Sigmund Freud and the Greek mythological tradition.

Abstract

his paper represents an overview of one important strand in an ongoing study of and Jung and way in which each related psychology and myth. In a sense it is my version of Philip Rieff's Fellow Teachers; I, too, look to for help in recalling us to those urgencies that pulled us into religious studies once upon a time, to a renewed appreciation of sacred. But unlike Rieff, I want to equate godterms not only with interdiction and prohibition, but also with celebration. Rieff seems to want to reinstate YHVH as only true god, albeit a god constantly struggling with Baals and Asteroths. I am more pagan and find in resources for a genuinely polytheistic theology which affirms power of YHVH and Astarte, Eros and Thanatos. What I will put forward here is not a literal but a depth reading of Freud: a political reading, a poetic, mythic reading. still has things to say to us precisely because his thinking was more dialectical and subtle than that of movement he spawned, and because he deliberately invites us to look for latent meanings. We are all familiar with tensions: is therapist or theorist, scientist or poet, realist or romantic? Obviously, answer is, Both, but not in easily reconcilable ways. seems to encourage readings which exploit Freud against Freud, as Wilhelm Reich put it: readings like Rieff's which set interdictory over against remissive, like Herbert Marcuse's which discovers revolutionary in apparent conservative, and like Norman O. Brown's which opposes orgiastic to repressive, fantasy to literalism. Each of these is a reading that goes beyond they are interpretations that are truly the other room of dream yet they are fathered by him. is important in part because he both allows such going beyond and resists it. He is someone we learn from by wrestling with. Like his YHVH he is a figure worth fighting against. Perhaps just because he had himself so consciously played role of son, rebel, he is willing to take his turn as father who does not simply abdicate. (I suspect a new vision needs to be mothered as well; in larger study I turn to Jung as one who might be invested with this role.) My own reading will focus on Freud's understanding of role of myth in human life; it sees in Freud's criticism and iconoclasm manifest of resymbolization, in his atheism manifest of polytheism. Not that we ignore manifest. It is precisely analysis of death of God that makes possible an opening to continued