Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's concern with changes in the ‘likely stories’ or ‘mythologies’ of identity in the century since Freud, which looks in particular in Freud's varying assumptions about whether the fundamental features of human development and predicament do change over time; Freud's essay ‘Family Romances’, which concerns what Freud regards as universal fantasies of adoption, but is pegged to presumably local, realistic circumstances, illustrates the question. The chapter also considers the reliance on Greek tragedy that underpins Freud's theories as typical of the tendency, in the 19th century, to use Greek tragedy as matter for philosophical thinking.