freudian intersection between the modern and ancient plots should not persuade us to locate the unconscious either in antiquity or in modernity. Its significance is rather in showing the role of time in figuring out the dynamic nature of the unconscious. The ancient text’s future unfolds as the modern text discovers its hidden past. Recognizing the unconscious depends on unraveling the hidden links between past and future. This psychoanalytic understanding is textual at heart and its original reverberation is found, in my view, in the early centuries of Christianity as the Church Fathers were looking for a correspondence between two different, temporally setapart sacred texts, the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament.

5.3 Temporalities 5.3.1 THE FUTURE PAST In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud compares the ancient plot with psychoanalytic methodology (“a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-analysis”) and lays the ground for identifying the ancient protagonist as a prefiguration of the modern neurotic.⁷³ Although Freud discerns the structure of the Oedipal complex in the tragic actions of the ancient ⁷² Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE 15: 347. ⁷³ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 261–2. See also the discussion in Section 5.2.6.

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protagonist, his act of linking is not based merely on finding a common denominator between two different and distant worlds. His analogy hinges rather on the differences between the ancient and the modern texts by giving special emphasis to the temporal precedence of one over the other. Linking the ancient and the modern texts does not assume universality or identity. It assumes that the ancient play foreshadows psychoanalysis. The question that concerns me here is how to understand the promise of the ancient text. In what way is the future fulfillment of Oedipus a part of his ancient textual provenance? What kind of relation exists between the ancient prefiguration and its future fulfillment? Oedipus Rex unknowingly conceals the future of psychoanalysis. Sophocles’ blind protagonist faces an actual past experience whose literal meaning the Freudian patient would—given resistance to healing—strive to hide. Recognition of one’s past experience, then, is a process that relies on mediation between two stages that psychoanalysis terms primary and secondary. Freud’s dual system has its origins in the traditional dichotomy of body and soul. In Western literary history the oppositional relationship between materiality and spirituality has been framed hermeneutically through the difference between the text’s literal and allegorical senses. Freud’s temporal differentiation between the two processes preserves this hermeneutic difference by emphasizing their respective relations to two perspectives, and two different points in time. While the text’s literal sense pertains to the immediate and straightforward reading, an allegorical interpretation requires some temporal distance from it. The correspondence between psychoanalysis and literary interpretation is particularly fruitful in the context of biblical exegesis. Excoriating naive readers of Genesis 1:1 and distinguishing them from enlightened readers, Augustine explains that clinging to the literal sense of the text derives from the readers’ physical experience of the world (ex familiaritate carnis). Readers of the biblical creation story who imagine God as a man of unlimited strength creating heaven and earth as if they were two great bodies are, according to Augustine, infants. Augustine sees these infantile readers as still nestling in their mother’s bosom. Their reading strategy is confined by material needs. Augustine compares these readers to chicks without wings yet to leave the nest. By contrast, those who return to the same text after being enlightened are capable of a spiritually allegorical reading. Being able to return to the biblical narrative of creation with developed insight, they are, according to Augustine, mature birds, who have grown wings and can now fly.⁷⁴ In the exegetical ⁷⁴ Augustine, Confessions 12.27.

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tradition, an immediate, literal response to the text designates a simplicity that in Freudian terminology belongs to the level of instincts. Conversely, reading the text allegorically depends on resisting its literal sense, and can even lead to a repression of its corporeal referentiality.⁷⁵ In Freudian terms, this hermeneutic stage in the psychoanalytical process involves the sublimation of instincts.⁷⁶ Freud acknowledges the importance for psychoanalysis of “a return to the nest.” The Augustinian image of the reader returning to the nest with an enlightened perspective is restored in Freud’s picture of the experience of self-revelation through the return of childhood memories. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud underlines the role of time in distinguishing primary from secondary processes. It is through the acknowledgment of the temporal difference between primary and secondary modes of psychic functioning that the analysand undergoes a process of becoming conscious. The Augustinian move from the literal to the spiritual sense of the biblical text is connected, therefore, to Freud’s process of becoming self-conscious, through which, as he explains, one gains a historical perspective allowing him to “understand the past as a preparation for the present.”⁷⁷ The process of becoming conscious is the subject of Freud’s letter to Fliess of October 15, 1897. As recalled, Freud associates the gripping power of Oedipus Rex with its capacity to confront modern readers with the repressed content of their early wishes. The famous paragraph, and its later elaboration in The Interpretation of Dreams,⁷⁸ has often suggested to Freud’s readers that the ancient text played a one-dimensional role in the process that led to the discovery of the unconscious. Through the literalness of Oedipus’ deeds modern spectators, according to Freud, encounter in Oedipus their own repressed wishes. By connecting the modern unconscious to the ancient experience, and especially by turning to the mythical figure of Oedipus, Freud created a history for the unconscious. By turning backwards to the myth of Oedipus, Freud strives to restore to the modern subject, by means of a literary link, a sense of a pristine experience no longer accessible in the present. Let us remember that, unlike historically minded philologists and positivist historians, for Freud, turning backwards always involves an encounter between the present and the past. ⁷⁵ For a discussion of the literal sense in ancient literary criticism, see Lev Kenaan 2000: 370–91. ⁷⁶ Paul de Man attends to the temporal character of allegorical reading: “The allegorical mode is accounted for in the description of all language as figural and in the necessarily diachronic structure of the reflection that reveals this insight.” In de Man 1996: 135. ⁷⁷ Freud 1985: 274. ⁷⁸ Freud 1985: 272, and Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 262–4.

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The ancient myth is therefore for Freud an important source capable of reflecting something forgotten by consciousness. Thus, linking the modern self with ancient Oedipus furnishes evidence of the existence of the unconscious in modernity. But this temporal direction of the Freudian turn in order to acquire for the present a depth perspective through the space of the unconscious reveals only one aspect of Freud’s comparative methodology. His literary association has another important temporal dimension that requires an exploration on its own terms. The link Freud made should be explored from both of its poles. More specifically, while connecting to the ancient Oedipus allows the modern subject to gain knowledge of the unconscious, the link with the modern subject allows the ancients to appear with an unconscious. In associating the ancient subject with modern experience, we see the possibility of figuring out an ancient unconscious. This possibility will be explored through the construction of the ancient unconscious with a face turned towards the future. The consequent perspective, derived from linking the ancient text to modern experience, juxtaposes antiquity with a future source through which its unconscious can be reflected.

5.3.2 THE PAST FUTURE: OEDIPUS REX AS FIGURA FUTURORUM Freud’s reading of Oedipus Rex as prefiguration of psychoanalysis sparked an interminable debate concerning the implications of his conclusions for the ancient unconscious. Does Oedipus have a complex, or should he be left, as Vernant argues, without the complex?⁷⁹ Approaching the ancient text as originary cannot fully explicate Freud’s daring contention that Oedipus Rex prescribes “a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-analysis.” Under the sway of the play’s retrospective plot, Oedipus never has access to the literal level of his past deeds.⁸⁰ The play articulates the past as a temporal presence that cannot be fully revealed. As mentioned above, in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud ⁷⁹ The controversy over whether ancient Oedipus has a complex or not reached its peak with Jean-Pierre Vernant’s critical response to Anzieu 1966. Cf. Vidal-Naquet 1988: 363. ⁸⁰ Moreover, the language of Oedipus Rex is, as Vernant so aptly demonstrates, a language not understood by, and without meaning for, its users. In other words, it is frequently an expression of the unconscious: “When Oedipus speaks he sometimes says something other than or even the opposite of what he thinks he is saying” (in Vernant 1988a: 116). In referring to the dialogue between Jocasta and Oedipus in which they exchange their personal accounts of two different oracular prophecies (Oedipus Rex 711–22 and 774–99) Rachel Bowlby comments, “The parallels hover over the two fragmentary stories as they are presented by speakers unconscious of their connection” (Bowlby 2007: 177). See also Segal 1994.

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distinguishes the Sophoclean sjuzet from its mythic fabula. Sophocles’ resistance to representing the past as present, namely as a chronological tale, is precisely what makes the tragic process of revelation a prefiguration of the work of psychoanalysis. Such a notion of the past cannot be apprehended directly and without mediation. We need to find a textual framework through which Freud’s understanding of the past as a preparation for the present, his principle of prefiguration, makes sense. The expectation that the ancient text can be an originary source of the modern self is resonant of a traditional hermeneutic praxis. In likening the ancient play’s process of revelation to the work of psychoanalysis, Freud employed a certain system of interpretation. He made use of a hermeneutic praxis inculcated in him by his own culturally diverse upbringing. Freud’s exposure to ancient classical texts, his acquaintance with philosophical and scholastic traditions, as well as his formative schooling in Jewish history and religion are crucial for appreciating the natural transitions from one textual register to another, so typical of his thought and writing.⁸¹ Moreover, Freud’s psychoanalytic form of hermeneutics was constituted and consolidated on the strength of this literary discourse which merged Greek and Latin with German and English literatures, along with Jewish and Christian traditions. Freud’s deep familiarity with different literary archives is evident in his adoption of Gleichnis (linking) as an essential strategy for his art of interpretation as well as for his self-analysis.⁸² Considering the important role of linking for psychoanalysis, we need to call our attention to the formative contribution of the figural system of interpretation for the scholastic tradition, and its impact on the development of Freud’s notion of the unconscious.⁸³ ⁸¹ For Freud’s early education in the humanistic gymnasium in Leopoldstadt, which provided inter alia a great emphasis on classical education, German and English literature, as well classes in Jewish history and religion, see Knoepfmacher 1979: 287–300. As a medical student at the University of Vienna, Freud enrolled in five different philosophy courses taught by Franz Brentano, through whom he was acquainted with St. Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic tradition. On this important chapter in Freud’s humanist education, see Vitz 1988: 50–2. ⁸² An excellent illustration of Freud’s habituation with the Jewish, classical, and Christian worlds is provided by Richard Armstrong, who analyzes the Herr Aliquis episode from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. See Armstrong 2010: 35–50. ⁸³ Freud’s familiarity with figural interpretation is explicitly acknowledged in his criticism of Herbert Silberer’s notion of anagogical interpretation of the dream. See, e.g., Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 524; Freud, “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams,” SE 14: 228; and Freud, “Dreams and Telepathy,” SE 18: 216. Freud, as Ken Frieden shows, attacks Silberer’s hermeneutic approach on the grounds that the anagogical turns the interpreter away from the drive stimuli, aiming instead at a representation of higher psychical accomplishments. See Frieden 1990: 32. Freud’s criticism of the use of allegorical method (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 524) and his cynical response to

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This system of interpretation, with roots in the work of the early Christian Fathers, considers texts and works of art in their relation “to something other than is promised and not yet present.”⁸⁴ Tertullian introduced a new terminology in order to establish inherent ties between the Old and the New Testaments. Figura futurorum, a figure of things to come, was coined by Tertullian as a textual principle binding meaning with time.⁸⁵ Thus, for example, Moses’ naming of Oshea, son of Nun, Jehoshua is a foreshadowing event, a prefiguration of Jesus Christ. Joshua-Jesus is a new semantic creation, the product of a relationship between two texts where the historical figure of Joshua coalesces with his fulfillment in Jesus Christ. The events of the Old Testament literally manifest a historical reality. But regardless of whether the Old Testament is read literally or not, the events described in it appear as umbrae, shadows, or imagines, images or figures concealing a deeper meaning to be fully revealed in the New Testament. This dogmatic, ideological view of the Old Testament divests it of its legal and historical meaning and promotes instead a reading of it as a promise and prefiguration of Christ. Erich Auerbach, however, presents a different view of the Old Testament and its figural relation to the New, a view already adopted in nascent form by some of the Church Fathers.⁸⁶ Auerbach’s unique stance towards the figural interpretation of the biblical text offers us a hermeneutic prism through which Freud’s notion of the unconscious can be viewed as preparing the ground for the reality of the ancient unconscious.⁸⁷ Auerbach’s novel exposition of the traditional figural system of interpretation has recently been discussed in terms of its political context. Focusing on Auerbach’s seminal “Odysseus’ Scar,” the opening chapter of his Mimesis, James Porter shows just how provocative the essay is, and situates its intellectual vision as growing out of Auerbach’s “moment of crisis in which he confronted his Jewishness as

Silberer’s inclination to mysticism in his anagogical interpretation reflect the symbolic sense commonly associated with the figural system. Yet, despite Freud’s criticism, it is hard not to recognize the great impact of the tradition of figural interpretation on his own thought, as I will show through my reading of Erich Auerbach’s “Figura.” ⁸⁴ See Auerbach 1984: 59. ⁸⁵ Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 3.16. Trans. Ernest Evans. ⁸⁶ Auerbach’s remarks on the developments in the post-Reformation that led to a view of the Old Testament as representing Jewish history and Jewish law are also important for his monumental Mimesis: “Consequently the attitude embodied in the figural interpretation became one of the essential elements of the Christian picture of reality, history, and the concrete world in general” (Auerbach 1984: 52–3). Cf. Meltzer 1987: 13–46. ⁸⁷ See Hayden White’s reading of the innovative nature of Auerbach’s figurality in White 1996: 124–39. For a Marxist approach to figural interpretation that champions new ideas of historicism, see Jameson 1983.

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he never had (or had to) before.”⁸⁸ Porter calls Auerbach’s scholarly position “a Jewish philology or a Judaizing philology” and conceives of its evolution out of the decanonization of the Old Testament under the German National Socialists, whose roots Auerbach identifies with the ancient and medieval de-Judaization (Entjudung) of the Christian Bible.⁸⁹ As Porter demonstrates, Auerbach’s exegetical position defies the Christian exclusion of the Old Testament altogether or its effort to interpret it only abstractly and allegorically.⁹⁰ While Porter distinguishes Auerbach’s figura from the politically charged “Odysseus’ Scar,” he argues that both share a primary motivation in defending “the concrete reality of the Jewish tradition.”⁹¹ Relating to the Old Testament literally and allegorically while addressing its manifest and hidden meanings enables Auerbach to demonstrate the Old Testament’s independent status as a Jewish text and helps to explain its preservation by Christian tradition. Within the Christian perspective we can find an understanding of the Jewish text which remedies its blindness to the Christian future by its fulfillment in the New Testament. This Christian view, extracted from the exegetical tradition and which Auerbach wishes to revive in “Figura,” does not fully explicate the novelty of Auerbach’s essay. The contribution of “Figura” should be sought in the field of comparative literature primarily because of its intertextual significance. As I view it, its innovation lies in revealing a hermeneutic aspect of exegetical linking important for the field of comparative literature. Through the method of linking, Auerbach’s figura discovers a new textual space, a future textual unfolding which can be described in Freudian terms as the text’s unconscious promise.⁹² Although Auerbach wishes to affirm the Old Testament’s cultural exclusiveness, his figura futurorum specifies rather a system of meaning that operates in the intermediate zone between temporality and eternity, between historicity and spirituality, between imitatio veritatis and veritas. Freud’s claim of similarity between the ancient Oedipus and the modern self resonates with the principle of figura futurorum which I would like to offer as a tool for explicating the intertextual work of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic exploration, like the intertextual force of figura futurorum, forges an intermediate semantic zone between past and present experiences, which in psychoanalysis makes a link between childhood experiences and a neurotic present of negations, rejections,

⁸⁸ Porter 2008: 116. Cf. Zakai and Weinstein 2012. ⁸⁹ Porter 2008: 122, 125. ⁹⁰ Auerbach 1984: 51–2. ⁹¹ Porter 2008: 126. ⁹² Hayden White recapitulates Erich Auerbach’s “figurality” as a plot structure in the history of Western literature that takes the form of “an ever renewed promise of fulfillment.” In White 1996: 125.

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and repressions. To understand the emergence of this intermediate semantic zone, consider Auerbach’s analysis of figural interpretation: Figural prophecy implies the interpretation of one worldly event through another; the first signifies the second, the second fulfills the first. Both remain historical events; yet both, looked at in this way, have something provisional and incomplete about them; they point to something in the future, something still to come, which will be the actual, real, and definitive event.⁹³

From this exegetical perspective, both the Old and the New Testaments are provisional and incomplete, and both collaborate in forging a passage to something still to come. This shared sense of incompleteness is what necessitates a process of interpretation binding the two together. Rather than maintaining an unbroken relation, then, these two texts remain apart, awaiting subordination to a form of interpretation that will only be fully revealed in some future time, “when they behold the Saviour revelata facie.”⁹⁴ The expectation of the day when the Savior’s face will be unveiled to the senses as well as in spirit points to the indefinite duration that must be thought of as inherent to the interpretation of both Old and New Testaments. Reading both Old and New Testaments is thus constituted by the structure of a promise, implying that no hierarchical order sets them apart, since they are related to an as yet unfulfilled future that turns them into equal participants in the quest to unveil the divine presence. Auerbach turns to the image of the unveiled face, revelata facies, to signify the “tentative form of something eternal and timeless” that both the Old and the New Testaments allude to. In his view, the figures in both textual traditions “point to something which is in need of interpretation.”⁹⁵ The image of the veiled face symbolizes the temporary condition of blindness confronted by the divine presence. Though Auerbach does not mention this, the phrase revelata facies appears in 2 Corinthians 3:13–18, and its complicated meaning can be interpreted as signifying an experience that readers of both Old and New Testaments share: Not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not see the end of the fading splendour. But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their minds; but when a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled

⁹³ Auerbach 1984: 58. ⁹⁵ Auerbach 1984: 59.

⁹⁴ Auerbach 1984: 59.

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face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.⁹⁶

Paul tells his audience that a literal reading of the Old Testament has a blinding effect.⁹⁷ This passage attests to the usual Christian critique targeting the Jewish reading of the Old Testament as lacking spirituality and as blind to the Old Testament’s revelation of Christ. And yet, when employing the word “veil,” Paul specifically refers his readers to Exodus 34:33–5: And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face (‫ויתן‬ ‫)על פניו מסוה‬. But when Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he took the veil off (‫ )יסיר את המסוה‬until he came out. And he came out, and spoke to the children of Israel that which he was commanded. And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face shone: Moses put the veil upon his face again (‫)והשיב משה את המסוה‬, until he went in to speak with him.⁹⁸

Moses’ face reveals a radiance ascribed to the proximity of God’s presence. Veiling his face may signal his recognition that the radiance has disappeared as well as his fear of his audience’s response.⁹⁹ According to Christian exegesis, Moses is known as a figure of Christ and the veil conceals his having been in God’s presence.¹⁰⁰ This figura futurorum is reflected in the call of the Syrian poet-theologian Jacob of Sarug (451–521), who comments on the veil on Moses’ face: “Oh Jew, remove the veil from your mind, and look upon Moses, on whose face Christ is depicted.”¹⁰¹ The critique of the Jewish literal reading is, for Paul, analogous to the way the Christian faces the incarnate and crucified Christ. Precisely at that particular moment the Christian is required, like the Jew, to unveil the face and behold the spirit of the Lord. Both texts are, therefore, incomplete versions of the eternal truth, which they seek through their shared structure of promise.

⁹⁶ Bible, Revised Standard Version, 1971. ⁹⁷ This is the first time that the title he palaia diatheke occurs in Christian literature, but without yet meaning a canonical collection of books in the sense of the Old Testament. See Roukema 2006. ⁹⁸ Exodus 34:33–5. Trans. Harold Fisch. ⁹⁹ For the various interpretations of this passage, see Noth 1962. ¹⁰⁰ Auerbach 1984: 34. In his The Moses of Michelangelo, Freud exhibits his familiarity with the polysemic notion of this biblical figure. Freud shows his awareness of the Hellenistic aspect of Michelangelo’s Moses when he quotes Max Sauerlandt, who links the Moses and Pan. Moreover, in referring to the original plan to incorporate the Moses as part of a row of seated figures representing the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, Freud shows his familiarity with the Christian exegetical tradition. See Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo, SE 13: 213, 219. ¹⁰¹ Roukema 2006: 246.

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Psychoanalysis exhibits a similar hermeneutic tendency. For Freud too, the past and the present create two merging temporal horizons and provide two incomplete texts calling for interpretation. Past and present are set together in an indefinite duration whose telos is a meeting between unconscious and consciousness, a meeting not possible in either the past or the present, and which remains entangled in the future mode of the psychoanalytic promise. Considering past and present experiences as incomplete texts, we can revisit the notion of Oedipus Rex as the site of a modern unconscious. Freud’s notion of the retrospective fantasy which guides his understanding of the irrevocability of past experience is illuminating here: “We can easily see, too, that hatred of the father is reinforced by a number of factors arising from later times and circumstances and that the sexual desires towards the mother are cast into forms which must have been alien as yet to a child.”¹⁰² If the past is open to constant reshaping, the unconscious too is an element of movement and transformation. The unconscious should, therefore, be sought in the middle zone that binds the two different texts together. Auerbach’s analysis of figura futurorum leads us to recognize the psychoanalytic dimension of the comparativist’s work, which aims to decipher the intrinsic relations between different texts which are temporally set apart. The comparative undertaking exposes a textual network whose structure consists in a series of acts of unfolding of what one text conceals from another. This interplay between the prior and later texts allows for an intermediate, third textual zone to appear. The third textual zone specifies, for the psychoanalytic comparativist, a virtual space through which the dynamic essence of the unconscious is revealed. It is there where the unpresentable experiences of a plurality of texts, which cannot be masked in the present mode, intersect and reflect each other’s unconscious through the temporal effect of delay.

5.3.3 THE COMPLEX The juncture between Oedipus and Hamlet is virtual. The connection retains an ineradicable difference that continues to dominate the relationship between the two domains, mental and textual. In the case of Oedipus and Hamlet, their virtual meeting cannot eradicate the fundamental difference between the two important cultural protagonists. There is no doubt that, for Freud, the relation between these two

¹⁰² Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE 15: 336.

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dramatic figures reflects progress in the history of social psychology. Freud creates a clear-cut distinction between Oedipus and Hamlet. Freud is alert to the “difference in the mental life” of Oedipus and Hamlet as representatives of “these widely separated epochs of civilization.”¹⁰³ It is definitely not the purpose of this study to efface the irreducible difference between Oedipus and Hamlet nor to argue that Freud’s universalism disregards it. And yet Freud’s notable characterization, setting the ancient apart from the modern, triggers our attention, since it is within this context of their difference that the notion of a common unconscious apparatus can surge forth. Hamlet bars ancient Oedipus from depth psychology. Such a reading unburdens the ancient Oedipus of any complex. And yet, since it was the ancient myth of Oedipus that inspired the articulation of the Oedipal complex, one calls into question the psychological crudity of the ancient self, a self that provides a framework for modern self-examination. So how can the ancient complex of Oedipus be approached? It would be easier to point to the traces that the work of the ancient unconscious has left on the modern self, while more challenging, I suppose, to discern the traces of a future prefigured by the ancient fabric of the unconscious; the latter is the task of the final chapter. Both directions of inquiry ought to be taken. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Freud’s “Oedipal complex” suggest a unique temporal web that is crucial for understanding the ancients’ encroachment on modern experience. Freud represents the ontological difference between primary and secondary processes through the divide between psychoanalysis’s two main protagonists: the ancient Oedipus and his modern offspring. Accordingly, Freud’s notion of the Oedipal complex presupposes a primary model of an ancient Oedipus without a complex. And yet, if we attend to the etymology of the term “complex” that Freud began to use a few years after the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams,¹⁰⁴ we might hear a different nuance. Thus, the Latin roots of “complex” lead us to the verb plectere meaning to interweave, and show that within the unconscious experience of both protagonists, the ancient and the modern, the past and the present are interwoven. The Oedipus-Hamlet composite manifests how the exegetical principle of figura futurorum operates in Freud’s thought: The movement from the ancient Oedipus Rex to the early modern Hamlet has an ¹⁰³ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 264. Cf. the discussion above in Section 5.2.6. ¹⁰⁴ Freud mentions Oedipus and Hamlet already in 1897, but the term “Oedipus complex” was not coined until 1910. See Rudnytsky 1987: 14.

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integrative force; it creates a third space of meaning that specifies a meeting point between the two different texts. Figura futurorum is used here as a trope to specify a place of connectedness, a virtual junction created by the text’s intrinsic openness to its future unfolding.¹⁰⁵ This textual connectedness also sheds light on the psychoanalytic process during which uninhibited and inhibited experiences converge in the shared (third) space created by the analytic session. Oedipus Rex does not offer the modern subject an undistorted picture of a primeval past. Neither does it provide a platform for uninhibited drives. Oedipus Rex, like Hamlet, alludes to an originary past consisting of a primary process whose traces are repressed and already forgotten. Oedipus’ contribution to Freud’s “deep insight into the unconscious mind” brings out a certain temporal complexity constitutive of unconscious experience. The significance of temporality for Freud is especially salient in his comparison between the tragic plot of Oedipus Rex and the psychoanalytic process. The two narratives, the ancient drama and the modern process of psychoanalysis, as Freud points out, begin at a similar point in time. Freud invokes Sophocles’ tragedy: “It is at this point,” namely, when the plague breaks out, “that Sophocles’ tragedy opens.”¹⁰⁶ The act of comparison between the psychoanalytic plot and the ancient tragic one identifies a first common denominator; a shared beginning point: plague, a pathological crisis, a breakdown. It is, therefore, significant that it is only at this particular moment in his discussion of the myth of Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams that Freud quotes, for the first time, from Sophocles’ play: Where on earth are they? Where shall now the hard to trace track of an ancient crime be found?¹⁰⁷ Wo aber weilt der? Wo findet sich die schwer erkennbar dunkle Spur der alten Schuld? (Die Traumdeutung 269)

Oedipus’ question formulates an unresolvable problem concerning the unconscious. The fact of its being untraceable either in the past or in the present prescribes its future unfolding as its sole locus of existence. Oedipus’ question foreshadows Freud’s discovery of the future unfolding of the unconscious in the ancient Greek text. Freud, therefore, identified ¹⁰⁵ This openness is connected to the fact that writers are always implicitly talking to some reader who must be located in the future. The author’s unconscious is not entirely separate from the text’s unconscious. ¹⁰⁶ Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 261. ¹⁰⁷ οἳ δ᾽ εἰσὶ ποῦ γῆς; ποῦ τόδ᾽ εὑρεθήσεται ἴχνος παλαιᾶς δυστέκμαρτον αἰτίας; (Oedipus Rex 108–9).

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the primary delineation of psychoanalysis’ path of inquiry in the plot of Oedipus Rex. Oedipus’ process of uncovering his destiny structures the direction of the journey of both analyst and analysand. In this sense, Freud turns Sophocles’ version of the story of Oedipus into a myth of origin for psychoanalysis: “The action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement—a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-analysis—that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta.”¹⁰⁸ As a foundational text, Oedipus Rex anticipates the future of psychoanalysis and thereby reconciles Oedipus’ experience with our own. In Freud’s reading, the future of the ancient play is part of its horizon of meaning. The ancient play forecasts the future of psychoanalysis by projecting into the future a tale that has become constitutive of our present. Oedipus has become our story. The reading of Oedipus Rex prescribes a return to a past predicting an interpretive future that has become the reader’s present.

¹⁰⁸ Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 261–2.

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Oedipal dreams The ancient and modern unconscious

The reconstruction of the past is, as we know, no easy matter, but we may assume with certainty, if I may put it as a joke, that our ancestors three thousand or more years ago already had dreams like ours. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE 15: 85

6.1 Dreaming about Oedipus I recently heard the following story from a psychoanalyst friend. When my friend was 13 years old, he was told by an acquaintance for the first time about the Oedipus complex. That night he had a dream in which his mother seduced him. Reflecting on the embarrassing dream, it occurred to him that it must have been connected to the conversation earlier in the day. He realized with some relief that the dream was not only processing the “shocking Oedipal news” he had just absorbed, but that it also reflected a “legitimate” normative stage in his sexual development. Moreover, he understood the dream to be an inversion of the conventional pattern of the Oedipal complex. Instead of showing his desire towards the mother, the dream staged her as the seducer. He remembered that although the dream’s erotic situation felt strange to him, the manifest dream of the mother’s desire for her son released him from anxiously anticipating what was even more unthinkable—his own desire for his mother. The thought that the dream itself expresses a wished-for situation makes him already at this point in history a Freudian interpreter. Though for the 13-year-old the incest dream was undoubtedly strange, embarrassing, and unpleasant, the young dreamer felt relieved to remember that the incestuous dream was communicating a generic truth about his present psychological development. My friend heard it from a friend; Oedipus heard it from Jocasta: “Many men before you, in dreams too, have shared the mother’s bed” (Oedipus Rex 981). Freudian thought transmits ancient oneiric knowledge. The modern dream episode repeats a common ancient dream experience of which even the mythic Oedipus is aware.

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This chapter deals with the Oedipal dream as a common experience for both ancient and modern dreamers. This sense of commonality cannot erase a deep and ineradicable difference separating the ancients from the moderns. And yet my intention is to point to a hermeneutic possibility that only a comparative reading of ancient and modern dreams can offer. By juxtaposing ancient and modern texts, and ancient and modern dreaminterpretations, a third space of textuality—an intermediate zone—opens for us. This is where the unconscious will show up. Through a comparative reading, the ancient dream unfurls what is hidden from view in the modern one, and the modern dream sheds light on the blind spots of the ancients. It is in this intermediate zone, where the unrepresented experiences of the two cultures that cannot be unmasked in the present modus, intersect and reflect each other’s unconscious in delayed action.

6.2 The unconscious at the crossroads In the previous chapter I examined the image of the crossroads, the mythic focal point of the tragic encounter of fathers and sons. This image of the intersection is, to borrow a Bakhtinian term, a chronotopic figure. As a tragic locus, the intersection of Sophocles’ play is located within a particular geographical region whose different directions lead travelers to points whose semantic meaning varies respectively: for one, Thebes means a home, while for another, a foreign land. Hence, the direction one chooses to take at the intersection always depends on one’s point of view: either backwards or forwards, leaving home or returning to it. These ambiguities become even more complicated in the case of the son, Oedipus, for whom Thebes, from the perspective of the present and adulthood, designates a foreign land, but from the perspective of the past and infancy, a home. For Oedipus the chronotopic intersection stipulates a place that connects movement both forwards and backwards in time. This geographical point of plurality carries unconscious significance for the traveler returning to a place he deems foreign, a place which bears the traces of his own remote past of which he has no recollection. The Oedipal crossroads is known to be a place where two strangers clash. The tragedy of Oedipus renders the encounter at the junction between father and son as violent and aggressive. Accordingly, the mythical conflict has been interpreted by psychoanalysis as a symbolic configuration of the inescapable rivalry of sons and fathers. Yet, as we have seen in our cultural and poetic analysis of the image of the juncture, the significance of the intersection is always dual. Besides its connotation

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as a point of conflict designating a divide between the older and younger generations, the intersection also offers connection and coalescence. Hence, the tragic junction represents a place of intergenerational (con)fusion between fathers and sons. It is analogous to the cultural relationship between the ancients and the moderns of division and fusion, and suggests a similar dialectic: As a point of fusion, the intersection designates a space where different perspectives are unconsciously blended. As a point of conflict and divide, the intersection stands for a point of transition, embracing the promise of unveiling unconscious fusion to reveal division and individuation. Sophocles’ image of the road junction also provides an insight into the mother-and-son relationship. This chapter links the thematics of the unconscious to the figure of the mother. These thematics were discussed in previous chapters through the organic connection to earth in the myth of Antaeus (in Chapter 2), the fusion of times and the language of analogies (in Chapters 3 and 5), and the tangle of dream thoughts (in Chapter 4). These feminine aspects of the unconscious designate a metaphorical space of birth and death, an embryonic source that continues to stimulate longing for a lost home, nourishing childhood fears, ambitions, and desires. Attending to ancient and modern textualizations of the symbolic locus of motherhood sheds new light on Freud’s Oedipal relationship with the mother.¹ The crossroads as juncture surfaces in the conversation between Jocasta and Oedipus and appears to have an important role in uniting son with mother. How does the figure of the crossroads reflect a mother– son relationship? This question was raised in an essay written in 1923 by one of Freud’s devotees, Karl Abraham. In the section “The Trifurcation of the Road in the Oedipus Myth,” Abraham reports that a patient’s recent dream account cleared up a hermeneutic difficulty created in the interpretation of Sophocles’ enigmatic figure of the place where the patricide took place. Juxtaposed with the Oedipus myth, the Oedipal character of the patient’s dream is clear. Abraham’s comparative reading focuses on the connection between the ancient and modern symbols,² a

¹ Seeing the mother and motherhood as loci of the unconscious involves a structure of symbiosis (Freud talks about it in The Interpretation of Dreams through the figure of the mycelium [SE 5: 517]); and, as mentioned above, the duality of birth and death also comes to mind. These essential connotations do not allow us to read the Oedipal erotic relation to the mother strictly through the prism of sexuality: they mean that we see the mother–son relationship in a much wider context. My reading of Freud’s Oedipal desire, therefore, goes beyond its narrow gender construction. ² As a devout Freudian, Abraham sees the Oedipal complex as a constant, a necessary stage in the child’s development which is also reflected in the adult’s neurotic symptoms.

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connection that provides the basis for a systematic grammar of symbols whose stable meanings point to a common language of dreams, myths, and folktales across times and cultures. Abraham’s wish “to formulate a generalized interpretation based on common cultural concepts” should not render his reading irrelevant for our context.³ His reading, despite its commitment to universal meaning, is a comparative gesture that opens up, as we shall see, a third, dynamic space of interpretation. Before plunging into Abraham’s essay, let us refresh our memory and return to the moment in the play when the location of the murder is discussed for the first time: Iocasta And as for Laius—as the rumor goes—one day foreign robbers murdered him at the triple road . . . Oedipus What restlessness of soul, woman, what tumult has seized my heart as soon as I heard you speak! Iocasta What anxiety has startled you, that you say this? Oedipus I thought that I heard this from you—that Laius was slain at the triple road. Iocasta Yes, that was the report, and so it is still thought. Oedipus And where is the place where this occurred? Iocasta Phocis is how this land is called; the two-branching road leads to the same place from Delphi and from Daulia.⁴ Ἰοκάστη καὶ τὸν μέν, ὥσπερ γ᾽ ἡ φάτις, ξένοι ποτὲ λῃσταὶ φονεύουσ᾽ ἐν τριπλαῖς ἁμαξιτοῖς: . . . Οἰδίπους οἷόν μ᾽ ἀκούσαντ᾽ ἀρτίως ἔχει, γύναι, ψυχῆς πλάνημα κἀνακίνησις φρενῶν. Ἰοκάστη ποίας μερίμνης τοῦθ᾽ ὑποστραφεὶς λέγεις; Οἰδίπους ἔδοξ᾽ ἀκοῦσαι σοῦ τόδ᾽, ὡς ὁ Λάϊος κατασφαγείη πρὸς τριπλαῖς ἁμαξιτοῖς. Ἰοκάστη ηὐδᾶτο γὰρ ταῦτ᾽ οὐδέ πω λήξαντ᾽ ἔχει. Οἰδίπους καὶ ποῦ᾽σθ᾽ ὁ χῶρος οὗτος οὗ τόδ᾽ ἦν πάθος; Ἰοκάστη Φωκὶς μὲν ἡ γῆ κλῄζεται, σχιστὴ δ᾽ ὁδὸς ἐς ταὐτὸ Δελφῶν κἀπὸ Δαυλίας ἄγει.

³ Abraham 1955b: 81. ⁴ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 715–34. Translation by Sir R. C. Jebb with my adaptations.

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The story that Jocasta sets out brings back the memory of a traumatic event. It forces her to return to the calamitous day when her husband was murdered in cold blood. It was that event that left Thebes bereft of its king and leader, the very day that led the unguided Thebes to undergo the crisis engendered by the threat of the Sphinx. Back then, uncertainty loomed and penetrated personal and public spheres. Now, many years after the terrible event, uncertainty again takes hold as the vague memory of it returns to disturb the two speakers. Of all the things that Jocasta tells Oedipus, only one has the clear status of a fact: King Laius has been killed. But the why and the how surrounding this fact remain in darkness and pertain to hearsay; the memory of the past relies on rumors and gossip, and is therefore unreliable. Jocasta repeats an old rumor that Laius was killed by foreign robbers at the triple road. In the uncertain domain of rumors, the king is said to have been murdered by strangers who had no connection with him and had no specific personal interest in him. Motivated by greed, they ended up robbing him of his life without knowing who he was. This untrustworthy and incorrect account of the pointless murder shocks Oedipus. His disproportionately tormented response comes as a total surprise to his wife. For Jocasta wanted only to assuage Oedipus, who has just arrived enraged by Creon’s and Tiresias’s accusations. She mentioned the rumor concerning the king’s murder at the hands of robbers only to prove the unreliability of the oracles and prophecies that ground Creon’s and Tiresias’ accusations. Jocasta wanted Oedipus to see how prophecies get the future wrong, just as the Delphic prophecy that Laius would die at the hands of his son proved wrong. In repeating the rumor that the king was actually killed by the hands of robbers Jocasta means only to reaffirm common sense against the claims of soothsayers (oracles); it is an “ideological” axe to grind, unrelated, as far as she is concerned, to their material (actual) relation to events.⁵ Therefore, Jocasta is puzzled by Oedipus’ anxious and emotional response, which seems to her an overreaction. To us Oedipus seems to display post-traumatic affect. How else can his unexpected panic attacks and anxiety be explained? There is a strong sense of the return of the repressed here, reflected in Oedipus’ psychological breakdown. Oedipus, who up till now has been able to stay firm before great difficulties, unshaken by the horrors of the recent pestilence, who has remained resolute and indomitable in the harsh confrontations with Creon and Tiresias, for the first time loses his self-control, in the presence of his ⁵ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 707–25.

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supportive and protective wife. Time is playing its tricky game again. Many years have passed since Oedipus first showed up in Thebes. Back then he was a complete stranger, a traveler from a foreign land whom no one knew or had even heard of. Jocasta unknowingly touches upon an unexposed (traumatic) memory. Something happened back then preceding Oedipus’ arrival at the gates of Thebes. He, so it seems, has never looked back at this episode and the terrible story of how he got involved in a violent incident at the crossroads. In Oedipus Rex, doubt is cast on the location of the murder through the question of whether the place where Laius and his companions were killed and the place where Oedipus killed an old man and his companions are one and the same.⁶ As Karl Abraham observed, this major ambiguity is specifically articulated through the variety of names given to the place in which the murder took place.⁷ The place is first named by Jocasta as triplais hamaxitois (l. 716). Disturbed by Jocasta’s particular phrasing, Oedipus repeats her specific description of the location. His language reflects a desire to disprove what he has just heard: “It seems to me,” he says, “that I heard you saying that Laius was killed at the triple road” (l. 730). The figure of the triple road awakens a lingering threat which is connected to an old and terrible memory. Oedipus’ anxious inquiry concerning her specific choice of triplais hamaxitois (l. 730) has an immediate effect on Jocasta who obscurely drops triplais hamaxitois, replacing it instead with schiste hodos (l. 733). Oedipus wants to know where exactly the murder of Laius took place (732). Phocis is the name of the land, answers Jocasta; the road is divided, with one direction coming from Delphi and the other from Daulia (733–4). What is the significance of this change? Was Laius killed on a triple- or a double-branching road? The incompatibility between these two supposedly synonymous terms puzzled Abraham so much that he temporarily withheld the completion of his research, especially after consulting with “Professor Freud,” who “drew [his] . . . attention to the difficulty this point raises.”⁸ As a Freudian reader, Abraham would have easily seen that the rhetoric governing Sophocles’ dialogue adopts a poetics familiar in the textuality of dreams.⁹ For a dream-interpreter, the conjunction of triplais hamaxitois and schiste ⁶ The different accounts of these two events preclude the possibility of a definitive version, resulting in the so-called Rashomon effect. The sole survivor, the eyewitness to Laius’ murder, the shepherd who also saved the pierced-footed infant Oedipus, never identifies Oedipus as the murderer of Laius. For the Rashomon effect in the different accounts in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, see Sandor Goodhart’s critique of Freudian interpretations of the ancient play as depicting predetermined events, in Goodhart 1978. ⁷ Abraham, 1955b: 83. ⁸ Abraham 1955b: 83. ⁹ On dream poetics in ancient fiction, see Lev Kenaan 2004.

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hodos calls for interpretation of the terminological ambiguity. This is not the case, however, in other rational and scientific discourses for which conjunctions that create dualities simply need to be reconciled. Polarized and ambiguous conjunctions block and obstruct investigations guided by the ideal of objective truth. The aspiration to purify Sophocles’ language of its “dream poetics” in the name of logic is common to many of his interpreters, as we see, for example, in R. D. Dawe’s note on Jocasta’s triplais of line 716: “if one road branches into two, the sum can be described as three roads.”¹⁰ This kind of rationalization is congruous with Oedipus’ resilient position regarding the identity of the place. Oedipus insists on a unique description of the place of the murder. For him there is only one option—the three-way junction—and he completely ignores its dual variant. Oedipus, as Seth Benardete argues, adopts a general perspective. Accordingly, his triple hodos reflects a wish to preserve the theoretical (objective) gaze of one looking at a map: Oedipus says that he met Laius at a triple road, but Jocasta calls the meeting of the ways from Daulia and Delphi a split road . . . A triple hodos (“triple way”) is the same as a schiste hodos (“split way”). Two is the same as three. If one is walking a road and comes to a branching of it, there are only two ways that one can go, for the third way has already been traversed. If, however, one is not walking but simply looking at a map of such branching, there appear to be three ways to take. Action sees only two where contemplation sees three.¹¹

Benardete distinguishes between the two terms as symbolizing, respectively, action and contemplation. Oedipus’ triple hodos is an indication of his false positivism: “Oedipus places himself in the camp of theoria, but it is a naïve theoria.”¹² Oedipus’ distanced stance is indicative of his past blindness, and current resistance, to acknowledging his physical involvement in the king’s family ties. Solving or doing away with the ambiguity between the two variations of naming the place overlooks an important feature in the dramatic dialogue that operates just as it would in a dream. Such logical procedures erase duality and miss the significance of the following rule formulated by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams: “The alternative ‘either-or’ cannot be expressed in dreams in any way whatever. Both of the alternatives are usually inserted in the text of the dream as though they were equally valid.”¹³

¹⁰ Dawe turns to the authority of Plato for support: “And so when they die, they will judge in the meadow at the three ways (triodo) from which lead the twin ways (to hodo).” Plato, Gorgias 524a. ¹¹ Benardete 1966: 117. ¹² Benardete 1966: 117. ¹³ Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 316.

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The mystery surrounding the configuration of the road resembles another ambiguity concerning the anatomy of the figure suggested by the Sphinx’s riddle. The Sphinx’s enigma involved the identification of a living creature with two, three, and four feet; similarly, the variant descriptions of the scene of the crime call for the identification of a place that is simultaneously “a two-branching road” and a “triple road.”¹⁴ The enigmatic shape of the place thus creates a spatial variation of the Sphinx’s riddle of temporality. The riddle proposes a multiform shape corresponding to the different ages coexisting in the figure of a single man. Can a person be an infant, a grown-up, and an old man simultaneously? Can a crossroad occur on a three- and a two-branching road at one and the same time? Ambivalence is intrinsic to this scene and even Oedipus, despite his apparent talent for solving riddles, cannot eliminate it. For Oedipus, a riddle is a state of plurality that needs to be overcome through one unified and privileged meaning. His implicit assumption is that underlying the plurality is one clear and coherent sense, and that ambiguity can ultimately be removed.¹⁵ In Oedipus Rex, however, the search for underlying unity only strengthens the view that ambiguity is not merely an external manifestation but the inner core of meaning. The deeper Oedipus searches for the one truth, the clearer it becomes to the reader that the significance of the riddle does not depend solely on its solvability. This view is apparent in Nietzsche’s advice in Beyond Good and Evil to learn from the Sphinx to ask questions, and to relinquish the philosophical search for truth: Is it any wonder that we should finally become suspicious, lose patience, and turn away impatiently? That we should finally learn from this Sphinx to ask questions, too? Who is it really that puts questions to us here? What in us really wants “truth”? Indeed we came to a long halt at the question about the cause of this will—until we finally came to a complete stop before a still more basic question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?¹⁶

It is through the ambivalence and uncertainty surrounding the scene of the crime that we are able to recognize the crossroads as a juncture uniting three different aspects of temporality which are intrinsically incompatible: the now, the before, and the not yet. The crossroads signifies another kind of amalgamation of different perspectives: that of ¹⁴ The different depictions of the crime scene thus invoke the shape of a Y, a capital delta, or a small lambda. See Joseph Pucci, who discusses the symbols of the crossroad through its graphic representation in letters, in Pucci 1992: 106. ¹⁵ Cf. Benardete 1966: 110. ¹⁶ Nietzsche 1966: sec. 1 (emphasis in original).

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the son, the father, and the mother. Jocasta’s two different formulations of the locations reflect the conjunction of two different perspectives. Located in Thebes away from the crossroads, Jocasta’s perspective is supposedly uninvolved. From this remote point of view, she adopts, like Oedipus, the image of the triple road. But when she replaces triple hodos with schiste hodos, she adopts instead the traveler’s point of view. She might imagine the two-branching road from Laius’ perspective going out from Thebes towards Delphi. Even more striking is the option suggested by schiste hodos as seen from Oedipus’ perspective on his journey from Delphi to Thebes.¹⁷ In this case, schiste hodos merges Jocasta’s and Oedipus’ perspectives of the road. This possibility conveys Jocasta’s unconscious containing of Oedipus’ experience. The difference between them suggests the opposite of what we would have expected: contrary to her situatedness in Thebes, Jocasta adopts the wanderer’s perspective, whereas contrary to the traveler’s experience, Oedipus’ triple hodos contains the wish to free himself from the memory of his involvement. Jocasta’s choice of schiste hodos reveals what lies hidden from her: her own involvement in the murder scene. We thus gain a sense of her unconscious experience by attending to an element that specifically represents her point of view in the diversity of perspectives. Jocasta concretizes the figure of the triple road by referring to its materiality. Conceptual knowledge of the place is not sufficient for her. A place is primarily connected to the earth: Phocis men he ge klezetai (“Phocis is the name of ge” [i.e., the land, the earth, mother-earth] l. 733). The choice of ge invokes the land but carries echoes of Gaia, the primordial maternal divinity.¹⁸ Jocasta thus points to the earthly dimension of the region— Phocis—where Oedipus trod.¹⁹ She recalls the walker’s physical experience, while her unconscious image betrays the latent trace of Oedipus’ foot on her body.²⁰

¹⁷ In lines 794–7, Oedipus relates that after returning from Delphi, he had made up his mind to go as far away from Corinth as possible. See Cameron 1968: 10. ¹⁸ Gaia and Ouranus, her son and husband, are the prime example of an incestuous relationship in Greek theogony; see Hesiod, Theogony 116–36, 176–81. ¹⁹ Jocasta’s reference to ge recalls Oedipus’ unconscious expression in Oedipus Rex 108–9, a sonorous juxtaposition of pous and ge. Cf. the discussion above in Chapter 4. For the sexual connotations of the foot, see the scholiast on Euripides’ Medea, who refers to the sexual meaning of pous as penis. See Henderson 1991: 126, 129–30; Kovacs 2008: 300. ²⁰ We can also identify a trace of unconscious repression in Jocasta’s Daulia–Delphi split road, for it significantly does not include the road chosen by Oedipus. The fact that the road to Thebes taken by Oedipus is absent from Jocasta’s schiste hodos may suggest that her revision of the triple hodos was an unconscious act. The triple hodos includes Thebes, which is the place where Oedipus was conceived and where he will meet her in the future as his consort.

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6.3 The Oedipal dream: Backwards and forwards A dormant memory of Oedipus’ mother’s body is awakened in us once Abraham links the ancient play to a modern dream. This moment of recollection belongs to a hermeneutic process that gradually evolves. Abraham wishes to resolve an ambiguity created by the different descriptions of the crossroads where the patricide took place. One incongruity in particular attracts his attention in comparing Oedipus’ speech with Jocasta’s schiste hodos (l. 733). He examines the blind Oedipus who looks back and revisits the painful places of his past: Now I am found to be evil and a son of evils. Oh, three roads [treis keleuthoi], hidden glade [kekrummene nape], thicket [drumos] and narrow pass [stenopos] in the three roads [triplais hodois] that threw up my father’s blood, my own blood, from my hands, do you still remember what I did in front of you, and what I have done when I came on a different occasion?²¹ νῦν γὰρ κακός τ᾽ ὢν κἀκ κακῶν εὑρίσκομαι. ὦ τρεῖς κέλευθοι καὶ κεκρυμμένη νάπη δρυμός τε καὶ στενωπὸς ἐν τριπλαῖς ὁδοῖς, αἳ τοὐμὸν αἷμα τῶν ἐμῶν χειρῶν ἄπο ἐπίετε πατρός, ἆρά μου μέμνησθ᾽ ἔτι οἷ᾽ ἔργα δράσας ὑμὶν εἶτα δεῦρ᾽ ἰὼν ὁποῖ᾽ ἔπρασσον αὖθις;

For the Freudian interpreter the symbolism of the narrow pass, stenopos (O.T. l. 1399) does not cause any difficulty. Moreover, the image of the narrow pass is especially helpful for proving what Abraham sought to show was “a remarkable correspondence” between the Oedipus myth and the fantasy of rescuing one’s father (Vaterrettung).²² Elsewhere, Abraham argued that the common modern phantasy of rescuing one’s father is strikingly similar to the murder incident depicted in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In a version of the modern rescue-phantasy a patient imagines that he saves the king (or any other prominent figure who substitutes for the figure of the father) by boldly stopping the king’s carriage in full flight, despite its alarming speed.²³ To the unconscious, explains Abraham, the running of the carriage or horses stand for the sexual act, while “the king stands for father and rescue for killing.” Thus, ²¹ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 1397–1403 (my emphasis). ²² Cf. Abraham 1955a. ²³ Abraham bases his analysis on Freud, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men (Contributions to the Psychology of Love I),” SE 11.

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the phantasy of rescuing one’s father is closely related to the phantasy of rescuing one’s mother. The son’s phantasy is not only “to witness the act of sexual intercourse between his parents; he seeks to prevent this by killing his father, and in that way rescuing his mother.”²⁴ Abraham’s patients’ unconscious phantasies reactivate these infantile experiences, situated by Freud in the time in which the boy gains some sexual enlightenment concerning his own birth. This is also the time, Freud explains, when the child “comes . . . under the dominance of the Oedipus complex.”²⁵ The correspondence sheds new light upon the rescue phantasy as the modern unconscious content “becomes clearly apparent” in the ancient play.²⁶ It also gives us a clue to the not-yet-apparent meaning of the Oedipus episode, in its association of Laius’ carriage in movement with the modern patient’s phantasy’s symbol of the sexual act, and consequently confirms that the ancient image of the narrow pass operates as a figura futurorum, to be revealed in a modern dream as a symbol of the female genitalia. “If the narrow pass is a symbol of the female genitalia,” Abraham reiterates, “it falls into place with the rest of the symbolism,” namely, with the images of the crossroads that Oedipus identifies in his monologue as a hidden glade and a thicket. These synonymous phrasings unite in expressing Oedipus’ imagistic notion of the place of the encounter with the father. Through these ancient images, Abraham translates the place of “encountering the father inside the mother’s body” into the language of dream symbols.²⁷ The enigmatic symbol that temporarily obstructs Abraham from further consideration of the Oedipal symbolism is the schiste hodos, about which he explains that it “literally means not ‘cross-roads’, but ‘divided-road’—which might be translated by some such phrase as ‘parting of the ways’.”²⁸ Wondering about the possible significance of this image for Oedipus at the crossroads, Abraham compares it to an analogous crossroads from a different ancient tale. This is Prodicus’ allegory of Hercules choosing between virtue and vice.²⁹ Hercules’ transition from boyhood to manhood suggests an analogy with the point in life represented by Oedipus’ two-branching road: “The parting of the

²⁴ Abraham 1955b: 83. Cf. Rank 1992: 211. ²⁵ Freud, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men (Contributions to the Psychology of Love I),” SE 11: 171. This is Freud’s first published use of the term “Oedipus Complex.” ²⁶ Abraham 1955a: 69. ²⁷ Abraham 1955b: 83. Cf. Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, SE 4: 399–400. ²⁸ Abraham 1955b: 83. ²⁹ Following Prodicus, Xenophon elaborates on Hercules’ choice in Memorabilia 2.1.21–34.

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ways might, as in the case of Hercules, symbolize a doubt on the part of the traveler.”³⁰ The image of the split road as a figure of internal conflict between virtue and vice fails, however, to take account of the literal significance of the split-road in Oedipus Rex. What sort of deliberation can the split between the ways from Daulia and Delphi evoke in the young Oedipus? This is not the choice Oedipus is required to make upon his return from Delphi. Abraham concludes that Hercules’ choice provides an insufficient analogy, amounting to a redundant rationalization. Nevertheless, the allegory of Hercules’ choice does maintain a figural relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex which could have helped Abraham’s inquiry. Xenophon’s elaboration of Hercules’ choice reveals what Jocasta’s schiste hodos conceals: the sexual meaning of the traveler’s road. Representing the two opposite ways through two seductive female figures who entice Hercules into choosing between them renders the road, any road, as an object of desire. But Hercules’ choice does not offer Abraham the moment of enlightenment he needed for deciphering the enigmatic symbol. It is, rather, a modern dream brought by another of his patients that provides the illumination: The dream was as follows: “My mother has died, and I am attending the funeral. The scene then becomes indistinct. I go away and then return to the grave. I have the impression that I am in Russia, and that Bolsheviks have violated the grave. A hole has been dug in the ground. I see something white at the bottom of it; it may be the shroud. Then the scene changes again. Now my mother’s grave is at a place where two roads meet, converging into a wide highway. The grave protrudes only slightly above the surrounding ground; vehicles pass over it and disappear. Now I myself am driving backwards and forwards over it.”³¹

Abraham preserves the dreamer’s subjective experience by transcribing the first-person narrative voice. Oedipus’ invocation of the narrow pass and the three roads in lines 1397–1400, together with the patient’s dream, suggest a close relation, a correspondence that works forwards and backwards in time: a not-yet-apparent significance of Sophocles’ imagery becomes manifest in the future, namely, in a modern dream, while the hidden significance of the patient’s dream is discovered in the ancient text. In the modern dream, the mother’s grave is located at the crossroads. This specific location offers a link that illuminates Jocasta’s enigmatic choice of schiste hodos. The modern link missing from Jocasta’s schiste hodos reminds us that Thebes is a sign for the mother and can therefore be integrated as a third element in the triangular image of the triple road: the merging roads from Delphi and Daulia lead directly to ³⁰ Abraham 1955b: 83.

³¹ Abraham 1955b: 84.

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Thebes. Through this missing link, Abraham also re-establishes the patient’s disguised dream as an Oedipal dream. The mother’s grave is violated by the Bolsheviks who, in dreams of that period, typically represent (subversive) impulses expressing illicit and violent (revolutionary) desires.³² In the wake of censorship work, the dream attributes the patient’s necrophilic phantasies to the violent Bolsheviks. The sexual connotation of the mother’s violation is accentuated by the many vehicles passing over her grave. “We remember,” writes Abraham, “that busy places like railway stations and department stores are frequently used as symbols of prostitution. At the same time, we remember that the road symbolizes the female genital organs, the vehicles those of the male.”³³ The grave is situated where several roads meet: “The site of this well-worn grave provides an unmistakable clue. The two roads which merge to form a wide highway are the two thighs which join at the trunk. The junction is the site of the genitalia.”³⁴ Together they create a triangle or the trifurcation of the road. Hence, Abraham concludes that the son’s driving backwards and forwards over his mother’s grave at the crossroads—the crossroad being the symbol of the mother’s thighs—signifies the son’s violation of his mother. For Abraham, as we can see, the discovery of the hidden significance of the modern image is a hermeneutic event that depends on a reading juxtaposing the modern dream and the ancient text: This is exactly what happens in the Oedipus myth. Oedipus encounters Laius, who is accompanied by other men, at the trifurcation. Oedipus kills Laius and the others. He then sets out to find his mother. If we interpret the symbolism of the ancient legend in this way, Oedipus’ struggle with Laius is a struggle for the mother’s genitalia. This makes it clear why neither father nor son can give way.³⁵

The comparison of the modern dream and Sophocles’ images of the murder shows us that the discovery of the unconscious of each text depends on the other. The ancient image of the crossroads provides the site of the discovery of the modern unconscious, just as the modern dream is the site for discovering the ancient unconscious. The temporal gap between the two texts calls for the link provided by the principle of figura futurorum. Both ancient and modern experiences are provisional and incomplete. They have in common the psychoanalytic promise of the unconscious, resonating with echoes of something pointing to the future, something still to come. Their distance from ³² “Frequently in the dreams of our patients the Bolsheviks represent those wishful impulses which outrage conventional morality” (Abraham 1955b: 84). ³³ Abraham 1955b: 84–5. ³⁴ Abraham 1955b: 85. ³⁵ Abraham 1955b: 85.

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and their obliviousness to the not-yet-manifest confirm the unconscious’s dynamic character and demonstrate that the site of the unconscious pertains to the intermediate semantic zone existing between ancient and modern experiences. The ambiguous present resists any solution within the textual confines of the ancient tragedy. However, as the memory of this enigmatic text emerges in the context of discussing a modern dream, the ancient and the modern unconscious are unveiled, each in the other’s domain. “The ‘unconscious,’” writes Derrida, “is no more a ‘thing’ than it is any other thing, is no more a thing than it is a virtual or masked consciousness. This radical alterity as concerns every possible mode of presence is marked by the irreducibility of the aftereffect, the delay.”³⁶ The unconscious is a nomadic and dynamic phenomenon that, through its negotiation of the present and the past, pours forth in different shapes and, in this sense, transgresses boundaries that have been put in place between ancient and modern experiences.

6.4 The future of dreams Having traced the ancient features of the tragic relationship between Oedipus and his mother in modern dreams, I now turn to examine the significance of this relationship in dreams of the ancients. An ancient book on dream-interpretation provides us with an unusual source for studying ancient notions of mother–son dreams of incest. The Oneirocritica was written by Artemidorus of Daldis, a professional dreaminterpreter of the second century . I shall be discussing the appearance of the unconscious through a reading that examines the Oedipal dream as an experience common to a diverse community of ancient and modern dreamers. Some general remarks from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams dealing with differences and similarities between ancient and modern dreamers can give us a basic methodological orientation. Reviewing the scientific work done by earlier experts on dreaminterpretation, Freud prefaces his work by putting it in historical perspective. He leaves the investigation of the prehistoric experience of dreams to other scholars who study its effect “upon the formation” of primitive “conceptions of the world and of the soul.”³⁷ As for classical antiquity, Freud draws a complex picture. The ancient dream echoes ³⁶ Derrida 1982: 21. ³⁷ “I must refer my readers to the standard works of Sir John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, E. B. Tylor and others” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 2).

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the prehistoric (lost) experience of dreams, but at the same time demonstrates an affinity with the modern dream experience. Freud underlines the points of connection and disjuncture: ancient and modern theorists alike recognize the somatic and psychological sources of dreams. The difference between them, however, derives from the ancient acknowledgment of something that is completely denied and rejected by modern discourses on dreams: They took it as axiomatic that dreams were connected with the world of superhuman beings in whom they believed and that they were revelations from gods and daemons. There could be no question, moreover, that for the dreamer dreams have an important purpose, which was as a rule to foretell the future. (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 2)

In antiquity dreams typically raise an expectation of the unfolding of a future event.³⁸ The desire to know the future and the anxiety caused by future uncertainties make ancient dreaming in particular burdened with prophetic responsibilities. The predictive power of the dream, its fulfillment in a future event, is a clear indication of the dream’s truthfulness. Accordingly, dreams that foretell nothing are considered insignificant, false, and misleading. In antiquity, this duality is typically understood as a fundamental distinction splitting the oneiric field, creating two hierarchically ordered modalities: significant and insignificant dreams. This duality also takes the analogous form of distinctions between true and false, and visionary and psychological-somatic dreams. The terminology for this duality establishes an opposition between oneiros and enhypnion, indicating a difference between a higher, enigmatic, allegorical type of dream from a lower, literal, erotic type. The binary opposition between oneiros and enhypnion is clearest in Artemidorus’ systematization of dreams.³⁹ The ancient concentration on the dream’s future typically offers an argument against the continuity of ancient and modern experiences of dreams. Hence, a common response among classical philologists and ancient historians is to ultimately disallow any association between ancient dreams and Freudian interpretation. Thus, for example, despite the fact that Freud considers Artemidorus of Daldis to be his predecessor, and that he frequently refers to his Oneirocritica as an

³⁸ See, e.g., Virgil, Aeneid 6.893–6 and its Homeric source, Odyssey 19.562–7. For a discussion of the complex temporality of Homeric prophetic dreams, see Lev Kenaan 2016: 208–11. ³⁹ See Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1.1.3, and the discussion of this passage in Lev Kenaan 2016: 192–5.

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ancient model for his The Interpretation of Dreams, experts on ancient dreams insist on separating Freudian perspectives from the study of Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica.⁴⁰ In his essay, “The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus,” S. R. F. Price, for example, negates the historical validity of any attempt to bridge Freud’s retrospective and Artemidorus’ predictive theories, seeing this as futile: “Unlike Freud, Artemidorus is interested in dreams as a key not to the unconscious, but to the future.”⁴¹ In other words, the past, which is the Freudian interpreter’s object of investigation, takes one in an opposite direction to ancient oneiric inquiry.⁴² Similarly, John J. Winkler contends that “the difference is that Artemidorus’ soul is looking to the immediate future, Freud’s to the distant past.”⁴³ And yet the recurrent scholarly demand to preserve the divide between the ancient and modern experience of dreaming should, I think, be called into question.⁴⁴ The ancient fascination with the future does not automatically ascribe to modern dreams a complete indifference to the future. By the same token, the ancient interest in the dream’s promise of the future does not entail that other temporal aspects are completely excluded from the psychological experience of the dream. Ancient dreamers are engaged with memories, and they return to and even re-enact past experiences in their dreams. Ancient dreams indubitably reflect present and past concerns and desires. Moreover, ancient and modern dreams unfold like texts. A dream’s meaning cannot be understood independently from its temporal and hermeneutic horizons. In the case of ancient dreams, the ancient understanding relies on the dream’s temporal deferral. Only time can validate the force of a ⁴⁰ Freud takes Artemidorus to be an intellectual ally. Like Freud, Artemidorus takes into account the dreamer’s character and other social and personal criteria. Freud admires Artemidorus’ conception of the textuality of the dream, whose ingenuity is summed up by Freud in the phrase “a geological conglomerate.” See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 98–9. Finally, Freud is inspired by Artemidorus’ treatment of the separate parts of a dream, and appreciatively mentions Artemidorus’ unconventional method of endorsing, besides a linear reading of the dream, a reading from the end to the beginning. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 328, n. 1. ⁴¹ Price 1990: 366. ⁴² “Dreams frequently seem to have more than one meaning. Not only . . . may they include several wish-fulfilments one alongside the other; but a succession of meanings or wish-fulfilments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfilment of a wish dating from earliest childhood.” Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 219. ⁴³ Winkler 1990: 26. ⁴⁴ Martha Nussbaum, who acknowledges the difference between near future and remote past as “the first and clearest difference” between Freudian and ancient theory, is nevertheless convinced that this difference should not be overemphasized. For her discussion of the psychological interests and interpretative motivations that make for common ground between Artemidorus and Freud, see Nussbaum 1994: 48.

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dream-interpretation and eventually demonstrate its truth or falsity. Dreamers, therefore, know that interpretation takes time and requires a period of uncertainty that brackets the predictability of the future. Riven by the tension of ambiguity, this period has an important hermeneutic role. A dreamer who stays with the suspense of not knowing the future is meanwhile engaged in the search for meaning. Reflecting on their concerns, desires, and relationships in the past and present, ancient dreamers make use of dreams, like the Freudians, in order to decode the cryptic messages of their souls.⁴⁵

6.5 Past translated into future In Oedipus Rex dreams and prophecies are similar utterances. Dreams reverberate in the structure and content of the oracle’s prophecy. The affinity between dreams and prophecies reveals the shared structure of an enigma that requires and calls for an interpretation. Dreams and oracular prophecies are textual products that call for translations not only of the unknown future, but also of their inaccessible origin.⁴⁶ The Delphic oracle is a vocal discharge from the bottom of earth through the Pythia’s body.⁴⁷ Her utterance, considered by ancient witnesses to be utterly incoherent, was transmitted to Oedipus by one of the divine interpreters. As such, what Oedipus carried with him for so long is not an original apodictic experience but the translation of an oracular performance. As in a dream that fades leaving only a vague impression of its actual unfolding, the oracle too can become part of the public sphere and endure in time only by means of its objectification through translation and interpretation. The other side of this is that the translation into words of the oracular event or dream experience depends on the effacement of an original experience. When Oedipus relays Apollo’s oracle to Jocasta, we should doubt his reliability as such a transmitter. Translation should always be suspect as to its transparency and reliability. Thus,

⁴⁵ For Artemidorus, a dream can appear with an inbuilt demand for interpretation, an internal voice that requires the dreamer to “Observe this and pay it heed, learning from me as best as you can!” Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1.2.5, trans. Daniel E. Harris-McCoy. ⁴⁶ Cf. Benjamin 1992. ⁴⁷ Based on G. Roux’s study of the Delphic oracle, Giulia Sissa describes the spatial origins of the Pythia’s delirium and inspiration: “The chasma ges, fissure in the earth, that is, the adytum or manteion in the strict sense, was, he held, not a fanciful invention but a sort of pit dug in a square of bare earth in the back of the megaron . . . into which the Pythia ‘descended’ to make her prophecies” (Sissa 1990: 13).

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upon hearing Oedipus convey the message of the oracle, we rightly wonder whether it reflects the original sense of the divine message: and Phoibos sent me without the answer for which I had come. But, his prophecy revealed other miserable, terrible and unfortunate things: That I was fated to lie with my mother That I would produce offspring unbearable to see by humans, And that I would be the killer of the father who begot me.⁴⁸ καί μ᾽ ὁ Φοῖβος ὧν μὲν ἱκόμην ἄτιμον ἐξέπεμψεν, ἄλλα δ᾽ ἄθλια καὶ δεινὰ καὶ δύστηνα προύφηνεν λέγων, ὡς μητρὶ μὲν χρείη με μιχθῆναι, γένος δ᾽ ἄτλητον ἀνθρώποισι δηλώσοιμ᾽ ὁρᾶν, φονεὺς δ᾽ ἐσοίμην τοῦ φυτεύσαντος πατρός.

The original voice of the oracle is ephemeral, and this transient dimension is lost forever. How can one assess the difference between the original oracular utterance and the materialization of the oracle into a coherent message? Is it possible, for example, that the oracle prescribed, in fact, a return to Oedipus’ homeland? Or, perhaps, consisted of a prophecy of Oedipus’ future as a tyrannos?⁴⁹ The attempt to restore the original but now lost expression of the translated messages demonstrates that in its brutal literalism the oracle’s utterance potentially preserves a disguised structure of meaning.

6.6 Disguised and undisguised Oedipal dreams In Oedipus Rex, it is Jocasta who underscores the intrinsic connection between oracle and dream, while giving as an example the common pattern of what will become known as the Oedipal dream: What should a man fear for things over which fortune has the power? There is no clear foresight. It is better to live as random as one can. And fear not a marriage with your mother. Many men before you in their dreams,

⁴⁸ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 789–93. ⁴⁹ For the connection between the Oedipal dream and the idea of a return to one’s homeland, see Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1.79. For the association between the Oedipal dream and the figure of the tyrant, see Plato, Republic 9.571.

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have shared their mother’s bed. Yet those for whom these things are nothing, live a better life.⁵⁰ τί δ᾽ ἂν φοβοῖτ᾽ ἄνθρωπος ᾧ τὰ τῆς τύχης κρατεῖ, πρόνοια δ᾽ ἐστὶν οὐδενὸς σαφής; εἰκῆ κράτιστον ζῆν, ὅπως δύναιτό τις. σὺ δ᾽ εἰς τὰ μητρὸς μὴ φοβοῦ νυμφεύματα: πολλοὶ γὰρ ἤδη κἀν ὀνείρασιν βροτῶν μητρὶ ξυνηυνάσθησαν. ἀλλὰ ταῦθ᾽ ὅτῳ παρ᾽ οὐδέν ἐστι, ῥᾷστα τὸν βίον φέρει.

According to Jocasta, prophecies, just like dreams, address and yet fail to illuminate the blind spot in men and women’s mental fields of vision. Since the future aspect of Tyche is impenetrable to humans, she advises them to refrain from interpretation. For Freud who returns in The Interpretation of Dreams⁵¹ to Jocasta’s words, it is not so much her skeptical attitude toward dreams that interests him, but rather that she mentions Oedipal dreams and specifically that she claims that to see the picture of having intercourse with one’s mother is universal.⁵² To-day, just as then, many men dream of having sexual relations with their mothers, and speak of the fact with indignation and astonishment. It is clearly the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the dreamer’s father being dead. The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination to these two typical dreams.⁵³

And yet, while in The Interpretation of Dreams the Oedipal dream is presented as a common experience crossing cultural boundaries between antiquity and modern times, it also reveals that very divide. Freud notices a significant difference between modern and ancient dreams, suggesting that there is also a rift between the ancient and modern psyches. Freud points out that the ancient Oedipus dream is different from its modern equivalent in being an undisguised dream. The ancient dream serves as a literal manifestation of the latent significance of its modern, disguised Oedipus dream: When I insist to one of my patients on the frequency of Oedipus dreams, in which the dreamer has sexual intercourse with his own mother, he often replies: “I have no recollection of having had any such dream.” Immediately afterwards, however, a memory will emerge of some other inconspicuous and indifferent ⁵⁰ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 977–83. ⁵¹ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 264. ⁵² Freud reads the oracle in Oedipus Rex as analogous to two types of dreams which he regards as characteristic of modern times: dreams of sexual intercourse with the mother and dreams of the death of persons of whom the dreamer is fond. ⁵³ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 264.

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dream, which the patient has dreamt repeatedly. Analysis then shows that this is in fact a dream with the same content—once more an Oedipus dream. I can say with certainty that disguised dreams of sexual intercourse with the dreamer’s mother are many times more frequent than straightforward ones.⁵⁴

According to Freud, the ancient Oedipal dream does not conceal a forbidden experience; it straightforwardly expresses it. Freud provides a few ancient examples of undisguised dreams about which he remarks: “Incidentally, the symbolic interpretation of undisguised Oedipus dreams was not unknown to the ancients.”⁵⁵ Hence, the undisguised ancient dream might seem to have been produced without the psychic work that constitutes disguised Oedipal dreams. Or, to put this directly (what Freud refrains here from doing), the ancient dream’s literal form seems to lack a repression mechanism. Despite this crucial difference, Freud aligns ancient Oedipus dreams with modern ones, arguing that in antiquity undisguised Oedipal dreams were understood as symbolic and enigmatic utterances requiring interpretation. In their cryptic language and hidden significance, ancient Oedipal dreams, even if undisguised, contribute, according to Freud, to the modern study of the unconscious and enrich our understanding of it. Nevertheless, Freud’s inclusion of ancient dreamers within the modern European community of dreamers has not been welcomed. The ideology of the divide has been intensified nowhere more than in the flourishing discussion (in the 1980s and 1990s) of Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica.

6.7 Asexual Oedipal dreams: An ancient case of repression? “I have often felt discomfort,” writes Martha Nussbaum, “when hearing discussion of the Freudian Oedipus complex in connection with Sophocles’ play.”⁵⁶ Nussbaum’s discomfort conveys in understatement the critical view of what has been conceived by many to be a serious twentieth-century misreading. First, Sophocles’ play does not seem to be concerned with overt sexual desire; and second, Oedipus does not seem to be driven, either, by deeply hidden sexual drives. In short, antiFreudian readers attack Freud’s sexualization of the ancient Oedipus. ⁵⁴ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 397–8. ⁵⁵ Freud mentions Julius Caesar’s incest dream in Suetonius 1.7, the prophecy to Brutus in Livy 1.56, and Hippias’ incest dream in Herodotus 6.107. ⁵⁶ Nussbaum 1994: 43.

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Reading Sophocles’ protagonist as foreshadowing the modern repressed self led Freud to other acts of overinterpretation, with the result that, according to his critics, erotically innocent modern dreams have been Oedipalized. This criticism, Freud would have argued, is a disguised channel through which the unconscious makes its way into consciousness. “The negation,” he writes, “is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed.” This is not to say that Freud could have read the criticism against him as “an acceptance of what is repressed,” but in their resistance to his Oedipal reading of Oedipus Rex he could have identified a sign that “it is already a lifting of the repression.” Freud’s critics, just like his patients, are therefore diagnosed as repressed. The opposition to Freud’s sexualization of Oedipus is foreshadowed in his patients’ responses. Freud’s patients reject his Oedipalized interpretation of their dreams. His analysis of dreams as disguised Oedipal dreams causes the patient, as Freud himself explains, to resist, by projection, the Oedipal significance that has just emerged: “You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother.”⁵⁷ An association of an analogous or, rather, disanalogous ancient gesture of negation comes to mind while reading Artemidorus’ presentation of Oedipal dreams: And the section on [sex with] one’s mother, intricate and manifold and allowing for several distinct analyses, has eluded many dream interpreters. And it holds as follows. The sex itself is not enough to reveal what the dream signifies [oux he mixis aute kath’ heauten hikane esti ta semainomena deixai], but in fact the combinations and positions of the bodies when different, create different outcomes. (Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1.1.79)

The incest dream strikes Artemidorus as intricate (poikilos) and manifold (polymeres) and therefore a challenge to many interpreters who, unlike Artemidorus, had failed to comply with its hermeneutic complexity. The average interpreter, Artemidorus contends, escapesor, rather, gets away from (diephygen) tackling it. Artemidorus does not provide any explanation as to why interpreters shy away from the task of interpretation, and what the cause of their avoidance is. Yet the appearance of the negative clause, “sex itself is not enough to reveal what the dream signifies,” suggests that the literal, explicit sexual acts with the mother hinder interpreters from really deciphering the dream. Interestingly, Artemidorus’ interpretation of the manifold phenomena of incest dreams means that any approach that may lead a dreamer to dwell on the dream’s erotic level is abandoned. In other words, none of the manifest ⁵⁷ Freud, “Negation,” SE 19: 235–6.

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incest dreams which Artemidorus presents in his Oneirocritica is an example of the disvalued, erotic enhypnion. For Artemidorus, the enhypnion is an insignificant dream whose meaning belongs completely to immediate experience. The enhypnion carries no weight—refers to nothing—beyond the present in which it appears. And this is because such a dream is a mere apparition generated by the kind of “affections [that] are inclined to rush up and marshal themselves in the mind and to bring about nocturnal emissions.”⁵⁸ The intensity of the enhypnion imprisons its dreamer in the confines of a narrow present. Charged and excited by bodily instincts and passions, dreamers have no critical distance from the immediacy of these affections and, as such, cannot translate their experience into any form of knowledge, especially not foreknowledge, which is precisely the possibility presented by the oneiros. The silence regarding Oedipal enhypnia is intriguing. For Artemidorus there is no way in which the dream image of sleeping with one’s mother can be literal. All of Artemidorus’ dream examples resist the manifest layer of meaning and expel it from the dream’s horizon of interpretation. His very refusal of literalism opens the space for psychology, while his guide excludes the study of the dreamer’s psychological condition from its investigation. Artemidorus’ lack of interest in the psychological aspects of the incest dream bothers E. R. Dodds, who takes Plato as an exemplary Greek subject for whom the Oedipus dream betrays the dreamer’s ethical disfunction. The unrestrained soul creates shameful dreams in which it does not “shrink from attempting to lie with a mother.”⁵⁹ Plato’s reference to the undisguised Oedipal dream demonstrates, in his view, how deeply rooted was the incest taboo in Greek culture.⁶⁰ Dodds, therefore, considers Artemidorus’ indifference to the incest taboo to be strange. Moreover, it was for him an indication of the interpreter’s own repression and defense mechanism: That undisguised Oedipus dreams were likewise common in later antiquity, and that their significance was much debated by the ὀνειροκριτικοί [oneirokritikoi] appears from the unpleasantly detailed discussion of them in Artemidorus, 1.79. It may be thought that this implies a less deep and rigorous repression of incestuous desires than is usual in our own society. Plato, however, specifically testifies, not only that incest was universally regarded as αἰσχρῶν αἴσχιστον [aischron aischiston], but that most people were completely unconscious of any impulse towards it (Laws 838b). It seems that we ought rather to say that the necessary disguising of the forbidden impulse was accomplished, not within the ⁵⁸ Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1.1.3. ⁶⁰ Dodds 1951: 47.

⁵⁹ Cf. Plato, Republic 571c.

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dream itself, but by a subsequent process of interpretation, which gave it an innocuous symbolic meaning.⁶¹

Dodds’s attempt to retrieve the impending threat underlying the incestuous dream is criticized by S. R. F. Price, who sees Dodds’s Freudian reading as anachronistic. For him, reading the ancients as Freudians wrongly constructs them as repressed: Artemidorus, like other ancient writers, saw incestuous dreams as perfectly normal dreams which were interpretable by the standard analogical method. Dodds (1951), 47, 61–62, suggested that the incestuous symbolic meaning served to disguise and make acceptable the forbidden impulse to incest, but this makes the Freudian assumption that a sexual interpretation must underlie these dreams. If that assumption is rejected, as it is by Jung, incestuous dreams can be seen as the product of their standard cultural interpretation.⁶²

Price’s view echoes Michel Foucault, who in the Care of the Self sees Artemidorus’ theoretical motivation as quite different from Freud’s.⁶³ Foucault’s fascination with Artemidorus derives precisely from the Oneirocritica’s practical dimension, consisting in a formalistic discussion of sexuality. Likewise, Artemidorus’ discussion of Oedipal dreams concentrates, according to Foucault, on various sexual acts without lending eros any significance. Whereas for Freud—as the Foucauldian reading tends to underline—the Oedipal dream hides sexual meanings, Artemidorus’ incestuous images are, rather, purely symbols disguising other, supposedly asexual objects: “Sexual dreams foretell the dreamer’s destiny in social life; the actor that he is on the sexual stage of the dream anticipates the role that he will play in the theater of family life, professional endeavor, and civic affairs.”⁶⁴ Ancient dreams, Foucault claims, turn dreamers into spectators in the drama of their future life. Foucault does not see any sign of the work of the unconscious in the intense concern with one’s future personal affairs. Foucault, explains Giulia ⁶¹ Dodds then refers to ancient medical writing on dreams which, in contrast to Artemidorus’ hermeneutic tradition, concentrates on the somatic dream, the enhypnion, as the most challenging dream species precisely because it calls for a naturalistic direction of investigation. However, in the Pseudo-Hippocratic writing, Dodds finds the traces of what he understands as disguised Oedipal dreams: “Ancient writers do, however, also mention what would now be called disguised Oedipus dreams, e.g. the dream of plunging into water (Hipp. περὶ διαίτης 4.90, VI. 658 Littré)” (Dodds 1951: 61). Cf. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 400: “Dreams like this one are birth dreams. Their interpretation is reached by reversing the event reported in the manifest dream; thus, instead of ‘diving into water’ we have ‘coming out of the water’; i.e. being born.” ⁶² Price 1990: 381. ⁶³ The Care of the Self is the third volume of the Histoire de la sexualité published in France in 1984. ⁶⁴ Foucault 1986: 27.

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Sissa, begins with the ancient Greeks, since they come before Christ and Freud. In this sense they represent an age lacking the ethics of confession. For Foucault, Sissa explains, the unconscious is historically a product of sexual prohibitions, and therefore alien to the Greek experience: “The Greeks have problematized sex in terms of use, of organization, of dosage. Instead of worrying about desire, they have centered their ethical interest on acts, on pleasures in all their variety and quantity: when, how, with whom, how many times, in what climate, at what time, after what meals, etc.”⁶⁵ In many ways, Foucault’s History of Sexuality brought about the scholarly second return (after Freud) to Artemidorus. It also inspired various scholars to unanimously flag the Freudian sexualization of the ancients as symptomatic of a discordant anachronism, of forcing his modern framework on antiquity. Accordingly, ancient dreams should not be taken to reveal latent desires and emotions. Once they are admitted, then sexuality comes in the door. Dreams are part of a symbolic discourse that strictly requires an applied hermeneutics tailored to an ancient playground. This ancient hermeneutic framework, Foucault insists, is responsible for constructing a sexually uninhibited self. Artemidorus’ symbolic system of interpretation reflects different interests than the therapeutic values of psychoanalysis associated with ideas of self-revelation and self-transformation. Foucault’s reading of Artemidorus, Giulia Sissa argues, is tied to his identification of the Greeks as pre-Freudians: Confession is about the examination of your consciousness; psychoanalysis makes possible the discovery of your unconscious thoughts, conflicts, and wishes. To say this means to recall that the subject of psychoanalysis has an unconscious. On the contrary, to identify psychoanalysis with confession means to deny, without arguments, the very existence of an unconscious. And, since this identification provides the most important line of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, it appears certain that the project of a history intends to reduce psychoanalysis to a practice—confession—that is, historically determined. There is no human, universal unconscious, only the historically contingent presupposition of a latency.⁶⁶

For those who study the ancient experience of dreaming, primarily through the Oneirocritica, latency is a symptom of a symbolic system. When it comes to considering the place of latency in dreams about desires, Artemidorus’ readers respond unanimously: There are no such things as latent desires, as the category of the enhypnion demonstrates. Dreams whose sole concern is passions cannot be stripped of their erotic garb. In the enhypnion the erotic does not call for a structure of displacement. ⁶⁵ Sissa 2002: 152.

⁶⁶ Sissa 2002: 150.

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In Artemidorus, erotic dreams are simply erotic. “There are times,” writes J. J. Winkler, “when in a dream having an erection simply means having an erection and there are times when it means something else.”⁶⁷ This is how Winkler understands Artemidorus’ differentiation of the enhypnion from the oneiros. “For Artemidorus,” Winkler writes, “the discovery that the real content of a particular dream is the client’s desires or fears serves to disqualify it as a signifier of a hidden signified.”⁶⁸ Yet Winkler fails to come to terms with Artemidorus’ blind spot.

6.8 Artemidorus’ unconscious Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica focuses its investigation only on those dreams that come true. Oneiroi compose the principle part of Artemidorus’ essentialist theory of dreams. Within the wide and transient experience of dreams, oneiroi specify a hierarchically distinct group of dreams. Their relation to the future makes them superior to the more average short-lived, present-centered dreams. Artemidorus’ insistence on different types of dreams forges a dream ontology. And yet his essentialist mapping discloses subtle discrepancies. At the beginning of Book 1, immediately after he establishes the difference between enhypnion and oneiros, and just before he establishes—by the force of etymology—an inner connection between oneiros and telling the truth, Artemidorus awkwardly retreats to the following inconsistent assertion: “But the oneiros, which is also an enhypnion, makes us observe a prophecy of future events.”⁶⁹ In the context of his discussion, Artemidorus’ statement produces an apparent contradiction. How can his strict systematization of dreams allow the identity of the significant and the nonsignificant dream, while its proclaimed teleology rules out identification of this sort as erroneous? The inconsistency has not drawn special attention from ancient or modern readers,⁷⁰ perhaps because it can be explained away on a terminological level, by presenting the oneiros as a subcategory of the enhypnion.⁷¹ But such an implication would go against the guide’s explicit intention. Consequently, this unexpected caesura in Artemidorus’ rhetoric of dichotomies must be recognized. ⁶⁷ Winkler 1990: 26. ⁶⁸ Winkler 1990: 26. ⁶⁹ Artemidorus, Oneirocritica, Book 1, 1.3. ⁷⁰ Foucault 1986: 10–11 and Winkler 1990: 32 notice this contradictory statement without thoroughly accounting for it. ⁷¹ Harris-McCoy 2012: 417, e.g., says of this identification that “the oneiros is technically speaking an enhypnion because it occurs at least in part, during sleep.”

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Does this momentary appearance of a contradiction point to a blind spot in the Oneirocritica? Is such a discrepancy only a failure of systematization or is it also indicative of the guide’s implicit latent concerns regarding an ambiguity that, in principle, cannot be eradicated from the interpretation of dreams? A dream could thus have been seen to be a theorematic oneiros (a literal vision of a future event)⁷² or enhypnion, or a symbolic, enigmatic oneiros. According to Artemidorus, in the case where the dreamer is able to identify his object of fear or desire with the dream image, the somatic and psychological content of the enhypnion would be exposed, and the dream would be automatically dismissed as insignificant: And it is necessary to keep in mind that the things that appear to those who are worried about something and who have requested a dream from the gods will not resemble their worries [and signify something about the matters at hand] since dreams that are identical to the things one has on one’s mind are insignificant and have the quality of an enhypnion.⁷³

While keeping the two dream categories strictly apart, Artemidorus’ methodological instructions as to how to distinguish between the oneiros and the enhypnion cannot in fact be followed. Artemidorus cannot completely detach a symbolic dream from the dreamer’s individual concerns. Moreover, he cannot provide absolute criteria for classifying a literal dream as an enhypnion or as a theorematic dream, that is, as a dream whose explicit message would be identical to a future outcome.⁷⁴ For how can a dreamer possibly be sure that an enhypnion is not actually a literal oneiros? An answer to this puzzling question ultimately ties the dream experience to time (4.1.201): Of all the oneiroi, some we call theorematic and some allegorical. And theorematic dreams come to pass in the same manner as they are observed, but allegorical dreams reveal the things signified by them through riddles. And since, in such cases, a degree of error can arise for those who are uncertain whether it is necessary to accept as true the things that are seen themselves or whether something else will result from them in the future, the opportunity to interpret is not closed off to you. For first off, any dream that is theorematic comes to pass in a time of need and straightaway. But any that is allegorical always comes after some time has elapsed, either a lot or a little [or in an extreme case after a single day].⁷⁵

⁷² On the theorematic dream, see below note 74. ⁷³ Artemidorus, Oneirocritica, Book 1.6.13. ⁷⁴ Theorematikoi are, according to Artemidorus, dreams that are “directly perceived.” The theorematic dream is a special subcategory of the oneiros, whose outcome is identical to its appearance. It is literal but its prophetic message makes it a unique example of the oneiros type. ⁷⁵ Artemidorus, Oneirocritica, Book 4.1.201.

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Time is the only means through which a correct interpretation can be achieved. The true value of theorematic dreams is tested right after the dream’s occurrence.⁷⁶ However, the classification of an enigmatic dream as an oneiros, that is, as a significant dream, requires temporal deferment. Hence, on reading the Oneirocritica we need to recognize that the systematic mapping and clear hierarchical terminology of dreams are nevertheless unable to dispel an ambiguous dimension of the dream phenomenon that is continuously kept operative in Artemidorus’ synoptic picture. With the explication of the enhypnion-oneiros (theorematic dream) and the oneiros-enhypnion (enigmatic enhypnion) Artemidorus allows the unavoidable blind spots of his dream manual to surface. The ancient dream suggests an open form of textuality precisely because it is bound to a twilight zone of temporality. For what, after all, is Artemidorus’ notion of the time of a dream? On a time span rooted in its first appearance the dream may reflect the dreamer’s present and yet it may also contain possibilities of fulfilling an unknown future. The dream’s indefinite time constraints are, as Artemidorus admits, the source of its ambiguity, an ambiguity that underlies the hermeneutic process of the ancient dreamers. With this insight in mind I suggest we read Artemidorus account of incest dreams and see why his binary methodology cannot, as he himself sees, resolve the dream’s inherent equivocation. Artemidorus’ conflation of the incestuous oneiros and the incestuous enhypnion thus invites us to re-examine his exclusion of the erotic from the hermeneutic spectrum: And so, first of all, it is necessary to talk about a mother who is penetrated “fleshto-flesh” and who is also alive, since in fact a woman who is alive does not signify the same things as a dead person. And so, if someone should penetrate his own mother flesh-to-flesh, which some say is in accordance with nature, she is still alive, first if father is [moreover] healthy, there will be hostility between him and his father due to the jealousy that arises between men [which would be even greater in their case]. And if the father should happen to be sick, he will die. son, after observing this dream, will preside over his mother like a husband. And this dream is good for every craftsman and labourer. For in fact it is customary to call one’s craft one’s “mother,” and what other thing would having intercourse with one’s mother be than idleness and to make a living from one’s business? And, moreover, it is good for every leader of the mob and politician. For the mother signifies the fatherland [patrida]. And so, just as one who has sex in accordance with the law of every Aphrodite rules over the body of an obedient and willing partner, so too does the observer preside over all the

⁷⁶ Penelope performs such a test after dreaming of her slain beloved geese, when she immediately goes to see if they are all right. Homer, Odyssey 19.553.

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affairs of the city. And one who is hostile towards his mother will become friendly due to their union. For in fact sex is called “friendship.” (77) And often this dream has also reunited those dwelling apart for the same reason and has made them live together. For this reason it returns someone who is travelling abroad to his homeland. But if she is not, wherever the mother is living, it signifies the observer will set out there. And if someone who is poor and is in need of assistance should have a wealthy mother, he will take from her whatever he wants or, with his mother dying after a short time, he will become an heir, and thus will delight in his mother. And many, taking their mothers in, have taken care of them, so that they delight in their sons. And the dream heals a sick man and signifies that he will return to his natural state, for nature is the common mother of all things, and we say that the healthy do and the sick do not exist in accordance with nature. And Apollodorus of Telmessus, a renowned man, has also mentioned this. But the same thing is not signified in the case of sick men if, in fact, the mother is dead, since the observer will die straightaway. For a body of a dead person is dissolved into its constituent elements, out of which it is composed and constituted and, being mostly made of earth, changes one again into its elemental matter. And we call the earth no less a thing than our mother. And what other thing does having sex with one’s dead mother signify than mingling with [the] earth? And having sex with one’s dead mother is good for one involved in a trial over land and for one wishing to buy land and for one wishing to farm. And some say that it is for a farmer alone. For just as the one casts his seeds upon a corpse, so too does the farmer cast his seed upon earth that is barren. But for me in no way does this seem true, unless someone should state that he regrets (metaginoskein) the intercourse or is aggravated (aniasthai) by it. Moreover, a traveler will be returned to his homeland and one involved in a dispute over his mother’s property will prevail following this dream [the former returning to his native land, the latter] delighting not in the body but in the property of his mother. But if someone (78) should observe this dream while in his fatherland, he will be driven out of his fatherland. For it is not possible following a crime of this sort to remain at one’s maternal hearth. And if one feels grief or remorse following the intercourse, he will be banished from the fatherland. But if not, he will travel abroad of his own volition. And it is not good to penetrate one’s mother when she is turned away. For either she will turn her back on the dreamer herself, or his native land will or his trade, or any present undertaking. And it is wretched to stand with the mother positioned upright during intercourse. For people make use of this position due to the lack of bed or a mattress. And it therefore signifies afflictions and difficulties. And to have sex with one’s mother on her knees is grievous [and it is also unseemly for her to be laid flat on her stomach]. For it signifies great poverty due to the lack of movement on the part of the mother. [For we hold the mother to be symbolic for our origin or Tyche or the daimon that manages the affairs of the observer and the cause of all things.] And some say that penetrating one’s mother when she is positioned above and riding him like a horse signifies death for the observer. For a mother resembles

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the earth, since in fact the earth is the nourisher and begetter of all things. And the earth lies above the dead and not the living. And I myself have observed that following this dream, the sick die in every instance and the healthy pass the remainder of their life in great ease in doing what they will with a state of this sort coming above rightly and rationally. For in the other positions there is hard work and most of time heavy breathing for the man, but the woman expends less toil. But in this position, the man, quite conversely, takes pleasure without fatigue. But it also comes about that these men often avoid being noticed by others and are not exposed because their heavy breathing has been done away with. And, moreover, it is not beneficial to employ many and varying positions during sex with mother. For it is not (79) right to disrespect one’s mother. And because men have discovered the other positions through lewdness and licentiousness and drunkenness, and are only taught “flesh-to-flesh” by nature, it is clear that they learned them from the other animals. For every type of creature habitually uses a certain position, and they do not change it because they follow the dictates of nature. For instance, some mount from behind—for example, the horse, ass, ox, deer, and the rest of the four-footed creatures. And other join their mouths first—for example, snakes and pigeons and weasels. And other come together bit by bit—for example, the sparrow. And others compel the females to mate by forcing themselves upon them by using weight—for example, all birds. And others do not approach each other at all, but rather the females gather the seed which has been squeezed out by males—for example, fish. Thus it seems right that people use flesh-to-flesh as their natural position, and that they employ other positions when they give way to lewdness and licentiousness. And I have observed that imagining to be given oral sex by one’s mother is most terrible of all. For it signifies doom for his children and loss of property and serious illness for the observer. And I know of someone who, following this dream, had his genitals removed. For in fact it was fitting that, that part of the body where he sinned, he was punished in that same part. (Ar., On. 1.1.79)

Artemidorus’ analysis is an exceptionally impressive sociological document and, as the valuable analyses of Michel Foucault, John J. Winkler, and Martha Nussbaum have shown, an ample source for studying ancient notions of sexuality and gender, as well as being instructive about ancient conventional objects of desire and fear. Artemidorus’ modern readers tend to overlook, however, the sexual aspects of the son and mother relationship in his dream collection. In doing so, they keep Artemidorus’ unconscious alive and thus continue a long and ancient heritage of resistance beginning with Jocasta’s famous admonition that denies the incestuous dream any erotic significance. Moreover, Artemidorus’ detailed discussion of the different sexual positions of incestuous intercourse discloses a fascinating spectrum of emotions. The ancient dreamer’s mother is, indeed, as Foucault writes, the one “who gave birth to and nurtured him, and whom he ought to cultivate,

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honor, serve, maintain, and enrich in return, like a piece of land, a native country, a city.”⁷⁷ While referring to the various meanings of the figure of mother as generator and nurturer, Foucault too easily withholds their emotional connotations from dream-interpretation. Abiding by Artemidorus’ hermeneutic rules Foucault maintains the mechanical exchange of symbols regulated by the manual without problematizing it.⁷⁸ It is precisely the sexual appearance of the mother, the figure whom the ancient dreamer “ought to cultivate, honor, serve, maintain, and enrich in return,” that must have aroused ambivalent feelings (such as regret, metaginoskein, and grief, aniasthai) in the dreamer before submitting his dream to the professional dream-interpreter. Over-attentiveness to the Oneirocritica’s strictly analogous relationship between sexual and economic symbols results in deafness to the guide’s repressions and resistances.

6.9 The sexual mother Post-Freudian readings of Artemidorus which tend to undermine the foreboding presence of the incest taboo fail to take account of the literal significance of the sexual encounter with the mother. Why do the ancients who associate the figure of the mother with land, country, and property tend to dream about “getting control over an estate, having authority in the city, getting on well with one’s family and friends, getting or losing one’s health”⁷⁹ in sexual images? I think that the role of sexuality must be examined through the pathologies of the ancient family romance traced in Artemidorus’ manual, which also echo similar patterns in Oedipus Rex. In one dream type, Artemidorus ties the erotic knot between mother and son to a latent hostility between father and son. In Artemidorus’ pragmatic framework, if the dream portrays an excessive (sexual) relationship between mother and son, it should be interpreted as encoding future animosity between son and father. Seeing the present condition of the soul as cultivating the field of future seeds, we cannot simply remove latent filial aggression from the ancient dreamer’s emotional horizon.⁸⁰

⁷⁷ Foucault 1986: 32. ⁷⁸ “But for the sexual act in a dream to have a positive value, it must also ‘obey’ a principle of ‘economic adequation.’ The ‘cost’ and the ‘benefit’ this activity entails must be properly regulated” (Foucault 1986: 32). ⁷⁹ Nussbaum 1994: 55. ⁸⁰ See Froma Zeitlin’s analysis of family bonds in Zeitlin 1996: 87–119.

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Imagine Artemidorus’ ancient reader, the emotionally disturbed client, who invests in the practice of dream-interpretation. Could this dreamer strictly abide byo the oneiros’s one-dimensional form of temporality? I do not see why Artemidorus’ average reader should be contained with the flat semantic space opened solely by the oneiros’s future. On recognizing the inevitable break from his father, the future instills into the dreamer’s present experience the memory of past experiences, even triggers them, causing them to surface. Dreams concerning mother and father inevitably join future and past in the dreamer’s present. Artemidorus’ psychological insights do not constitute a unified picture of the mother-and-son relationship. Filial aggression towards the father is only one option which dreams of sex with the mother conjure. Other options depend on the geographical distance separating the mother and son. In this case the sexual intercourse symbolically expresses the longing for one’s mother, and the dream shows itself to be a wishful-thinking dream. But we can see how this wishful-thinking dream can be also connected to the unconscious thought that associates the mother’s sexuality with her alterity. Sex with the mother thus gives expression to this grain of strangeness underpinning every close blood relationship.⁸¹ Another option involves the fatal circumstances of a specific condition combined with certain positions of intercourse with the mother. The dream foretells the dreamer’s death if his mother in real life is already deceased or if in the dream the mother is positioned above her son. In these cases, Artemidorus reminds his reader of what he is supposedly already aware of, namely that mother stands for “Mother Earth” (Ge). In this suggestive remark he foreshadows Freud, who writes on the universality of symbols: Some symbols are universally disseminated and can be met with in all dreamers belonging to a single linguistic or cultural group; there are others which occur only within the most restricted and individual limits, symbols constructed by an individual out of his own ideational material. Of the former class we can distinguish some whose claim to represent sexual ideas is immediately justified by linguistic usage (such, for instance, as those derived from agriculture, e.g., “fertilization” or “seed”) and others whose relation to sexual ideas appears to reach back into the very earliest ages and to the most obscure depths of our conceptual functioning.⁸²

The symbols Freud refers to as universal are related to the field of agriculture and they are loaded with sexual connotation. The cultivation ⁸¹ Cf. my discussion below (pp. 195–7) of the erotic longing underpinning Aeneas’ relation to his unattainable mother in Virgil, Aeneid 1.402–5. For an interpretation that seeks out Virgil’s textual sources in constructing the double entendre of the Aeneas and Venus encounter, see Reckford 1995–6: 1–42. ⁸² Freud, “On Dreams,” SE 5: 684.

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of mother-earth (“husbandry”) results in the birth of children, and yet the fertilizing act of planting seeds connotes at the same time an opposite meaning: burial. The ancient image of the death-bearing womb that Artemidorus’ incest dream invokes is still alive in the modern dreams Freud interprets. Hence the erotic in the Oedipal dream involves, according to Freud, fears of death. The mother’s genitalia then specify an ambiguous locus, a site which is a conjuncture of birth and burial: “This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.”⁸³ Oedipal dreams, writes Freud, are “often accompanied by anxiety”:⁸⁴ “It was not for a long time that I learned to appreciate the importance of phantasies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain an explanation of the remarkable dread that many people have of being buried alive.”⁸⁵ Reading Artemidorus’ interpretation of the death foretold by the incestuous dream in light of Freud’s account, we find them to be connected. Both Artemidorus and Freud conceive of the two cardinal life events, birth and death, as merged in the incestuous dream image. Freud’s remark that the dream contains the dread of being buried alive echoes Artemidorus’ vocabulary. According to Artemidorus, the incest dream symbolizes the material coalescence of the body into earth: “For a body of a dead person is dissolved into its constituent elements, out of which it is composed and constituted and, being mostly made of earth, changes once again into its elemental matter.” The association of the mother as a burial place with a nurturing womb is congruent with the flourishing ancient discourse around autochthony.⁸⁶ For the ancient dreamer, it would have been an acceptable interpretation to replace manifest filial desire with what underlies that passion, a fear of an intimate and fatal encounter with the beneficent source of life.

6.10 Aeneas’ Oedipal dream Artemidorus and Freud belong to the same textual tradition. It is not as if they meet only in comparative readings like the one put forward here. ⁸³ Freud, “The Uncanny,” SE 17: 245. ⁸⁴ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 399–400. ⁸⁵ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 400–1. And cf. “The distressing ideas may make their way, more or less modified but none the less quite recognizable, into the manifest content of the dream. This is the case which raises doubts as to the validity of the wish theory of dreams and needs further investigation.” Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 556. See also Freud, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” SE 20. ⁸⁶ See Loraux 1993; duBois 1988.

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Their inner connection becomes apparent in literary works that employ dream poetics to create narratives with psychological depth. This is the case with Virgil’s description of the phantasmagoric meeting between Aeneas and his mother Venus in Book 1 of the Aeneid. Virgil constructs the meeting scene with the divine mother as a dream experience: dissimulation and disguise, which are conventional themes in the ancient Greek accounts of Aphrodite’s apparition, serve here to accentuate the inaccessibility of the mother. The divine figure of the mother is thus indistinguishable from a certain typical dream figure. But, moreover, the contradictory and ambivalent set of emotions that the Virgilian encounter involves is characteristic of an incest dream. The mythological situation recast by Virgil is highly relevant for both Artemidorus’ and Freud’s Oedipal dreamers. Aeneas, a refugee, an exile torn away from his homeland, is a literary embodiment of Artemidorus’ dreamer estranged from his mother.⁸⁷ Shipwrecked and ejaculated by the stormy sea onto the shores of Carthage, Aeneas experiences a traumatic projection into the world. According to Freud, the picture of the shipwrecked wanderer is connected to the primal event of birth whose reenactment in the Oedipal dream is recognized by an affect of anxiety.⁸⁸ The journey from the sea to the city of Dido creates an intermediate zone between death and rebirth. In this intermediate dreamlike space, Aeneas encounters his mother. This encounter of a divine mother and a human son carries the meaning of Artemidorus’ incestuous dream predicting the dreamer’s return to his homeland. For a similar aspiration is indeed reflected in Virgil’s narrative of incest. Presenting Venus before her stupefied son in the form of a seductive and unavailable virgin, Virgil stages this encounter as erotic. In accordance with Artemidorus’ dreaminterpretation, this mysterious, erotic intercourse aims to guide Aeneas in his first steps in the new land that with Venus’ intervention might turn out to be a new home for her son. Thus, following the structure of a dream experience, the face-to-face encounter between son and mother serves as a preparation scene, Artemidorus tells us, for the future conquest of a new land.⁸⁹ Reading this scene through the reconstructed dialogue of Artemidorus and Freud, we can see how Artemidorus’ turn to the future coincides with Freud’s turn to the past. Past and future are particularly entangled in the recognition scene, which Virgil locates in the moment when Venus

⁸⁷ Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1.79. ⁸⁸ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 400–1. Cf. Freud’s discussion of the shipwrecked Odysseus’ at the Phaeacians shores in Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: 246–7. ⁸⁹ Reckford 1995–6: 6–7.

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fades away while Aeneas, frustrated, follows her with his gaze. The sensuality of the female figure whose naked body is partially exposed as she disappears brings up a sharp memory. It is precisely the clothedunclothed female body and the effect of her appearance-disappearance that conjure a moment of recollection. It is no wonder, therefore, that this ancient moment of recollection is described by a modern reader in terms of the Freudian déjà vu: Virgil’s presentation of the disguise-revelation sequence gives a strange feeling of déjà vu. It has all happened before. It is as if Aeneas, in this first book of his epic (though not chronologically, of his adventures), were re-experiencing the divine seduction with which his life began. It is where we all begin—with the beautiful mother, and the enticement of sex, and the coming together of our two parents in bed to perform that onetime act on which our very being depends. It is a wonder, and a trouble, and sometimes, as for Homer or Pindar, a moment of god-sent brilliance that offsets and is offset by the enforced sadness of our mortality—a sadness that the very name Aeneas continues to evoke.⁹⁰

For Aeneas, the dreamlike encounter, like the Freudian dream, sustains and uncovers buried traumatic memories of a child’s abandonment.⁹¹ The mother’s dissimulating presence causes him frustration, while her disappearance enrages him. Once again, he is abandoned by her. Once again he is kept from realizing the longed-for images of bliss that the vague memory of the mother’s pristine touch incites in him: And in her stride her true image as a goddess was revealed. He recognized his mother, and as she was hastening away, he pursued her with these words: “Why fool your son so many times with false images? You too are cruel. Why can’t we join hands? Why can’t we exchange honest talk? Why isn’t that allowed?” So, he reproached her, and moved towards the walls. Et vera incessu patuit dea. Ille ubi matrem Adgnovit, tali fugientem est voce secutus: “Quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis Ludis imaginibus? Cur dextrae iungere dextram Non datur ac versa audire et reddere voces?” Talibus incusat gressumque ad moenia tendit. (Aeneid 1.405–10)

⁹⁰ Reckford 1995–6: 22, and cf. 23–4. ⁹¹ In the Hymn to Aphrodite 256–90 Aphrodite says that she will leave her baby Aeneas to be raised by the nymphs. Aphrodite disappears from Aeneas’ life in the nursery stage.

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Virgil describes Aeneas in a moment of recognition, which in his dream poetics corresponds to waking from a dream. Aeneas’ recognition of his mother entails a disillusionment. Once again, as often before, the true meaning (vera) of the false images ( falsis imaginibus) has been revealed. The unfamiliar has been discovered to be familiar. The Virgilian false image and the Freudian disguised dream belong to the same family, Oedipal dreams: In some dreams of landscape or other localities emphasis is laid in the dream itself on a convinced feeling of having been there once before. (Occurrences of “déjà vu” in dreams have a special meaning.) These places are invariably the genitals of the dreamer’s mother; there is indeed no other place about which one can assert with such conviction that one has been there once before.⁹²

⁹² Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 399.

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7

Epilogue

During the seven years of writing the Ancient Unconscious I would sometimes imagine this moment of closure. I have been invested in this study, in research and writing, for many years, long before I even had a clear view of the book. Sometime in 2011, however, I officially embarked on the new book project. I associate this beginning with a specific dream, whose mysterious nature commanded my attention. The dream brought me once again to the house of Gordon Williams (1926–2010), Thacher Professor of Latin Literature at Yale for twenty years and my PhD advisor. I was showing his beautiful but empty house to someone, though I could not exactly remember who this person was. And yet a strong feeling told me that it was actually Gordon Williams whom I was showing around. The dream was the last of a series during the first year after Gordon’s death, followed shortly after by the death of his wife Jay. These frequent dream visits to their house were part of my mourning. On a personal level, it has been hard for me to accept the finale. No more visits to the house on Huntington Street in New Haven. That door is forever locked. This inevitable closure was challenged by my recurrent dreams, which allowed me to frequent the house at night. What did these dreams mean? Were they wish-fulfillment dreams? My satisfaction at a surface level was apparent. They afforded me another glimpse of the house, of the past, of a lost presence. But the satisfaction was partial and even illusive. The dreams held no promise of a meeting. I had no opportunity to see or to speak with the house’s inhabitants. The dead never reappeared alive and vigorous. I had to face their absence in these mourning dreams, wandering around the empty house. Walking through the abandoned house perhaps gave me a way to process the loss of its residents. This type of dream has, like Sappho’s Eros, a bittersweet taste. The dream of the dead, as vivid as it is, does not cover up or deny the loss, and yet, at the same time, it may provide the partial pleasure of intimately connecting with, and reviving, though in a distorted and momentary way, the memory of a life. The final dream visit to the Williams house was different. The house, I was amazed to discover, had completely changed. I entered a holy space in the shape of an ancient church. The house had a high nave, its vaulted ceiling brightly and colorfully painted, divided by small panels framed in gold. The sight was marvelous and I explained the details of

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what I saw to Gordon, who stood near me. As I woke up, I felt awkward about having been showing the house to its owner, and this is why, I think, I initially avoided identifying the person near me with him. Moreover, I could not understand why the dream turned the house into a church, though this image is not completely alien to the real house, since it stands near a Presbyterian church. The more I discussed my dream, the more I realized how different it was from the earlier members of the series of mourning dreams. In the final dream visit, the house had become an admirable shrine to knowledge and beauty, whose iconography I deciphered for my teacher. It had once been his house, but in its new iteration it had become spiritually mine. In contrast to the repetitive effect of the other dream visits, the final dream seemed to effectively stage a radical change in my experience, primarily through the shift to a new dramatic setting. I was now not sneaking into the professor’s house in order to fulfill a secret wish to revive a forever-lost past. The final dream put an end to that dream pattern, and suggested that I had come to some reconciliation with the event of death. The dream paved a way from the empty house and a crisis of meaning towards a new horizon. Perhaps my dream is one of those identified by the psychoanalyst Jean-Michel Quinodoz as “turning over a page.” These dreams, Quinodoz maintains, have an interesting narratological structure; they represent an anxiety-inducing

Fig. 7.1. The Williams House, New Haven, CT

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fantasy “after the underlying pathology has been overcome.” Hence, their manifest content reproduces the dreamer’s past experience, thus allowing the dreamer to examine it in retrospect. Through considering the dream’s affects, the dreamer is able “to turn over the page in order to proceed further.”1 Dreams can offer a new horizon of interpretation, unavailable to us outside the dream realm. They locate dreamers in spaces that create a new hermeneutic field in which freedom of interpretation is granted. I could now see something that I had not realized before. I could see that the house I entered in my dream was more than a sublime fabrication of the Williams house. It was simultaneously a private house and a church. The double image of a house-church creates a strange visual experience. Freud terms this kind of dream hybrid a “composite” which also reflects a temporal conjunction: the picturesque church with the gilded ceiling is superimposed onto the Puritan white New England dwelling. The merging of a house and church brought up in my associations a third object, much smaller than the architectonic ones. The “house-church” which typically has an entrance and windows also unfolds as a little closed container, one whose contents are hidden from an outside observer. Finding myself inside a small container while admiring its hidden beauty is undoubtedly related to what has been for a long while a central object of my rumination: the jewelry box. The dream led me back to the riddle I had left pending after publishing Pandora’s Senses. The final return to the Williams house must have invoked the future of my writing. The time has come, I told myself at that point in my life, to open Pandora’s Box and unravel the meaning of this ancient image of the unconscious.

1

Quinodoz 2002: 8.

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■ INDEX

abandonment 112, 196 Abraham, Karl 165–6, 165n. 2, 168–9, 172–5, 172n. 23 “The Trifurcation of the Road in the Oedipus Myth” 165–6 Adkins, Arthur W. H. 22n. 37 adolescence 61 adyton, the 101 Aeneas 89, 141–2, 193n. 81, 194–7, 196n. 91 Africa 51–2, 51n. 41, 54–5, 65–7 Agamemnon 31–2 Agathon 138 Agnoia 3–6, 5n. 7 Akedah 103n. 40 alienation 74; see also self-alienation Aliquis, Herr 154n. 82 alterity 2–3, 193; see also other, the ambiguity 168–9, 175–6, 178–9 amnesia 101, 102n. 37, 114n. 79, 117; see also forgetting (lesmosune) anachronism 11, 11n. 7, 13–14, 25–6, 33; see also textuality, anachronic analogy 82, 86–8, 129–30, 132–3, 165 Freud’s theory of 129–30, 132–5, 137, 150–1 Anchises 89, 142 ancients, the: dreams of, see dreams, in antiquity/of the ancients as having an unconscious 7, 11–12, 20–1, 25, 34–5; see also antiquity, psychoanalytic approaches to; experience, ancient; psychology, ancient and the moderns 18–19, 45, 49, 51–3, 59–60, 152–3, 156–7, 185; see also cultural difference, between the past and the present affinity/connection between 18–19, 21, 25–6, 41–2, 45–6, 53–4, 63, 67–9, 73, 79–80, 82, 88, 129–30, 132–3, 142–3, 152–3, 156–7, 182 differences/distance between 22–3, 49–52, 164, 178–9, 178n. 44, 181–2 encounter between 33–5, 42–3, 51–2, 59–60, 73, 79, 88 understanding 18–20, 25, 42 see also antiquity Antaeus 52, 54–9, 65–9, 66n. 4, 67n. 7, 165

anthropology 21, 132n. 11; see also psychoanalysis, and anthropology antiquity 9–10, 13–14, 51–2, 150, 184–5; see also ancients, the ambivalence about 67, 79, 88 attraction to 65n. 3, 68–9, 73, 79–80, 88n. 54, 89 and the development of psychoanalysis, see antiquity, psychoanalytic approaches to; psychoanalysis, development of, and antiquity discovery of 40 dreams in, see dreams, in antiquity/of the ancients “dual nature of ” 44–5, 48 encounters with 47–8, 51, 73, 79–80, 88 familiarity with 65, 74–5, 79–80, 88, 154n. 82 as foundation of the modern world 52–4, 60–1, 65–6, 68–9, 79–80 idealization of 43–5, 47–8 ideas about 48–54, 59–60, 66, 78–80 images of 48–50, 52–3, 63 as inaccessible 14–15, 17, 22–3 legacy/weight of 53–4, 58–61, 63, 73, 79–80, 88n. 54 life in, see experience, ancient and modernity 7, 10–11, 14–17, 20–1, 33–5, 40, 42, 44–5, 49–54, 58–61, 63, 67–9, 73, 133, 152–3; see also ancients, the, and the moderns negation of 77 notions of 43–5, 44n. 25 as part of modern selfenlightenment 15–16 passion for 79–80 perfection of 43, 59–60 preservation of 52 psychoanalytic approaches to 12–13, 20–1, 25 remnants of in the present 14, 18–19 resistance to 77 separation from 88 significance of 43, 65 understanding of 14, 17; see also ancients, the, understanding; experience, past, understanding of anti-Semitism 85 anxieties 22 Aphrodite 189–90, 194–5, 196n. 91

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216 INDEX Apollo 20–1, 122–3, 179–80 Apollo Belvedere 44nn. 23,26 Apollodorus of Telmessus 190 appearance 109 Aquinas, St. Thomas 154n. 81 archeology 37–8, 37nn. 3–4; see also “dialectic of archeology”; Freud, and archeology; psychoanalysis, and archeology Aristophanes: Symposium 122 Aristotle 143–4, 149n. 70 Poetics 139–40 Armstrong, Richard 41n. 12, 65n. 3, 68n. 8, 92–3, 130–1, 154n. 82 Artemidorus of Daldis 176–8, 178nn. 40, 44, 179n. 45, 183–9, 185n. 61, 188n. 74, 191–6 Oneirocritica 176–8, 180n. 49, 182–9, 191–2 Ascanius 142 associations 121–2, 132–3, 135–6; see also free association atheism 75n. 28 Athena 126 Athens 72–80, 88–9, 102n. 37 Acropolis, the 73–82, 85–6, 88–9 Auerbach, Erich 103–6, 103n. 40, 105n. 48, 106nn. 55–7, 119–20, 123, 135n. 17, 155–7, 155nn. 86–92, 159 Mimesis 103, 106, 155–6 “Odysseus’ Scar” 155–6 Aulis 107n. 58 Augustine of Hippo 18, 151–2 Austin, Norman 104–5, 105n. 48 Austria 42n. 15, 85 authenticity 79–80 authority: diving 99 autochthony 193–4 Autolycus 123 avoidance 6, 183–4 Bakhtin, Mikhail 164 Barthes, Roland The Pleasure of the Text 1 being 109 Benardete, Seth 168–9 Benedict, Ruth 132n. 11 Bernard of Chartres 142–3 Bible, the 150–2, 155–8, 155n. 86, 158n. 97 blindness 169 body, the 151–2, 184 Boeotia 101–2 Boethius 56

bonded figures 139 Bonnechere, Pierre 101n. 33 Bowlby, Rachel 93n. 9, 145–6, 145n. 54, 153n. 80 Brentano, Franz 154n. 81 bride, the 62–3 bridges/bridging 129–30 Brown, James A. C. 132n. 11 Brown, Norman O. 20, 31n. 56 Brutus 182n. 55 Burckhardt, Jacob 10n. 4, 41–3, 41nn. 13–16, 43n. 20 The Greeks and Greek Civilization 41–2, 42n. 16 Cairo 1–2 Caldwell, Richard 25n. 44 Calypso 125 Carthage 195 Caruth, Cathy 112n. 74 Chase, Cynthia 149n. 71 childhood 107, 119–21, 124–6, 145–6; see also dreams, childhood; events, childhood; experience, childhood; memory, childhood Christianity 146, 150, 154n. 82, 155–6, 158, 158n. 97 chronological analysis 17–18 chronology 6, 10–11, 41–2, 135n. 17, 150, 164 chthonic, the 45, 53–9, 53n. 44 Church Fathers, the 150, 155, 158 Cithaeron, Mount 3, 5n. 6 civilization 51–3, 58, 148–9, 159–60 classical philology 7, 11–19, 21, 23–31, 31n. 55, 131, 152–3 critiques of 29–30 Freudian 24–5 Homeric 103n. 40, 105n. 44 methodology of 14–15, 17, 20–1, 32–3 positivist 18–19, 130n. 4 and postmodernism 17–18 and psychoanalysis 14, 21, 23n. 38, 25–6 purpose/task of 15–16, 18, 18n. 23, 29 classical studies 7, 11–13, 18, 21–2, 46, 49; see also classical philology; texts, classical and anthropology 21 and psychoanalysis 11–14, 25 and psychology 20–1 and the unconscious 7–8, 161–2 Clausen, Wendell 84–5 cognitive structure 9–10 commonality 164 comparativism 159 comparison 81–2, 88

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INDEX concealment 77–8 concreteness 57n. 58 confession 186 conjecture 130 conjunction 139–41, 168–9; see also junctions connection 87, 127, 135–6, 140–3, 143n. 46, 146, 159–61, 165, 194–5; see also junctions conscious, the 75–6 and the unconscious 38–9, 58–9, 75–6 consciousness 5, 46–7, 57–8, 62, 102–3, 111–12, 140–1, 152–3, 175–6, 186; see also self-consciousness dynamics of 39 expressions of 28–9 Freudian ideas about 29, 39–40, 95–6 Hegelian ideas about 52, 61–3 history of 61–3, 95–6 mediation of 39–40 modern 43, 60–1 states of 86, 126 and the unconscious 23–4, 28–9, 39–40, 58–9, 69–70 contextualization 17–19, 27, 82–3 contiguity 136 continuity 87–8, 130 paratactic 106–7, 106n. 55 Corfu 72–3 Corinth 67–8, 138–9, 171n. 17 Corneille, Pierre Discourse on Tragedy 149n. 70 correspondence 151–2, 172–3 Creon 167–8 Creusa 110n. 68 critical theory 21 Cronus 55–6 crossroads 7, 54–5, 164–6, 168–76, 170n. 14, 171n. 20 Oedipal 164–5, 171n. 20 cultural difference 17–18, 22n. 36 between the past and the present 18–23, 22n. 36, 51–2 cultural studies 17–18 culture 22n. 36, 42–3, 42n. 15, 51–3, 85n. 48, 88, 129–31, 140–1, 148 anatomy of 68–9 bringing together of 129–30, 132n. 11 continuity of 65–6, 68–9, 130 conventions of 23–4 deterioration of 53 modern 53–4 origins of 58–9 past 25, 53–4

217

Danaans 98 Dante 134–5 Davis, Douglas 143n. 46 Dawe, R. D. 114nn. 78–9, 168–9, 169n. 10 death 102–3, 181n. 52, 190–1, 193, 195, 199 decomposition 148–9 deconstructionism 15–16 defense mechanisms 21, 184 déjà vu 195–7 de Jong, Irene F. 107nn. 59–60 Delphi 67–8, 169–71, 171nn. 17,20, 174–5 Delphic oracle, the 167–8, 179–80, 179n. 47 de Man, Paul 152n. 76 depersonalization 74, 76–7 depression 93–4 derealization 74–7, 79 Derrida, Jacques 175–6 desires 22, 25n. 43, 109, 159, 163, 185–6, 191–2, 193n. 81 Devereux, George: Dreams in Greek Tragedy 22n. 35 “dialectic of archeology” 37 Dicaearchus 101n. 33 dichotomy 89 Diderot, Denis 2n. 3 Dido 18, 195 difference 129–30 differentiation 151–2 digression 104–7, 105nn. 48–9, 106nn. 57–8, 110–11, 118–20 Dilthey, Wilhelm 12 Dionysus 20–1 disconnection 130, 140–1; see also separation disjunction 139–43; see also junctions distance 48; see also self, gaining distance from divinity 157–8 Dodds, E. R. 12, 20–5, 20n. 29, 22nn. 35–6, 184–5, 185n. 61 The Greeks and the Irrational 20–1 “Humanism and Technique in Greek Studies” 12 Doherty, Lillian 125n. 103 Dora 136 doubt 75–6, 173–4 Dover, Kenneth: Greek Homosexuality 17n. 22 dreamers 148–9, 184, 193, 195, 197 dream-patterns 23–4 dream poetics 106–7, 168–9 dreams 19, 21–2, 25–6, 106–7, 121–2, 126–7, 133–6, 148–9, 163, 174–81, 178nn. 40–2,44, 179n. 45, 184–6, 188–90, 193, 195–7, 199–201 allegorical 177, 188

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218 INDEX dreams (cont.) analysis of 21–2, 24–5, 92 in antiquity/of the ancients 21–5, 31–2, 164, 176–9, 178n. 44, 181, 184–6, 191–2 childhood 120–1 collocations in 138 erotic 177, 181–7, 181n. 52, 182n. 55, 189–95, 192n. 78 experience of 23–4, 177–9, 186–7, 195, 199; see also experience, dream fulfillment of 92 hybrid 201 ideas about 22–5, 164, 185–7, 191–5, 197, 200–1 Freudian 23–5, 23n. 40, 92, 94, 94n. 11, 106, 120–3, 126–8, 130, 133–6, 138, 146, 148–9, 176–8, 178n. 44, 181–2, 185–6, 185n. 61, 193–7, 194n. 85, 201 interpretation of 21, 23–5, 23n. 39, 31–2, 70, 94, 95n. 15, 126–7, 148–9, 168–9, 174–80, 183–94, 185n. 61, 200–1 language of, see language, of dreams logic of 34–5; see also unconscious, the, logic of the meaning of 31–2, 183, 185–6, 190–3, 197 modern 24–5, 164, 172, 175–9, 178n. 44, 181 Oedipal 163–4, 174–5, 180–6, 180n. 49, 181n. 52, 185n. 61, 193–4, 197 predictive 177 psychoanalytic approach to 22, 120–1 recurrent 199–201 sources of 176–7 structure of 146 text of 23n. 40 textuality of 10–11, 146, 164, 178n. 40, 189 value of 26 wishful-thinking 193, 199 dream-thoughts 126–8, 133–5 dream-work 146 drives 160–1 duality 62–3, 109–11, 133, 151–2 du Bois, Page 13–14 ego, the 77–8 Egypt 1–3 Ellenberger, Henri: The Discovery of the Unconscious 40 embarrassment 81–2 “embedded focalization” 107n. 59 emotions 17–19, 81–2, 93, 109, 113–14, 121, 148, 185–6, 191–2

enhupnion 177, 183–4, 185n. 61, 186–9, 187n. 71 Enlightenment, the 51–2 erasure 112, 116 Erlebnis 15 Eros 122, 199 estrangement 48 eternity 155–6 Euripides: Ion 110n. 68 Medea 171n. 19 Europe 51–2, 65, 88 Eurycleia 103–4, 107n. 59, 119–20, 123 events 86, 88, 134–5 childhood 91–2, 104–5, 126 political 82–3 traumatic 112, 126, 167; see also trauma experience 14, 17–18, 17nn. 20–1, 63, 79–80, 86, 94, 121–2, 124, 130, 156–7, 159–61, 171, 175–6 aesthetic 9–10 ancient 14–25, 22n. 36, 33–4, 147–8, 175–9, 178n. 44, 182; see also cultural difference, between the past and the present; dreams, in antiquity/of the ancients; Erlebnis belated 92n. 2 childhood 92–3, 119–21, 126, 156–7 conscious 40 dream 21–5, 22n. 36, 31–2, 174–5, 178–9, 178n. 44, 186–7, 195 fields of 47–8 forbidden 182 human 16–17, 33 immediate 46–7 intersubjective 34–5 lived 15 meaning of 30, 32 melancholic 62–3 mental 32 modern 18, 24–5, 60, 129–31, 147–8, 175–9, 178n. 44, 182 nature of 24–5 past 18, 25, 32–3, 95–6, 98–9, 121–2, 150, 156–7, 159 recognition of 151–2 reconstruction of 14–17 understanding of 14–15, 18–22 prelingual/primordial 113–14, 121, 124–5 subjective 12, 23–4, 32, 100, 102, 174–5 and temporality 34–5; see also time, experience of traumatic 113, 126; see also trauma unconscious 30, 40, 161 universal 131, 131n. 5

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/4/2019, SPi

INDEX fabula 144, 144n. 52 fabula anilis 152n. 75 facticity 27–8 facts 27–30, 40 familiarity 108, 127, 197 family 65, 78, 124 fantasy 92–3; see also phantasy father, the 68–9, 68n. 8 father-sky 56 fathers 65, 143–4, 172–3, 193; see also father, the; father-sky; Freud, Sigmund, father of; relationships Fellini, Federico: Roma 40n. 8 feminism 131–2, 132n. 13 Ffytche, Matt 41n. 10 figura futurorum 155–61, 173, 175–6 Finkelberg, Margalit 105n. 49 Fliess, Wilhelm 66, 69, 69n. 11, 92–6, 93n. 9, 113–14, 129, 143n. 46, 146, 152–3 Foce del Sele 55n. 49 forgetfulness 18–19, 53, 53n. 45, 101–3, 106–7, 109–11, 113–14, 118, 120–1, 127–8; see also forgetting; memory dialectics of 9–10 and memory 101–3, 106–7, 109–10, 113, 127–8 temporary 145–6 forgetting (lesmosune) 100–2, 106–7; see also amnesia; forgetfulness formalism 145–6 Foucault, Michel 16, 17n. 22, 185–6, 191–2 The Care of the Self 185–6, 185n. 63 History of Sexuality 185–6 The Use of Pleasure 17–18, 17n. 22 free association 80–1, 95n. 15, 96–7, 136 freedom 57, 61–3 Freud, Alexander 72–4, 80–1, 86 Freud, Jacob 68–72, 80–1, 88 Freud, Sigmund 9–11, 130n. 4, 149n. 70, 168–9, 172–3, 172n. 23, 185–6, 194–6 and antiquity 14–15, 18, 65, 65n. 3, 67, 73–5, 77–80, 86, 88–9 and archeology 37–40, 37n. 4 biography of 92n. 4 and consciousness, see consciousness, Freudian ideas about cultural roots of 65–8, 73, 75n. 28, 85, 88–9 and dreams, see dreams, ideas about, Freudian and his father 65, 67–73, 68nn. 8–9, 69n. 11, 79–81, 88–9, 92, 129 impact of 11–13 intellectual background of 131–2, 154nn. 81–3

219

life of 65–83, 85–6, 89, 92n. 4, 95–6, 129–30, 129n. 2 childhood 65, 67n. 6, 74–5, 77, 91–2, 100–1 travels 72–81, 85–6, 88 memories of 65, 72–5, 77–8, 80–1, 86, 91–2 methodology of 14, 133–4, 143–4, 152–3, 154n. 83 and his mother 67, 92, 129 and Oedipus 66–8, 68n. 9, 91–3, 93nn. 7, 9, 129–33, 129n. 2, 131n. 5, 132n. 13, 138, 140–50, 143n. 46, 152–4, 156–7, 159–60, 160n. 104, 161–2, 165, 168n. 6, 181n. 52, 182–3; see also Oedipus; Oedipus complex and psychoanalysis 4–5, 21, 73, 130, 136, 143n. 46, 144, 150–4; see also psychoanalysis, Freudian readings of 37, 182 resistance to 13–14 schooling of 37n. 3 self-analysis of 69–71, 69n. 11, 73–8, 80–2, 85–6, 88–9, 91–5, 94n. 11, 100–1, 129n. 2, 143n. 46, 146 self-disclosure of 71–3, 75–6, 86, 92–4, 129n. 2 self-discovery of 148, 186 thought/ideas/work of 14, 18, 21–6, 23nn. 39–40, 28–9, 37, 39–42, 65, 67, 73–4, 77–9, 88, 95–7, 106–7, 113–14, 121, 129–32, 132nn. 11–12, 134–8, 140–57, 159–62, 160n. 104, 176–8, 178nn. 40,44, 181–3, 181n. 52, 185–6, 185n. 61, 193–6, 195n. 88, 201; see also dreams, ideas about, Freudian; Freudianism; hermeneutics, Freudian; Oedipus complex, the; psychoanalysis, Freudian; unconscious, the, ideas about, Freudian and the unconscious 2–3, 2n. 3, 10–11, 37, 72–3, 75–9, 79n. 35, 80–2, 86–8, 133–4, 148, 152–3, 155–6, 161, 183; see also unconscious, the, ideas about, Freudian works of 65 “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” 72–4, 81–2, 85–6, 88n. 54 The Interpretation of Dreams 10–13, 21, 23n. 40, 25–6, 70–2, 71n. 19, 92, 96n. 19, 118n. 89, 120–2, 126–7, 129, 132–4, 138, 143nn. 46–7, 144–5, 147, 150–4, 154n. 83, 160–1, 165n. 1, 169, 176–8, 181, 185n. 61

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220 INDEX Freud, Sigmund (cont.) “Typical Dreams” 133 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 163 Moses and Monotheism 2–3, 102n. 37, 146n. 58 “Moses of Michelangelo”, the 146, 158n. 100 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life 143n. 47, 154n. 82 “Screen Memories” 91–2 Totem and Taboo 124, 140–1 “The Unconscious” 28–9 Freudianism 37, 62–3, 165n. 2, 178–9, 185 Frieden, Ken 154n. 83 fulfillment 150–1 future, the 26, 31–2, 34–5, 102, 142, 150–2, 160–2, 161n. 105, 175–80, 179n. 45, 193, 195–6; see also prophecies and the past 6, 102, 193 future, knowledge of 153, 178 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 20, 26–32, 30n. 53 Truth and Method 26, 30n. 53 Gaia 55–6, 171n. 18 Galicia 65, 65n. 2, 73, 79 gaps 127 Ge 58 gender 17–18, 17n. 21, 131–2, 165n. 1, 191–2 gender studies 11–12 George, Michael 60 Germany 41–2, 41nn. 13–14, 49–53, 53n. 44, 56–7, 65–6, 73, 85, 155–6 and ancient Greece 37n. 3, 41–5, 41nn. 13–16, 49–52, 56, 57n. 58, 58–9, 63, 68–9 culture of 41–2, 44, 51–3, 73–4, 78–9, 131–2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 81n. 40, 96–7, 96n. 21, 136–8 Faust 96–7 “Dedication Poem” 95–7, 96nn. 19, 22, 136–7 golden apples in silver bowls 48–9 Goodhard, Sandor 168n. 6 Grant, Michael 6n. 8 Greece 41–2, 41n. 13, 51–7, 60–3, 61n. 65, 65n. 2, 107n. 58, 149–50, 186 culture of 1–2, 20–1, 20n. 30, 42, 44, 50, 98, 129–30, 161–2, 184, 194–5; see also poetry, Greek and Germany, see Germany, and ancient Greece transmission of 2–3 irrationality of 44, 57n. 58

and modernity 16–17 and the unconscious 2–3 Grinstein, Alexander 71n. 19 guilt 81–2, 117–18 Hallet, Judith P. and Thomas van Nortwick: Compromising Traditions 16n. 18 Hamlet 146–50, 149n. 68, 159–61, 160n. 104; see also Oedipus-Hamlet Harris, William 22n. 36 Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity 12–13 Hartman, Geoffrey 138–9, 138n. 31 Hecate 54–5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 37, 43–63, 47n. 33, 51n. 40, 65–8 “On Classical Studies” 46 Lectures on the History of Philosophy 63 Phenomenology of Spirit 46 Heidegger, Martin 53n. 45 Helios 124 hendiadyses 138–9 Hercules 54–9, 66n. 4, 173–4 hermeneutics 12–15, 24–5, 27–30, 31n. 57, 32, 130–1, 175, 178–9, 185n. 61, 186, 189 Freudian 22, 25–6, 94–5, 151–2, 154, 154n. 83, 159 psychoanalytic 23n. 38 temporally based 26, 159 Herodotus 81n. 39, 101n. 33, 182n. 55 Hesiod 55–6, 101 Theogony 97–8, 100–1 Hippias 182n. 55 Hissarlik 37n. 3 historicism 17, 155n. 87 historicity 17–18, 31 historiography 17–18, 42, 42n. 17 history 7, 11–12, 19–20, 26–8, 30–2, 31n. 56, 40–2, 41nn. 10–12, 52, 56–7, 60–2, 69–70, 81–3, 81n. 39, 86, 88, 106, 140–1, 148–9, 152–4, 177–8; see also reality, historical cultural 42–3, 43n. 20, 95–6 methodology of 43; see also historiography pathological 143n. 46, 161 personal 145–6 and psychoanalysis, see psychoanalysis, and history relational 43, 48–9 Hitler, Adolf 67n. 7 “homecoming” 46–7, 60, 118, 126, 180n. 49; see also leaving

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/4/2019, SPi

INDEX homelands 180, 180n. 49, 190, 195 Homer 18–19, 41n. 13, 91, 98, 98n. 25, 103–12, 103nn. 38, 40, 120–2, 125, 134–5, 135n. 17, 177n. 38, 196; see also classical philology, Homeric; poetry, Homeric; remembrance, Homeric; texts, Homeric The Illiad 18–19, 31–2, 105n. 49, 107n. 58 The Odyssey 18–19, 31–2, 47–8, 103–4, 105n. 49, 118, 123, 125 Book 19 91–2 human beings 12, 16–17, 60–2, 117–18, 121–3 experience of, see experience, human nature of 12, 83n. 45, 122–3, 132n. 11 human condition, the 5, 65–6 human existence 9–10, 57, 61, 97–8 humanism 44, 154n. 81 post-Freudian 131–2 humanities, the 12, 15–16, 16n. 16, 46, 46n. 29, 132 humanity 33, 52–4, 58–63, 65–6, 120–1, 121n. 98 archaic heritage of 121–3 human sciences, the 12; see also humanities, the Humboldt, Wilhelm von 15–19, 16n. 16, 57 The History of the Fall and Decline of the Greek City States 56 hybrid phrases 139–40 hybrids 148, 150, 201 Ibsen, Henrik 131–2 ideal, the 56–7 idealism 33, 56, 131–2 idealization 56 identification 142–3, 145–6 identity 74–5, 75n. 28, 85, 113–14, 116–17, 116n. 88, 145–6 cultural 11–12, 65, 65n. 3, 89, 114–15 hiding 108, 110–14, 110n. 68 historical 11–12 national 51–2, 57 politics of 17–18 ignorantia 5–6, 5n. 7 imagination 101 impressions 93n. 7, 119 inappropriateness 81–2 individuals 61, 121, 188 individuation 142–3, 164–5 Inigaray, Luce 132n. 12 interdisciplinary studies 11–12 intersection 33, 164 chronotopic 164 interpretation (act of ) 30–2, 34–5, 54–5, 76, 94, 151–2, 157, 179–80, 183–5, 200–1

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intertextuality 34–5 intimacy 120, 127–8 intuition 93–4, 148–9 Ion 110n. 68 irrationality 9–10, 20–1, 20n. 30, 57n. 58; see also Greece, irrationality of Isaac 103–4 Italy 83–4 Ithaca 47–8, 123, 126 Jacob of Sarug 158 Jehoshua 155 Jerusalem 1–2 Jesus Christ 155–8, 185–6 Jews/Judaism 65–9, 65n. 2, 73, 75n. 28, 85, 88–9, 146, 150, 154–6, 154n. 82, 155n. 86, 158; see also anti-Semitism Jocasta 34, 114, 114nn. 79–82, 140, 140n. 38, 144–5, 153n. 80, 161–3, 165–72, 171nn. 19–20, 174, 179–81, 191–2 John of Salisbury 45n. 28 The Metalogicon 142–3 journeys 72–4, 77–8, 103, 110–11, 124, 126, 164, 167–8, 170–1, 190, 195; see also Freud, Sigmund, life of, travels as a metaphor 75nn. 25–7, 94–7, 164 Julius Caesar 82–3, 182n. 55 junctions 142–3, 159–60, 165–6, 175; see also crossroads Jung, Carl 185 juxtaposition 136, 171n. 19 Kant, Immanuel 9n. 1 katabasis 101–2, 105–6 Kedar, Benjamin Z. 41n. 13 Kierkegaard, Søren 131–2 Kleos 103n. 38 Knossos 37n. 3 knowledge 6, 10–11, 56–8, 97–8, 121–3, 152–4, 200–1 of antiquity 15–16, 21 conceptual 171 of the future, see future, knowledge of modern 15 primordial 122 sources of 58–9, 99 Konstan, David 18n. 23 Lacan, Jacques 127, 127n. 106 Laius 1, 5n. 6, 114, 138–40, 140n. 38, 144–5, 149n. 71, 169, 173, 175 murder of 3–4, 161–2, 164–5, 167–8, 168n. 6, 175; see also Oedipus, life/ story of, and murder of Laius

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/4/2019, SPi

222 INDEX landscape 75, 77–8, 83–4, 94–5 mythic 74–5 language 27, 75–6, 82, 87, 125, 135–6, 136nn. 23–4, 137–40, 138n. 28, 147, 153n. 80, 155–7, 160, 165, 168–9; see also unconscious, the, language of of dreams 9–10, 182 hyperbolic 114n. 78 of proof 28–9 use of 117–18 languages ancient 51–2 English 154, 154n. 81 German 46, 81–2, 136n. 23, 138n. 28, 154, 154n. 81 Greek 49, 154 Hebrew 138, 138n. 28 Latin 46, 49, 51n. 40, 60, 136n. 23, 154 study of 15, 46 Laocoön group, the 44n. 23 latency 112n. 74, 186–7 leaving 47–8 Lebadea 101–2, 101n. 33 Leonard, Miriam 85–6, 89, 131–2, 132n. 13 Leopoldstadt 154n. 81 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 41n. 13 Lethe 101–2 Levy, Joseph M. 1–2 Libya 54–5, 67 liminality 62–3 literalism 184 literature 27, 104–6, 130–3, 146–52, 155–6, 156n. 92 classical 81, 141–2 comparative 103–4, 132 Livy 182n. 55 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh 19–20, 130n. 4, 131n. 5 logic 138, 169 Loraux, Nicole 11n. 7, 13–14, 102n. 37 Lubbock, Sir John 176n. 37 lucidity 104–5 Lucretius 81n. 39 Marcus, Laura 75n. 25, 95–6, 95n. 18 Martindale, Charles 82n. 43 Marxism 155n. 87 Masson, Jeffrey 95n. 13 Mead, Margaret 132n. 11 meaning 6, 27–8, 32–5, 70, 83–4, 125, 130–1, 136, 147, 151–2, 155–6, 161–2, 170, 173, 184, 197, 200–1 creation of 10–11 of dreams, see dreams, meaning of

grounding of 29 of names 116–17, 123 projection of 130 structure of 25–6, 180 of a text 6–8, 27–30, 155, 160–1; see also textuality of unconscious experience 30 universal 165 mediation: liturgical 101 Meliboeus 83–7 memory 6, 18–19, 28–9, 47–8, 50–5, 62–3, 77–8, 87–8, 91, 98, 98n. 25, 101–2, 102nn. 37–8, 103–7, 107nn. 58–60, 109–12, 114n. 82, 117–28, 125n. 104, 167, 172, 199; see also remembrance, act of childhood 91–2, 93n. 7, 96–7, 104–5, 119, 122–3, 125–6, 152, 196 collective 91 construction of 102n. 37 cultural 51–2, 54–5 dialectics of 9–10 disruption/disturbance of 74, 85–6, 116–17 extrication of 120 faculty of 94–5 flashbulb 107n. 60, 109n. 65, 125n. 104 and forgetfulness 101–3, 106–7, 113; see also forgetfulness human 122 intervention of 91 involuntary 121–2 lapses in 112, 145–6 literary 81 loss of 102–3, 121 personal 69–75, 77–8, 80–1, 86, 88, 99, 107n. 60, 167; see also Freud, Sigmund, memories of; past, memories of phylogenetic insights about 121–2 poetic 99 and the present 103 and psychoanalysis 143–4 reliability of 77, 110n. 68 repressed 93n. 7, 149–50 resistance to 77 semantic 107n. 60 shared 109–10 stimulation/awakening of 86, 122–3, 126 transformation of 91 transmission of 121–2 traumatic 167–8 waking 92 mental, the 56 mental apparatus 94

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/4/2019, SPi

INDEX mental life 37–8, 143–4, 159–60; see also experience, mental; facts, mental mental processes 142–3, 152 primary 152, 160 secondary 152, 160 Merope 140n. 38 Messenger, the (from Oedipus Rex) 113–14, 116n. 88, 140n. 38 metopes of Hera temple 55n. 49 Mieszkowski, Jan 136n. 24 mind, the 42, 143–4 mnemonics 98, 120–1 Mnemosyne 98, 100–2 modernity 15, 43n. 21, 44–5, 49–50, 57–60, 150, 152–3; see also moderns, the and antiquity, see antiquity, and modernity understanding 17, 60–1, 63 moderns, the 49–50, 60–1, 63, 133, 156–7 and the ancients, see ancients, the, and the moderns and invention of the unconscious 7–8 Momigliano, A. D. 41n. 14 Mommsen, Theodor 31n. 56 The History of Rome 31n. 56 morality/ethics 113–14, 175, 175n. 32, 184 Moses 155, 157–8, 158n. 100 mother, the 68–9 chthonic 55–6; see also mother-earth mother-earth 56–8, 193–4 mothers 100–1, 124, 163, 165, 165n. 1, 172–5, 180, 189–97; see also mother, the; mother-earth; relationships movement 159 backwards, see temporal movements murder 3–4, 143–6 of Laius, see Laius, murder of; Oedipus, life/story of, and murder of Laius Muses, the 98–101, 98n. 25, 101n. 30; see also poetry, of the Muses mycelium 165n. 1 myth 25n. 43, 54–6, 58, 99, 129–30 interpretation of 130n. 4 logic of 54–5 Nachträglichkeit 29–30 Napoleon Bonaparte 80–1 Narcissus 6n. 8 narrative 72–5, 92–3, 92n. 2, 96–7, 104–6, 105n. 49, 106n. 57, 107nn. 59–60, 108, 111–12, 119–20 linear 5 sequential 125 visual 4–5 National Socialists, the 85, 155–6

223

nations/nationalism 15, 51–3, 53n. 44, 66, 67n. 7 natural, the 61–2 “Nature and Spirit” 46–7 negation 77–8, 156–7, 183 neuroscience 10–13 neuroses 121, 148 neurotics 143–8, 147n. 61, 150–1, 156–7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 20–1, 31n. 55, 44n. 24, 120–1, 120n. 94, 121n. 98, 131–2, 170 Beyond Good and Evil 170 Daybreak 120–1 and ideas about Greek irrationality 20n. 30 Nisbet, H. B. 57n. 58 “noble simplicity” 44 non-positivism 7–8, 41–2 Nussbaum, Martha 17n. 22, 178n. 44, 182, 191–2 objectivity 61, 104–5, 168–9 Octavian 84–5 Odysseus 47–8, 91–2, 103–6, 104n. 41, 105n. 49, 107n. 58, 108–12, 116, 118–20, 123–6, 195n. 88 bathing of 108–12, 119–22 identity of 123 scar of 105n. 48, 107, 107nn. 59–60, 111–12, 118–20, 123, 155–6 Oedipus 1, 5, 33–4, 66, 91–3, 93n. 7, 116–18, 129–30, 138, 142–6, 145n. 54, 147–50, 149n. 71, 153–4, 153nn. 79–80, 156–7, 159–62, 160n. 104, 164–76, 171n. 20, 179–80, 183–4; see also Oedipus-Hamlet debates/ideas about 7–8, 139–40, 143–4, 143n. 46, 145–50, 149nn. 68,70–1, 150–4, 153nn. 79–80, 156–7, 161 and his father 66, 68–9, 138–40, 144–5, 161–2, 164–5, 169, 172, 175; see also Oedipus, life/story of, and murder of Laius identity of 112–15, 114nn. 78–9, 82 life/story of 3, 33, 139–40, 144n. 52, 171n. 17 abandonment of 5n. 6 at the crossroads 164–5, 169–70, 173–5; see also crossroads, Oedipal ignorance of 6 and murder of Laius 3–5, 139, 161–2, 164–5, 168, 168n. 6, 175 and the Sphinx’s riddle 3–5, 115–17, 115n. 83, 116n. 85, 170 and Thebes 5

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/4/2019, SPi

224 INDEX Oedipus (cont.) and his mother 66, 139–40, 144–5, 153n. 80, 161–3, 165–8, 165n. 1, 176, 180–1 wounds of 112–17, 116n. 88 Oedipus complex, the 2n. 3, 7, 18, 129–30, 145–7, 150–1, 153–4, 153n. 79, 160–1, 160n. 104, 163, 165n. 2, 172–3, 181–3; see also dreams, Oedipal anachronism of 11–12 universality of 131, 131n. 5, 165, 181 Oedipus-Hamlet 146–8, 150, 159–61 Oedipus myth, the 1–4, 55–6, 67–8, 92–3, 129–30, 129n. 2, 131–3, 131n. 5, 132n. 13, 138, 144, 147–8, 161–2, 165–6, 173, 175, 181; see also Oedipus, life/story of and psychoanalysis 4–5, 65, 144, 161–2 and the unconscious 2–3, 161 universality of 129n. 2, 131, 131n. 5 Oedipus painting, the 1–6, 1n. 2 Oedipus, wounds of 112–18 phylogenetic scar 122, 123 Oliensis, Ellen 25, 25n. 43 Freud’s Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry 25 Olympian 45, 56, 66n. 4, 80–1 oneiros 177, 184, 187–9, 187n. 71, 188n. 74, 193 oracles 25–6 Orient, the 51–2, 51n. 41, 60–3, 61n. 65 origins/beginnings 97–8, 100–1 Oshea son of Nun 155 other, the 10, 22n. 37, 67 mythic typology of 9–10 Ouranus 55–6, 171n. 18 Ovid 55–6 paganism 146 Pan 158n. 100 parents/parenthood 87; see also relationships Parnassus 118, 123, 134–5 past, the 27, 31–5, 58–9, 94–6, 100, 102–5, 119–23, 127–8, 150, 153–4, 159, 161–2, 172, 193, 195–6 conceptions of 50 evocation of 6 excavation of 39–40 experience of, see experience, past and the future 6, 34–5, 102; see also future, the, and the past interpretation of 17, 26–8, 30–1 memories of 69–70, 102–3, 105n. 49, 109–10, 117–18, 121–2, 127–8 see also memory

perception of 98–9, 98n. 25 and the present 43, 50–3, 94–7, 108, 121–2, 153–4, 156–7, 159 reconstruction of the 163 reminders of 113 understanding 31–2 patients 38, 94, 143–8, 143nn. 46–8, 150, 165–6, 173–5, 181–3; see also neurotics patriarchy 45 Paul, St. 158 Pausanias 101 pedagogy/education 15–16, 43, 46–7, 46n. 29, 48–52, 51n. 40, 58–9, 79–80, 88, 154n. 81, 200–1 Penelope 31–2, 103–4, 108–12, 189n. 76 Phaeacia 125–6, 195n. 88 phantasy 173, 193–5 philosophy 41–2, 56, 73–4, 78–9, 93n. 7, 131–2, 149n. 70 Philostratus 58 phobia 143–4 Phocis 168, 171 Phoibos 180 physical, the 56, 58–9 pietas 141–2 Pindar 196 Isthmian Ode 4 55–6 Plato 23–5, 100, 122, 169n. 10, 184–5 Ion 18–19 Phaedrus 24–5 Laws 184–5 Republic 180n. 49 Symposium 138 Timaeus 23n. 40 pleasure principle, the 62–3 plurality 170 poetry 18–19, 106–7, 136–7 ancient 96–9 and dreams 135 epic 100–1 Greek 97–9 Homeric 103, 107n. 60, 109 human 99–101 ideas about/images of 134–5, 135n. 17, 137 and memory, see memory, poetic of the Muses 100–3 pastoral 83–4, 83n. 45 sources of 9–10 and the unconscious 100–1 polarity 140–1 politics 84–5, 85n. 48, 89, 102n. 37, 155–6; see also events, political; reality, political Polybus 140n. 38

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/4/2019, SPi

INDEX Pompeii 38–40, 42 Porter, James 31n. 55, 44–5, 44nn. 24,26, 57n. 58, 146n. 58, 155–6 Poseidon 54–5 positivism 12–13, 18–19, 40, 50, 130n. 4, 131n. 5, 152–3; see also nonpositivism postcolonial studies 11–12 postmodernism 15–18 prefiguration 150–1 present, the 31–4, 50–2, 94–7, 101–2, 108, 121–3, 150, 153–4, 156–7, 159, 161–2, 193 and the past, see past, and the present Price, S. R. F. 177–8, 185–6 primordial, the 97–8, 125, 127–8; see also experience, prelingual/primordial progress 45, 51–2, 57 progression 94–5 projection 130 proof 28–9 prophecies 179–81 proximity 48–9, 136 Prussia 42n. 15 Pseudo-Apollodorus Bibliotheka 55–6 psychic reality 7 psychic structures 122–3 psychoanalytic analysis 19–20 psychoanalytic notions about backward movement 93 about self-consciousness 67 psychoanalytic treatment 95n. 15 psychoanalysis 4–5, 10–11, 13–14, 19, 21–3, 25–6, 39–40, 67, 143–4, 143n. 46, 146, 150, 161–2, 164–5, 175–6, 186 and anachronism 11, 25–6 of the ancients, see ancients, the, psychoanalysis of and the ancient world 20, 25–6 and anthropology 20 and archeology 37–40, 37n. 4 and classical philology 14, 25–6 and classical studies 11–14, 25–6, 25n. 43, 131n. 5 and construction of the unconscious 7 development of 37–8, 67n. 6, 69, 161–2 and antiquity 40; see also antiquity, psychoanalytic approaches to and dreams, see dreams, psychoanalytic approach to foundations of 68–9 Freudian 14, 150–2, 154, 159, 161–2 and history 41n. 12, 69–70 intellectual quest of 75n. 27

225

literature and 146–9, 154 methodology of 21, 143–4, 150–2, 159 nature of 69–70, 161, 186 Oedipal structure of 25, 144, 153–4, 161–2 origins of 161–2 perspective of 97–8, 130 practice of 23n. 38, 135–6 process of 69–70, 161, 186 techniques of 136 terminology of 13–14 theory of 7, 130 work of 153–4, 156–7, 159, 186 psychoanalysts 163 psychology 10–11, 19–21, 26–9, 149–50, 194–5 ancient 20–1 cognitive 10–11, 107n. 60 social 132n. 11 Pucci, Pietro 13–14 Pythagoras 100 Pythia 179–80, 179n. 47 Quinodoz, Jean-Michel 200–1 Raphael 134–5 Parnassus 134–5, 135n. 17 School of Athens 134n. 15 Vatican paintings 133–4 Rashomon effect, the 168n. 6 rationality 44, 75–6, 87; see also irrationality rules of 19–20 Rat Man 38 reality 106, 135n. 17 historical 77, 155 political 82–3 reality principle, the 62–3 reason 20–1 reception studies 11–12 recognition (anagnorisis) 139–40, 197 recoil 92–3 recollection (anamnesis) 99–102, 104–5, 107, 107n. 59, 109–10, 117–18, 127–8, 195–6 rejection 156–7 regression 58–9, 91–5, 106–7, 113–14, 119–20, 123 relations 86, 141–2, 171n. 18 relationships cross-generational 45, 45n. 28, 141–3 father–child 66n. 4, 67–8, 172–3 father–son 67–9, 88–9, 138–47, 141n. 39, 164–5, 193; see also Freud, Sigmund, and his father; Oedipus, and his father incestuous 171n. 18, 182n. 55, 183–5, 189–92, 195–6

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/4/2019, SPi

226 INDEX relationships (cont.) mother–child 53, 66n. 4, 67–8, 175, 193–5 mother–son 65–7, 163, 165–6, 165n. 1, 172–3, 175–6, 180–2, 181n. 52, 189–94, 196–7, 196n. 91; see also Freud, Sigmund, and his mother; Oedipus, and his mother parent–child 66, 141–2, 141n. 39, 145–6 remembrance, act of 72–3, 99, 102–5, 105n. 49, 111–13 Homeric 102–5, 111–12 polysemic function of 103 remorse 143–4 representation 104–6, 135n. 17 idealized 43 literary 104–6 “repressed” classicism 44n. 24 repression 21, 92–3, 102n. 37, 112, 114, 114nn. 78–82, 148–50, 156–7, 171n. 20, 183–5, 191–2 resistance 6, 58–9, 102, 109–12, 145–6, 153–4, 169, 191–2; see also antiquity, resistance to; memories, resistance to structure of 77 responsibility 113–14 revelata facies 157 reversal (peripeteia) 139–40 Ricoeur, Paul 37 riddles 77–8, 94; see also Oedipus, life story of, and the Sphinx’s riddle rituals/ceremonies 99, 101–2 initiation 124–5, 125nn. 103–4 roads 4–5, 170–5, 171nn. 17–20; see also crossroads Roberts, Deborah H. 31n. 57 Robinson Crusoe 47–8, 47n. 33 Rolland, Romain 72–3, 82, 85, 88 Rome 31n. 56, 51–2, 55–6, 82–8, 142 culture of 1–2, 50, 141–2 Roth, Michael 70n. 13 Roux, G. 179n. 47 Rudnytsky, Peter 67n. 6, 129n. 2, 139–40, 140n. 38, 143nn. 46–8, 149n. 70 Russia 174–5 Sappho 199 Sauerlandt, Max 158n. 100 scars/wounds 118–20, 122–3, 125, 127, 141–2; see also Odysseus, scar of; Oedipus, wounds of phylogenetic scar Schelling, F. W. J. 41n. 11, 42n. 18 schiste hodos 168–75, 171n. 20 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 30n. 53 Schliemann, Heinrich 37n. 3

Schopenhauer, Arthur 131–2 Scodel, Ruth 107n. 60, 109–10, 125n. 104 seduction 92n. 4 self, the 149–50 ancient 160 awareness of 81 formation of 61 gaining distance from 60 historicization of 41–2 images of 63 modern 152–3 parts of 75–6 psychoanalytic history of 40 return to 48 separation of from itself 47; see also self-alienation transformation of 48, 186 see also selfhood self-alienation 74, 114n. 78, 117–18 self-consciousness 46–7, 62, 67, 152–3 development of 69–70 selfhood: modern 78–9, 147–8 self-recognition 2–4, 77–8 self-understanding 12, 40, 152, 160 sema 109–10, 118, 118n. 90, 122 separation 127, 140–1, 159–60, 164–5; see also disconnection sex 17–18, 159, 163, 165n. 1, 172–5, 177, 181–6, 181n. 52, 189–92, 192n. 78, 193–7, 193n. 81; see also sexuality sexuality 17–18, 17n. 21, 132n. 12, 165n. 1, 185–6, 191–3 shadows 83–4 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet 146–50, 149n. 68, 160–1 signs/signification 127, 136 Silberer, Herbert 154n. 83 similarity 87–8, 129–30, 132–3, 140, 156–7; see also correspondence simultaneity 133–4 Sissa, Giulia 179n. 47, 185–6 sleep 126 Snell, Bruno 18–19 society 141 Socrates 138 Sophocles 33, 93n. 7, 114n. 79, 116–17, 149n. 70, 151–4, 165–6, 168–9, 175–6, 183 Oedipus Rex 4–5, 7, 25, 34, 67–8, 91–3, 93n. 7, 112, 114–15, 114n. 78, 130–1, 138–44, 139n. 36, 144nn. 52–4, 146–50, 149n. 70, 151–4, 153n. 80, 159–62, 164–5, 168–70, 168n. 6, 170, 171n. 19, 172–6, 179–80, 181n. 52, 182–3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/4/2019, SPi

INDEX soul the 14, 151–2, 176–9 care of 9–10 formulations of 13–14 historicization of 14 space/spatiality 108, 159, 195 Spencer, Herbert 176n. 37 Sphinx, the 1–5, 114–16, 115n. 83, 116n. 85, 167, 170 spirit, the 60–2, 157–8 spiritual, the 58–61, 155–8 Starobinski, Jean 147 The Living Eye 149n. 68 Strachey, James 136 strangeness 129–30, 145–6, 145n. 54 strangers 109–10, 140, 145–6, 145n. 54, 164–5, 167–8 identification with 145–6 subjectivity 25n. 43, 34, 59–60, 66, 102, 104–6, 131–2; see also experience, subjective sublimation 121 Suetonius 182n. 55 Sulzer, Johann Georg 9n. 1 Switzerland 42n. 15 symbiosis 165n. 1 symbolism 127–8, 164–5, 169, 170n. 14, 172–5, 186–8, 193–4 temporal boundaries 17, 32, 98, 175–6 crossing 22 temporal confusion 33 temporal difference 51 temporal exaggeration 113n. 76 temporal fusion 29–32 temporality 5, 26, 30–2, 34, 37, 75–6, 81n. 39, 93, 99–102, 108, 120, 127–8, 133–4, 150–6, 159, 170–1, 178–9, 189, 193; see also hermeneutics, temporally based; temporal boundaries; time temporal layers 123 temporal movements 94–5, 99 backwards 93–7, 174–5 forwards 175 temporal sequence 99, 136 temporal structure 29–32, 94, 96–7, 119–20, 150 Tertullian 155 texts 25–7, 73, 130–1, 151–2, 155–6, 159–61, 161n. 105, 165 ancient/classical 15, 18, 25, 27–30, 49, 82, 150–1, 161–2, 172, 175 and modern readers 34–5 boundaries of 17 evidence from outside of 29 Homeric 105–6, 124–5 interpretation of 27–31, 130–1, 154–8, 154n. 83, 168n. 6, 182

227

meaning of, see meaning, of a text modern 82, 150–1 understanding of 27–8, 31–2 textual criticism 16–17 textual hermeneutics 194–5 and the unconscious 10–11, 160–2 textuality 6, 27, 30, 106–7, 127–8, 146, 150–1, 164, 189; see also intertextuality anachronistic 10–11 and dreams, see dreams, and textuality Jewish 65n. 2 and meaning, see meaning, of a text Theban herdsman 140n. 38 Thebes 1, 3–5, 5n. 6, 67–8, 138–9, 164, 167–8, 170–1, 171n. 20, 175 theorematikoi 188n. 74 therapeutic arts 9–10; see also soul, the, care of therapy 100–1 thought 169, 176–7 objects of 119 thoughts 118, 126–8 distressing 194n. 85 involuntary 118n. 89 unconscious 38–9, 117–18, 121–2, 193–4 see also dream-thoughts Thucydides 81n. 39 time 103, 105–6, 110–11, 129–30, 132n. 11, 150, 159–62 controlling 32, 99 experience of 100 human 100–2 ideas about 25–6 moving back and forth in 69–70 simultaneity in 133–4 Tiresias 115–17, 167–8 Tityrus 83–8 tmesis 139 tradition 141 “tranquil grandeur” 44 transcendence 56–7 transfiguration 80–1 transformation 47, 63, 92n. 4, 110–11, 159; see also self, the, transformation of translation 179–80 trauma 92n. 2, 112–13, 114n. 82, 126, 167–8 Trieste 72–4, 76–7 triplai hamaxitoi 168–9 triple hodos 168–71, 171n. 20 Trophonios 101 Troy 103, 107n. 58, 141–2 eternal 18–19, 155–6, 158 objective 168–9 search for the 6, 170 Tuna el-Gebel 1–2, 1n. 2 paintings in, see Oedipus painting, the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/4/2019, SPi

228 INDEX Tutankhamen 37n. 3 Tyche 181, 190 Tylor, E. B. 176n. 37 unconscious, the 5–6, 75–6, 143–4, 165, 186, 193–4 access to 77 ancient 11–12, 22–3, 34–5, 87–8, 127–8, 152–4, 175–6; see also ancients, the, as having an unconscious search for 34–5 and classical studies, see classical studies, and the unconscious and the conscious 38–40, 58–9, 75–6 and consciousness, see consciousness, and the unconscious delving into 75–7, 80, 86 discovery of 38, 72, 129, 132–3, 146, 161–2 as dynamic 150 encountering 43 expressions of 28–9, 106, 114n. 78, 171n. 19 ancient 86 interpretation of 28–9 foreshadowing of 150–1 and Freud, see Freud, Sigmund, and the unconscious; unconscious, the, ideas about, Freudian and Greece, see Greece, and the unconscious history of 9–10, 152–3 ideas about 26–7 ancient 25–6 Freudian 21–3, 33, 40, 133, 148, 152–3, 155–6, 161–2 modern 25–6 lack of 150 language of 77–8 liquidation of 69–70 locating 150, 159, 165n. 1 logic of the 133–4 manifestations of 11–12 meaning of 10–11 metaphors for 79n. 35, 127–8 modern 22–3, 127–8, 152–3, 173, 175–6; see also moderns, the and invention of the unconscious nature of 22–3, 25–6, 34, 40, 77, 150, 159–62 non-objective status of 14–15 notion of 7, 10–11, 34, 41–2 and Oedipus, see Oedipus myth, the, and the unconscious operation of 10–11 and poetry, see poetry, and the unconscious

revealed 39 search for 34 significance of 7–8 structure of 13–14 and textual hermeneutics, see textual hermeneutics, and the unconscious understanding/deciphering 24–5, 39–40 universality of 22 work of the 82, 133 unconscious associations 11 unconsciousness 5 underworld, the 101, 101n. 33 universalism 10, 33, 129–32, 131n. 5, 132n. 11, 193–4 “vehicles of expression” 17–18, 17n. 20 Venit, Marjorie 5, 5n. 6 Venus 193n. 81, 195–6 Vermorel, Henry 75n. 28 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 100–2, 130–1, 130n. 4, 153–4, 153nn. 79–80 “Mythical Aspects of Memory and Time” 99, 102 Vienna 65–7, 65n. 2, 77–8, 85 University of 154n. 81 Vincent, Andrew 60 Virgil 81–4, 81n. 39, 86, 89, 134–5, 141–3, 194–7 Aeneid, the 141–2, 193n. 81, 194–5 First Eclogue 81–3, 81n. 40, 82n. 43, 85–7, 85n. 48 voice 75–6 Voss, Johann Heinrich 41n. 13 Warburg, Abi 44n. 25 West, David 15–16 Western world, the 54, 60–2 White, Hayden 155nn. 87–92 Williams, Gordon 199–201 Winckelman, Johann Joachim 41n. 13, 44, 44nn. 23–6 Winkler, John J. 177–8, 186–7, 191–2 Wolff, Christian 9n. 1 Württemberg 42n. 15 Xenophon 174 young people 46–8, 65–6; see also adolescence Zetema 3–6, 6n. 8 Zeus 56, 122 Ziolkowski, Theodore 85n. 48