Classical mythology: a very short introduction by Helen Morales

Author:Helen Morales [Morales, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192804761
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

On the analyst’s couch

‘He who knew the famous riddle …’

In 1906, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, Sigmund Freud, Viennese neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, was presented by a group of his supporters with a bronze medallion. On one side was engraved a portrait of Freud, in profi le. On the other, an image of the mythic hero Oedipus, facing the Sphinx. To the right of Oedipus appears a line in Greek: ‘He who knew the famous riddle and was a most powerful man.’

The Greek, a quotation from the ancient Greek play Oedipus the King by Sophocles, refers to Oedipus. A descendant of Europa’s brother Cadmus, Oedipus destroyed the Sphinx, a monstrous woman-lion-bird who was terrorizing the city of Thebes, when he solved her riddle: ‘Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at midday on two, and in the evening upon three?’ The answer is ‘Man’ (who in the morning of life crawls on all fours, in mid-life walks on two feet, and in the twilight of his years uses a

‘third foot’, a cane). So it was that he ‘knew the famous riddle’ and, when given leadership of Thebes by the grateful city, became ‘a most powerful man’.

But the inscription, of course, also describes Freud. Two riddles fascinated Freud. The fi rst, for which he is less well known, was 68

how to account for the power of myth, especially as told in Greek tragedies, to move a modern audience. The second was that of the mind, how it worked and why it sometimes went wrong. In 1927, in the postscript to his book The Question of Lay Analysis, he wrote: ‘In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution.’ His answers, which, as we shall see, were in no small part infl uenced by classical mythology, and which involved ideas such as that humans have ‘unconscious’ and ‘subconscious’ parts of the mind and that we sometimes repress our sexual desires, were so infl uential that they made Freud one of the most powerful men of the 20th century.

Psychoanalysis and Greek mythology are two sides of the same O

medallion. To put it differently: without classical mythology, n the analyst

there would be no psychoanalysis. If that seems like too bold a statement, this chapter aims to show that it is not. It will look at the dynamic relationship forged between psychoanalysis and

’s c

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classical myth, and the impacts, positive and negative, that each uc

h

has made upon the other. There are numerous psychoanalytic theorists, but Freud necessarily takes centre stage. Like many in 19th-century Germany, Freud was passionate about ancient Greece and its myths. He was both an analyst of the psyche, or mind (using Greek myth) and of Greek myth (using the psyche). As a result, he initiated a radical new method of enquiry, psychoanalysis, and wrote a momentous chapter in the history of classical mythology.

Know thyself

Freud used

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