Plato and Freud

Abstract

When the world was younger and the skies were uncontested, there was a time when utterances from the gods were not disdained. It was then, so we are told, that the Pythian Apollo had his say. It was then that his paternal injunction, γνωθισ εαυτδν, “Know thyself,” first proclaimed the problem which has kept the introspective mind in travail from that day to this. Man has a fickle memory, but it is not surprising that he has recalled this injunction in every age, since none could have been more congenial to his inquiring spirit. To be sure, most of us are quite unable to summon the poet's interest in “everything created in the bounds of earth and sky”; but few of us, it we are honest, would disclaim an interest in ourselves, or in that most engrossing of all mortal quests, the quest to discover something of the nature of the rock from which we were hewn or of the pit from which we were digged.