Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis: Ancient and Modern Stories of the Self(Classical Presences)

Since Freud published the Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and utilized Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to work through his developing ideas about the psycho-sexual development of children, it has been virtually impossible to think about psychoanalysis without reference to classical myth. Myth has the capacity to transcend the context of any particular retelling, continuing to transform our understanding of the present. Throughout the twentieth century, experts on the ancient world have turned to the insights of psychoanalytic criticism to supplement and inform their readings of classical myth and literature. This volume examines the inter-relationship of classical myth and psychoanalysis from the generation before Freud to the present day, engaging with debates about the role of classical myth in modernity, the importance of psychoanalytic ideas for cultural critique, and its ongoing relevance to ways of conceiving the self. The chapters trace the historical roots of terms in everyday usage, such as narcissism and the phallic symbol, in the reception of Classical Greece, and cover a variety of both classical and psychoanalytic texts.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of contributors Note on the referencing of Freud's works Introduction 1: Vanda Zajko & Ellen O Gorman: Myths and their Receptions: Narrative, Antiquity, and the Unconscious I. Contexts For Freud 2: Bruce King: Freud's Empedocles: The Future of a Dualism 3: Daniel Orrells: Freud's Phallic Symbol 4: Richard Armstrong: Myth, Religion, Illusion: How Freud Got His Fire Back 5: David Engels: Narcissism against Narcissus? A Classical Myth and its Influence on the Elaboration of Early Psychoanalysis from Binet to Jung 6: Vered Lev Kenaan: Who cares whether Pandora had a large pithos or a small pyxis? Jane Harrison and the emergence of a dynamic conception of the unconscious II. Freud and Vergil 7: Gregory Staley: Freud's Vergil 8: Jeff Rodman: Juno & the Symptom 9: Ika Willis: Tu Marcellus Eris: Nachträglichkei in Aeneid 6 III. Beyond the Canon 10: Victoria Wohl: The Mythic Foundation of Law 11: Kurt Lampe: Obeying Your Father: Stoic Theology between Myth and Masochism 12: Erik Gunderson: Valerius Maximus and the hysteria of virtue 13: Paul Allen Miller: Mythology and the Abject in Imperial Satire IV. Myth as Narrative and Icon 14: Meg Harris Williams: Playing with Fire: Prometheus and the Mythological Consciousness 15: Oliver Harris: The Ethics of Metamorphosis or A Poet Between Two Deaths 16: Jens De Vleminck: In the beginning was the Deed: On Oedipus and Cain 17: Marcia Dobson & John Riker: Aristophanes Myth of Eros and Contemporary Psychologies of the Self V. Reflexivity and Meta-Narrative 18: Mark Payne: Aristotle on Poets as Parents and the Hellenistic Poet as Mother 19: Page Dubois: Listening, Counter-Transference, and the Classicist as Subject-Supposed-to-Know Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Vanda Zajko is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol. She has wide-ranging research interests in the reception of classical literature, particularly in the 20th century, and in mythology, psychoanalytic theory, and feminist thought. She has published on a variety of ancient authors including Homer, Aeschylus, and Ovid, and on Shakespeare, Keats, Ted Hughes, Melanie Klein, James Joyce, Freud, Mary Shelley, and Robert Graves. She was co-editor with Miriam Leonard of Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (OUP, 2006) and with Alexandra Lianeri of Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture (OUP, 2008). Ellen O'Gorman is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol. She works on ancient historiography and its reception, and on historical and psychoanalytic theory. She has published on Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, Statius, Flaubert, Freud, and Lacan. She is the author of Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus (2000).

Review :
It is a collection that will make an impact on psychoanalytic studies, as well as classics, with re-evaluations of psychoanalytic narcissism and masculinity, and of Freud's engagements with ancient myth, drama and epic. engaging ... these writings preserve lively traces of the oral performance by an international roster of scholars committed to - and critical of - the interpretation of Greek and Roman mythology through the various theoretical frameworks of psychoanalysis. With an introduction and eighteen essays this volume displays the wide ranging conversance with psychoanalytic theory that classicists have developed in the last thirty years.