A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World

by Richard H. Armstrong

"If psychoanalysis is the return of repressed antiquity, distorted to be sure by modern desire, yet still bearing the telltale traces of the ancient archive, then would not our growing distance from the archive of antiquity also imply that we are in the process of losing our grip on psychoanalysis itself, as Freud conceived it?"―from Chapter 1 As he developed his striking new science of the mind, Sigmund Freud had frequent recourse to ancient culture and the historical disciplines that draw on it. A Compulsion for Antiquity fully explores how Freud appropriated figures and themes from classical mythology and how the theory and practice of psychoanalysis paralleled contemporary developments in historiography, archaeology, philology, and the history of religions. Drawing extensively from Freud's private correspondence and other notes and documents, Richard H. Armstrong touches on Freud's indebtedness to Sophocles and the Oedipus complex, his interest in Moses and the Jewish religion, and his travels to Athens and Rome. Armstrong shows how Freud turned to the ancient world to deal with the challenges posed by his own scientific ambitions and how these lessons influenced the way he handled psychic "evidence" and formulated the universal application of what were initially isolated clinical truths. Freud's narrative reconstructions of the past also related to his sense of Jewishness, linking the historical trajectory of psychoanalysis with contemporary central European Jewish culture. Ranging across the breadth of Freud's work, A Compulsion for Antiquity offers fresh insights into the roots of psychoanalysis and fin de siècle European culture, and makes an important contribution to the burgeoning discipline of mnemohistory.

322 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

Richard H. Armstrong is Associate Professor of Classical Studies and Fellow in the Honors College, University of Houston.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good overview of the nature of Freud's intellectual and personal relationship with the ancient world. Armstrong does a nice job of highlighting the way that Freud's rationalism and vitalism both find a home in the ancient archive.

[Julia Deptuła · Rating 3 out of 5]

dense which makes it hard *disso*

[Josh Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly academic but utterly fascinating. Freud borrowed very heavily from Empedocles and Aristodemus, and of course Sophocles.