The term ‘‘psychoanalysis’’ was first used by Freud in 1897 to denote the treatment of hysteria devised with Breuer in the preceding years. In choosing this term, Freud revived the ancient tradition of the ‘‘medicine of the soul,’’ as shown by the beginning of a short essay published by him in 1890, ‘‘Psychical (or Mental) Treatment.’’ Here he underlines the original meaning of the Greek word psyche (soul; German Seele) and claims the validity of a treatment made ‘‘by means which operate in the first instance and immediately upon the human mind (Seelische),’’ adding that the most important of these means is the word (Standard Edition 7.283).
These statements highlight how far Freud was in these years from the psychiatry of Meynert and from the histological researches on which he had worked in the Viennese Institute directed by Brucke. His withdrawal from medical positivism was begun during his stay in Paris (1885-6), at the clinic for the treatment of nervous maladies at the Salpetriere directed by J.-M. Charcot: a few years later Freud compared Charcot’s ‘‘discovery’’ of hysteria with the liberation of madness from its chains as achieved by Pinel (Standard Edition 3.22). Afterward the Freudian theory, still remaining chiefly a therapeutic practice, deeply influenced humanistic studies and contemporary culture as a whole.
We shall deal in the remainder of this chapter with the presence of classical culture in the works of Freud, and then with the influence of psychoanalysis upon classical studies.
4.1 Freud and the classical world
Greek and Latin authors, myths, and topics are present in Freud’s works in a variety of ways. We can distinguish three different aspects of this presence. The first, sometimes quite difficult to evaluate, is the influence of Freud's classical learning on the formation of psychoanalysis, from his neuroanatomical inquiries in the eighties to his founding of a new method of psychological research. Second, we must consider Freud’s use of classical authors and topics as ‘‘precursors’’ of psychoanalytical concepts, as part of a strategy directed toward underlining not only the novelty of psychoanalysis in the face of contemporary science, but also its consonance with the thoughts and topics of antiquity. The third aspect of the classical presence in Freud’s work regards the quotations of Greek and especially Latin authors, particularly mottoes and famous phrases. In some cases, as we shall see, the phrases are pertinent to the context, but more often they belong to the rhetorical dimension of Freud’s writing (Mahony 1987).
Freud’s familiarity with classical texts obviously originated during his school years. His juvenile interest in the ancient world is shown by his self-identification with the Semite Hannibal, as a kind of revenge against the anti-Semitic discriminations suffered by his father. This self-identification is connected by Freud himself with the phobic inhibition that prevented him until 1901 from going to Rome, the city Hannibal never conquered (Standard Edition 4.194-7; Letters to Fliess 285). Besides this ‘‘Roman phobia,’’ Freud was also fascinated by the other capital of ancient culture, Athens, where he suffered a sudden state of disorientation on the occasion of his visit to the Acropolis in 1904 (A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, Standard Edition 22.239).
In his earlier years Freud had taken a great interest in archaic Greece, stimulated by the archaeological discoveries that brought to light the Mycenaean civilization (Freud’s interest in archaic cultures is confirmed by his archaeological collection, which eventually included over 3,000 pieces). In 1899 he read The History of Greek Culture by J. Burckhardt, finding in it ‘‘unexpected parallels,’’ as he writes in a letter to Fliess, adding that his ‘‘predilection for the prehistoric in all its human forms has remained the same’’ (Letters to Fliess 342). A few months later he says to Fliess that he has read the autobiography of Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy (Letters to Fliess 353); at the end of the same year he presents the interpretation of a sexual childhood dream of E., one of his patients, as the discovery of a new Troy, ‘‘which had hitherto been deemed a fable’’ (Letters to Fliess 391-2). A comparison with the discovery of Troy is again advanced in Moses and Monotheism (1934-8), once more in connection with the emergence of the unconscious (Standard Edition 23.70), while in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) the archaeological stratification of Rome is compared to the evolution of the psychic apparatus (Standard Edition 21.69-70).
After his school studies Freud continued to be interested in the classics during his first years at university: in 1874-6 he attended the courses in philosophy offered by Franz Brentano, who introduced him to Theodor Gomperz (1832-1912), professor of philology at the University of Vienna. Gomperz asked Freud to translate the twelfth volume of John Stuart Mill’s works, which also contained an essay on Plato. Later Freud had as one of his patients Gomperz’s wife, who supported him in his academic career (Letters to Fliess 456). Replying in 1907 to a questionnaire on reading, Freud listed the Greek Thinkers by Gomperz (1896-1902) as one of the 10 books that he recommended. On the same occasion he listed the Homeric poems and the tragedies of Sophocles among the 10 best works of world literature (Standard Edition 9.245).
References to classical antiquity are also made frequently by contemporary authors used by Freud: for example, Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Beginning in 1897, Ellis published Studies in the Psychology of Sex, an encyclopedic compendium of sexual behavior in which he also quotes classical authors. Nietzsche had taken up his academic career as a classical philologist, and in his Birth of Tragedy (1872) proposed a theory on the division of personality into Apollonian and Dionysian that provoked hostile reactions by U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931) and other philologists. In 1900 Freud told Fliess that he had acquired Nietzsche’s works and was hoping to find in them ‘‘words for much that remains mute in me’’ (Letters to Fliess 398); in a letter sent in 1931 to L. Bickel (quoted by Gay 1988: 42n), he claims to have refused the study of Nietzsche but acknowledges that there are similarities between his philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Besides Gomperz, another classical philologist known to Freud was Jakob Bernays (1824-81), professor at Breslau and the uncle of his wife Martha; Bernays’ interpretation of Aristotle’s catharsis was used by Freud in his Studies on Hysteria, a work written in collaboration with Josef Breuer (1842-1925), his senior colleague at the Institute directed by Brucke.
4.2 Freud, Breuer, and Aristotle’s eatbarsis
The Studies on Hysteria (1895) are considered the first important stage in the elaboration of psychoanalysis, after the initial physiological studies and Freud’s experience with Charcot and Hyppolite Bernheim. Freud and Breuer developed Charcot’s theories on hysteria, showing that the traumas ofchildren are the cause ofthis disease and conceiving a hypnotic therapy aimed at making their patients eliminate their neurotic symptoms by reliving their forgotten traumas. In order to differentiate their own therapeutic method from Charcot’s hypnosis, Freud and Breuer made use of the Greek concept of catharsis, which Aristotle used in his Poetics to describe the psychological reaction of the audience to tragic performances: ‘‘through pity (eleos) and fear (phobos)’ Aristotle writes, tragedy ‘‘brings relief (katharsis) to these and similar emotions’’ (1449b).
The traditional interpretation, accepted, for example, by Lessing in his Hamburg Dramaturgy, gave a moral value to the term katharsis, which was understood as a ‘‘purification from passions,'' to be accomplished through a process at the end of which the spectator is a more virtuous person. A different interpretation was proposed in 1858 by Bernays: in his view, Aristotle took the concept from ancient medicine, in which katharsis denotes the evacuation of the corrupted humors, so that in the Poetics the term would denote the purgation from passions.
Freud and Breuer clearly followed Bernays' interpretation in their use of the concept of catharsis (e. g., Standard Edition 2.9). Perhaps they were also influenced by Gomperz, who kept up a correspondence with Breuer about this issue (he also published in 1896 an edition of Aristotle’s Poetics). Bernays’ works are not quoted in the Studies, but they were certainly known to Freud, who in 1932 gave the writer Arnold Zweig a book commemorating Bernays.
4.3 From The Interpretation of Dreams to the Oedipus Complex
After the publication of the Studies, Freud broke with Breuer, discovered the sexual etiology of children’s neuroses, and elaborated the free-association technique. These topics are contained in the important work published in 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams. In this essay Freud criticizes contemporary research about dreams, which focused on the neurophysiological side of the phenomenon, aiming instead to investigate the meaning of the dream’s content. This research had a precedent in the ancient oneirokritika, and especially in the work of Artemidorus of Daldis (second century ad). Freud used the partial translation of Artemidorus by F. Kraus (1881), deprecating ‘‘the moral indignation which induced the translator to take the liberty of keeping the chapter on sexual dreams from his readers’ knowledge’’ (Standard Edition 5.606 n); later he used the translation of the omitted parts that was published in 1912 by H. Light.
In the first edition of The Interpretation, Artemidorus is mentioned as an example of ‘‘lay opinion,’’ particularly of a ‘‘decoding method’’ that treats dreams as a kind of cryptography, giving a meaning to every detail of the dreams. Another form of ‘‘lay opinion’’ is the symbolic one, which interprets the whole of the dream (Standard Edition 4.96). To these methods Freud opposes his own ‘‘scientific’’ one, characterized by the use of free association, as he writes in a note added in 1914 (Standard Edition 4.98n).
The quotations of Artemidorus become more frequent starting from the third edition of The Interpretation (1911). In the previously cited note from the 1914 edition, Freud presents the work by Artemidorus as the one that ‘‘has left us the most complete and painstaking study of dream-interpretation as practiced in the GraecoRoman world.’’ In another addition (Standard Edition 4.99n) Freud praises the interpretation of the dream of Alexander the Great given by Artemidorus at 4.24: the Satyr (satyros) in Alexander’s dream is interpreted as an admonishment to take possession of the town of Tyros (sa Tyros, i. e., Tyros is yours). Freud also mentions this dream in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915-17), where he says that ‘‘this interpretation, which has a sufficient artificial appearance, was undoubtedly the right one’’ (Standard Edition 15.236).
In The History of the Psychoanalytical Movement (1914), Freud writes that ‘‘the close connection between psychoanalytic dream-interpretation and the art of dream interpretation as practiced and held in such high esteem in antiquity only became clear to me much later’’ (Standard Edition 14.19-20). This affirmation suggests that Freud closely examined the work by Artemidorus only after the publication of the first edition of The Interpretation, but in fact we can imagine further reasons for explaining why Freud emphasizes the influence ofArtemidorus on his own work only at a later moment: first, his growing inclination to quote classical authors as precedents and precursors of his theories; second, the greater relevance attributed by Freud to the ‘‘extent and importance of symbolism in dreams’’ in the preface of the third edition (Standard Edition 4.xxvii), which may have suggested to him that he should pay more attention to the Oneirokritika.
There is in fact an unquestionable continuity between Artemidorus and Freud, in spite of their different aims (Artemidorus was mainly interested in the prediction of the future). This is shown by Freud’s statement that ‘‘dreams do have a meaning,’’ and by his declaration that, in spite of what contemporary science believes, ‘‘a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible’’ (Standard Edition 4.100). By establishing this continuity, Freud has furthermore achieved a ‘‘rediscovery’’ of Artemidorus, an author disparaged by contemporary philology precisely for his conception of dreams (this undervaluation of Artemidorus is also present in two books used by Freud when writing the Interpretation; i. e., Traum und Traumdeutung im Altertum [Dream and interpretation of dreams in antiquity] by B. Buchsenschutz [1868] and Traumdeutung und Zauberei [Interpretation of dreams and magics] by Gomperz [1866]).
The bibliography of the Interpretation includes another classical writer, Aristotle, quoted for the De divinatione per somnium (On divination through dream) and the De somniis (On dreams). In the first edition of his work Freud seems to assign a limited importance to him: while he concedes that for Aristotle the dream ‘‘becomes a subject for psychological study,’’ since it is no longer seen as ‘‘sent by the god,’’ nonetheless, in a note later suppressed, he affirms that ‘‘insufficient knowledge’’ and ‘‘lack of specialist assistance’’ prevent him from a deeper consideration of Aristotle’s treatise (Standard Edition 4.3n). On the other hand, already in the chapter on the dream as wish-fulfilment, Freud underlines the importance of Aristotle’s definition of the dream as ‘‘thinking that persists (in so far as we are asleep) in the state of sleep’’ (Standard Edition 5.549), a paraphrase of De divinatione per somnium 462a: ‘‘the mental picture (phantasma) that arises from the movement of sense-impressions when one is asleep, in so far as this condition exists.’’ The definition is repeatedly quoted by Freud in his later works: in a note added to the Autobiography (1935), he writes that Aristotle’s old definition ‘‘still holds good’’ (Standard Edition 14.46n).
A third classical author, Vergil, is present in The Interpretation:, as an epigraph to the entire work, Freud quotes two Vergilian lines: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (If I cannot prevail upon the gods above, then I shall move Hell!). These are words spoken by Juno in book 7 of the Aeneid (lines 311-12), when she announces her decision to summon the infernal goddess Allecto.
This motto was later interpreted by the philosopher W. Achelis as a symptom of Freud’s desire for revenge on the medical and scientific world, which had him banished. To this ‘‘Promethean’’ interpretation Freud objected (in a letter to the same Achelis in 1927) that he had simply copied the motto from the socialist politician F. Lassalle. But it seems very likely that Freud, in choosing that motto, was assigning it a meaning related to his further work: already in 1896 he was planning to use it for a projected work on hysteria, as we read in a letter to Fliess (Letters to Fliess 205). On this possible meaning of the motto, there are different interpretations: for Damrosch (1986) Freud identified himself with the female goddess Juno, in opposition to the male Jupiter; Heller (1956) and Timpanaro (1984) connected the motto with Freud’s ‘‘semitical’’ identification with Hannibal (in the Aeneid Juno supplies protection to the Carthaginian Dido); for Starobinski (1999) and Traverse (2000) the hell evoked by Juno symbolizes the unconscious brought to light by Freud. This last interpretation seems confirmed by the presence of the same Vergilian lines in the work itself, where Freud writes that ‘‘during the night, under the sway of an impetus toward the construction of compromises, this suppressed material finds methods and means of forcing its way into consciousness’’ (Standard Edition 5.608).
In The Interpretation Freud refers for the first time to the protagonist of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex as a prototype of the sexual desire felt by children for their mothers. This reference was already proposed in a letter to Fliess in 1897 (Letters to Fliess 272), the definition ‘‘Oedipus complex’’ was introduced in 1910 (Standard Edition 11.171), and in The Interpretation Freud speaks of the ‘‘Oedipus dream’’ (e. g., Standard Edition 5.398). Sophocles’ tragedy was well known to Freud, who translated some lines of it (and some of Vergil’s Aeneid) in his departure examination from school (as he wrote in 1873 to E. Fluss). In The Interpretation the reference to Sophocles is justified by Freud with the consideration that classical antiquity transmits ‘‘a legend whose profound and universal power to move can only be understood ifthe hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psychology of children has an equally universal validity’’ (Standard Edition 4.261). Criticizing the traditional interpretation of Oedipus Rex as ‘‘destiny’s tragedy,’’ Freud affirms that
If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified.
The same tragedy and its action ‘‘with cunning delays’’ is presented as ‘‘a process that can be likened to the work of psychoanalysis’’ (Standard Edition 4.262).
The hypothesis that myths give testimony to a sort of infancy in the human being later induced Freud to use other mythological figures to represent psychological processes. Narcissus had already been used by Havelock Ellis (1898) to denote narcissism (the sexual satisfaction derived from contemplation of one’s own physical endowment). Freud used the term in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1910) and then in his essay On Narcissism (1913). About the symbolic meaning of the head of Medusa, the infantile fear of castration, Freud wrote a short note in 1922 (published posthumously in 1940), where he says that ‘‘we have not often attempted to interpret individual mythological themes, but an interpretation suggests itself easily in the case of the horrifying decapitated head of Medusa’’ (Standard Edition 18.273). Another myth discussed by Freud was that of Prometheus, whose acquisition and control of fire was interpreted as a phallic symbol (Standard Edition 22.187).
4.4 Plato and Empedocles
Freud referred to Plato already in The Interpretation, where a note added in 1914 praises the statement that ‘‘the best men are those who only dream what other men do in the waking life’’ (Standard Edition 4.67): this is a paraphrase of Plato’s
Republic 9 571c-d, where Freud’s attention was perhaps aroused by one of the dreams mentioned by Plato, the dream ‘‘of lying with one’s own mother.’’
A more striking reference to Plato was proposed later by Freud for his theory of the libido, as associated with the Platonic concept of eros. In the Autobiography (1924) Freud affirms that he had discovered quite late that his own theory went back ‘‘to the very beginnings of medicine’’ and followed up ‘‘a thought of Plato’s’’ (Standard Edition 20.24), adding that he had realized it when he read an article published in 1898 by Havelock Ellis (Standard Edition 20.24).
The reference to Platonic eros was proposed by Freud for the first time in the preface to the fourth edition of the Three Essays (1920), where he invites the reader to consider ‘‘how closely the enlarged sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato’’ (Standard Edition 7.134). The reference reappears insistently in the following works, sometimes with other names associated with that of Plato: in the Group Psychology (1921), besides Plato, Freud mentions the Epistle to the Corinthians, where the apostle Paul praises ‘‘love above all else’’ (Standard Edition 18.91). Again in Why War?, in a letter to Albert Einstein (1932), Freud affirms that the sexual instincts are to be understood ‘‘exactly in the sense in which Plato uses the word (i. e., eros) in his Symposium’ (Standard Edition 22.209).
Plato, in this case, is used by Freud in order to legitimate, or ennoble, his own theory on sexuality, which aroused particular hostility among his critics. The comparison between eros and libido in fact seems superficial (there are more considerable analogies between Freud and Plato, explored, for example, by Simon [1973]) and not supported by a serious reading of Plato's works: Freud utilized an article published in 1915 by M. Nachmansohn, who limited himself to looking for precedents of Freudian theory in Plato’s Symposion.
The only precise reference by Freud to the Symposion is that proposed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where he praises the myth told by Aristophanes (but further rejected by Socrates, who represents Plato’s position), for which the sexual genders arose from a primary androgynous being (189d-191b). Freud had already referred to this ‘‘poetic fable’’ in the Three Essays (Standard Edition 7.136), without explicit reference to Plato. In this myth Freud was seeing a confirmation of his own theory that sexual instinct is ‘‘a need to restore an earlier state of things’’; he also points out the probable Babylonian origin of the myth, for which he quotes both an article by K. Ziegler and the opinion expressed by Heinrich Gomperz, son of the philologist (Standard Edition 18.57).
But 18 years later, in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938), Freud denied the validity of the myth, now qualified as a fancy of‘‘creative writers,’’ because ‘‘nothing like it is known to us from the actual history of living substance’’ (Standard Edition 23.149n). Instead of Plato, the antecedent of the Freudian theory of instincts was now becoming another ancient philosopher, Empedocles, quoted for his theory of the two natural energies, philia (love) and neikos (discordance), which cause conjunction and separation of the elements, and so the life and death of living beings. In this theory Freud sees an antecedent of his own theory of the instincts, the sexual one and the death instinct, a theory, as Freud observes, which was shocking even for many psychoanalysts.
Empedocles had been rediscovered by Freud the year before in Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), where he says that he recently ‘‘came upon his theory in mind in the writing of one of the great thinkers of ancient Greece’’ (Standard Edition 23.244). Freud found the fragments of Empedocles included in the Vorsokratiker by W. Capelle, published in 1935. He does not exclude the possibility of having been influenced in elaborating his theory by Empedocles himself, whose work he could have read among the many books he read in his youth (in this case, Freud says, he would have suffered from a cryptamnesia).
In the case of Plato, psychoanalytical theory had reached independently, as we have seen, the idea of eroS; in the case of Empedocles, eventually Freud preferred to propose himself as the direct heir of ancient wisdom.
4.5 After Freud
Freud’s interest in classical literature was inherited by several of his followers, who attempted to verify psychoanalytical theories in classical texts. Besides the article quoted by Nachmansohn about Plato’s eros, we should mention at least the essays by H. Gomperz (1924) about the personalities of Parmenides and Socrates (the latter was diagnosed as a homosexual, who would have sublimated his love into a passion for teaching), and by A. von Winterstein (1925) on Greek tragedy (his thesis, inspired by Freud’s Totem and Taboo, is that Greek tragedy has its roots in the Oedipal relationship between father, mother, and son). Several essays on classical topics were published by Imago, the review edited since 1913 by O. Rank and H. Sachs to support psychoanalytical research in the humanities.
Much research has been devoted to mythological topics, in order to verify the hypothesis that myths are expressions of the desires of whole communities: for example, K. Abraham wrote Dreams and Myths (1909), R. de Saussure (son of the linguist) defined the ‘‘Jocasta-complex’’ (1920), T. Reik wrote on Oedipus and the Sphinx (1920), and S. Bernfeld on Sisyphus (1925) and Tantalus (1931). The debate about the universality of the Oedipus complex involved anthropologists: in 1924 the review Imago organized a forum in which the anthropologist B. Malinowski, among others, participated. Anthropological researches founded on psychoanalysis were then conducted by G. Roheim and by G. Devereux (the latter also wrote essays on Euripides’ tragedies). C. Levi-Strauss also put important emphasis on the Oedipus complex in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1947), but in his subsequent works on structural anthropology left Freudian positions behind.
Freud’s interest in myth was inherited by Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), who in 1911-12 separated himself from psychoanalysis and founded analytical psychology. For Jung myths, fables, and dreams are influenced by archetypes, inherited mental images of the collective unconscious. The idea of‘‘archetype’’ was suggested to Jung, as he himself wrote, by St. Augustine (‘‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,’’ in Collected Works 9.1 p. 4). In his research on myth Jung was collaborating with the historian of religions K. Kerenyi, with whom he wrote Essays in the Science of Mythology (1941). Research on classical texts was also published later by Jungian scholars (M.-L. von Franz, C. A. Maier, J. Hillmann, and many others).
Among the more recent exponents of psychoanalysis it is possible here to mention only Jacques Lacan (1901-81), whose Seminary 7 on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60: Lacan 1992) contains a study of Sophocles’ Antigone (a text that was also studied by Freud’s daughter, Anna, and is now quite popular in gender studies).
4.6 Psychoanalysis and classical studies
The application of psychoanalysis to classical studies gave rise to different reactions. Brown (1957) published a programmatic manifesto; Sullivan (1974) edited a collection of studies; and several scholars used Freudian, Jungian, and recently also Lacanian concepts to study classical texts (prevailingly Greek, but also Latin ones). Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, was criticized by many classical philologists: for example, as regards Freud’s uses of classical authors. The most controversial matter remains Freud’s reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: accepted byVanderSterren (1948), it was refuted in 1972 by Vernant (1988), Bollack (1993), and others. Some scholars attempted to save Freud’s interpretation by integrating it with other ideas, Politzer (1974) by drawing on the theories of Bachhofen, Paduano (1994) by making use of the theory of the unconscious elaborated by the psychoanalyst I. Matte Blanco.
A comparison between psychoanalysis and textual philology was made by the philologist S. Timpanaro, who took as starting point the slip made by Freud when he quoted a line by Vergil (Aeneid 4.625) in Psychopathology of the Everyday Life to demonstrate that several of Freud’s slips are explainable as mnemonic errors, similar to those committed by copyists of manuscripts (Timpanaro 1976). Timpanaro’s criticisms of the scientific nature of psychoanalysis recall those addressed to Freud by Popper and have been utilized in the epistemological debate on psychoanalysis (Timpanaro’s work has been very influential also in the field of textual criticism, as an alternative to Housman’s mechanistic approach).
More than through direct application, psychoanalysis has influenced classical studies indirectly, at first through anthropological studies influenced by Freudian experience. Very important in this regard was the work of J. E. Harrison, a student of ancient religion who was interested especially in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (different from another Cambridge Ritualist scholar, Sir J. Frazer, who refused to read Freud but was largely used by Freud himself in Totem and Taboo). The experience of the Cambridge Ritualists was developed by E. R. Dodds (1893-1979) in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951); for the later essay Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (1965) Dodds was influenced also by the neo-Freudian E. Fromm.
Psychoanalytical concepts are also present in another essay on the anthropology of the ancient world, Homo necans: The Anthropology ofAncient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, by W. Burkert (1972), who afterward dropped his Freudian inspiration in order to achieve, with his Creation of the Sacred (1996), an evolutionist and biological approach to the history of religion.
Other authors who have contributed more recently in various ways to the reception of psychoanalytical culture in classical studies are P. Ricoeur, J. Derrida, and M. Foucault. The latter in 1967 placed Freud, together with Marx and Nietzsche, among the most innovative thinkers of the contemporary age (Foucault 1994: 564-74), but in his later History of Sexuality (1976-84), which was largely devoted to classical antiquity, Foucault, too, took an approach very different from the Freudian one (Black 1998).
FURTHER READING
Essays on several topics of psychology in antiquity are collected by Everson (1991), and a comparison with the contemporary mind-body debate is proposed by Ostenfeld (1987). On the ancient treatment of characters, see Ginsberg (1983). On Nemesios of Emesa (and Galen), Debru (2005). On humoral typology in modern times, one should read the classic work by Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl (1964) and, on the influence of the humors on modern art, Filipczak (1997). The Musicapractica (1482) by Ramos de Pareja is available in the Spanish edition by Terni (1983). English translations are available of Pinel (1962) and Esquirol (1965). Besides Pigeaud (1983), the classical influence upon Pinel is mentioned by Lanteri-Laura (1991). On Freud’s classical culture, see Tourney (1965) and Mitchell-Boyask (1994). On Freud’s archaeological collection, Ransohoff (1975). On Freud and Greek mythology, Downing (1975) and Caldwell (1996). On Freud and H. Ellis, Sulloway (1979): 305-15. On Freud’s ‘‘Roman phobia,’’ Timpanaro (1984) and Damrosh (1986). Bernays’ and Gomperz’s intepretations of Aristotle’s catharsis are analyzed by Langholf (1990). Differences between Freud and Artemidorus in the interpretation of dreams are clarified by Price
(1986) . On Freud and Plato, see Simon (1978) and Santas (1988). On the Oedipus complex and Sophocles (besides the essays quoted above), Chase (1979), Bremmer
(1987) , and Rudnytsky (1987). On Levi-Strauss (and the Oedipus myth), see Carroll (1978) and Delrieu (1999). On Antigone (and Lacan), Wolman (1965), Butler (2000), and Leonard (2003). Bibliographies and essays on psychoanalysis and classical studies include Glenn (1972, 1976), Caldwell (1974), Will (1966), Lloyd-Jones (1985), and Selden (1990: 171-4). On Dodds (and psychoanalysis), Cambiano (1991). On Derrida, and Foucault (and Lacan), Miller (1999).
A Companion to the Classical Tradition Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
World History
