Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis

Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Vanda Zajko
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199656673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
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.

Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis

Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Vanda Zajko
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199656673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Origin of the Gods

The Origin of the Gods PDF Author: Richard S. Caldwell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195072669
Category : Gods, Greek
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Presented in clear, comprehensible language, this study first explains the aspects of psychoanalytic theory relevant to the understanding of Greek myth, and then interprets, using psychoanalytic methodology, the Greek myth of origin and succession, particularly as stated in Hesiod's Theogony. Caldwell's provocative study will appeal to a wide range of classicists, teachers and students of mythology, and those interested in the application of psychoanalytic methods to literature.

Freudian Mythologies

Freudian Mythologies PDF Author: Rachel Bowlby
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191533661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfilment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex - child, mother, father - suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible—'a likely story!'—have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story. This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies - Oedipus and others - which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands of his stories of how children develop and how people change (or don't). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth PDF Author: Daniel Merkur
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135575274
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book surveys the history of psychoanalytic treatments of myths variously as symptoms of psychopathology, as cultural defense mechanisms, and as metaphoric expressions of ideas that may include therapeutic insights.

Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis

Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Phil Baker
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780333638910
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This is the first full length study to consider Beckett's informed but deeply ambivalent engagement with the terrain of psychoanalysis. Taking psychoanalysis as a historically-specific construct, not as a privileged source of truth, Phil Baker shows the extent to which psychoanalytic ideas are present in Beckett's work at a fully literary and aesthetic level. The focus is mainly on the prose, including lesser known early work. There are notable new readings within Molloy and Ill Seen Ill Said, and the fullest reading to date of the Four Novellas. It is also a significant contribution to understanding the gendered nature of Beckett's writing.

Moses and Monotheism

Moses and Monotheism PDF Author: Sigmund Freud
Publisher: Leonardo Paolo Lovari
ISBN: 8898301790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The book consists of three essays and is an extension of Freud’s work on psychoanalytic theory as a means of generating hypotheses about historical events. Freud hypothesizes that Moses was not Hebrew, but actually born into Ancient Egyptian nobility and was probably a follower of Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian monotheist. Freud contradicts the biblical story of Moses with his own retelling of events, claiming that Moses only led his close followers into freedom during an unstable period in Egyptian history after Akhenaten (ca. 1350 BCE) and that they subsequently killed Moses in rebellion and later combined with another monotheistic tribe in Midian based on a volcanic God, Jahweh. Freud explains that years after the murder of Moses, the rebels regretted their action, thus forming the concept of the Messiah as a hope for the return of Moses as the Saviour of the Israelites. Freud said that the guilt from the murder of Moses is inherited through the generations; this guilt then drives the Jews to religion to make them feel better.

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Myth PDF Author: Daniel Merkur
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780824059361
Category : Myth
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

On Matricide

On Matricide PDF Author: Amber Jacobs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231512058
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, Oresteia, Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's first wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's Oresteia, Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example. Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text, Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm. By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront, Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology.

Myth

Myth PDF Author: Robert Alan Segal
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198724705
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
This Very Short Introduction explores different approaches to myth from several disciplines, including science, religion, philosophy, literature, and psychology. In this new edition, Robert Segal considers both the future study of myth as well as the impact of areas such as cognitive science and the latest approaches to narrative theory.

A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology

A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology PDF Author: Vanda Zajko
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444339605
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology presents a collection of essays that explore a wide variety of aspects of Greek and Roman myths and their critical reception from antiquity to the present day. Reveals the importance of mythography to the survival, dissemination, and popularization of classical myth from the ancient world to the present day Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Offers a series of carefully selected in-depth readings, including both popular and less well-known examples