Epilogue

During the seven years of writing the Ancient Unconscious I would sometimes imagine this moment of closure. I have been invested in this study, in research and writing, for many years, long before I even had a clear view of the book. Sometime in 2011, however, I officially embarked on the new book project. I associate this beginning with a specific dream, whose mysterious nature commanded my attention. The dream brought me once again to the house of Gordon Williams (1926–2010), Thacher Professor of Latin Literature at Yale for twenty years and my PhD advisor. I was showing his beautiful but empty house to someone, though I could not exactly remember who this person was. And yet a strong feeling told me that it was actually Gordon Williams whom I was showing around. The dream was the last of a series during the first year after Gordon’s death, followed shortly after by the death of his wife Jay. These frequent dream visits to their house were part of my mourning....

Childhood memories

An analysis in which the Homeric digression intersects with Freud’s notion of regression leads into a comprehensive reading of the Homeric episode of the foot washing of the Odyssey, Book 19. The chapter concentrates on the mnemonic function of the scar in the Homeric epic and Sophocles’ tragedy. The chapter considers the significance of Oedipus’ childhood memories in shaping the tragic plot of Oedipus Rex as a tragedy of recollection. Oedipus’ and Odysseus’ scars bring home something that has collapsed into forgetfulness. The chapter discusses the significance of ancient and Freudian figures and images of scars as junctions of forgetting and remembering, and shows how ancient narratives of memory (Odysseus) and forgetfulness (Oedipus) can inform our understanding of Freud’s notion of the dream navel.

Freud on the Acropolis

Freud’s essay “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” is the focus of the third chapter. Freud’s short essay revisits an enigmatic memory from the visit to the Acropolis. Two different yet inseparable themes surface in the text; the chapter unravels their connectedness through their relation to the cultural and intellectual dual origins of Freud’s upbringing. In the essay the twofold thematics of Freud’s Jewish background at home and his classical education in the gymnasium intersect, creating a picture of a life of duality, ambivalence, and internal contradictions. The cultural intersection between Athens and Jerusalem constitutes the essence of Freud’s personal history and is responsible for the creation of his indissolubly tangled narrative. The chapter deals with the notion of the woven materiality of the text, the inner ties between antiquity and modernity, as well as those between Freud’s past and present, and the unconscious language of analogies.

Hegel’s antiquity

Chapter 2 presents the question of the unconscious in the context of the history of nineteenth-century German reflection on the encounter between moderns and ancients. The Hegelian dialectic of negation and preservation serves to unpack the received, modified memory of antiquity. In contrast to the common nineteenth-century view that regards classical antiquity as humanity’s remote childhood—its primordial past—Hegel’s notion of antiquity emphasizes rather its connectedness to present circumstances. For Hegel, the memory of antiquity is part of the present and therefore has a formative influence on the openness of modern consciousness to its future.

Introduction

A fresco of the Oedipus drama from the second-century Egyptian Nile Valley is a springboard for an analysis that illustrates how unconscious knowledge is formed and activated by communication across eras and cultures. The fresco is shown to reproduce a visual possibility in which being unconscious and gaining consciousness coalesce, and conveys the idea that searching for the truth and turning to futural horizons of meaning are always evocative of the past. We are introduced to the notion that the modern construction of Oedipus by Freud does not simply leave the ancient character without an unconscious; the interdependence of historical periods and places is too great for any such hierarchy.

Oedipal dreams

This chapter deals with the Oedipal dream as a common experience for both ancient and modern dreamers. This sense of commonality cannot erase a deep and ineradicable difference separating the ancients from the moderns. And yet the chapter points to a hermeneutic possibility that only a comparative reading of ancient and modern dreams can offer. By juxtaposing ancient and modern texts, and ancient and modern dream-interpretations, a third space of textuality—an intermediate zone—opens for us. This is where the unconscious will show up. Relationships between mothers and sons are taken to be the focus for the problematics of the literal-symbolic meaning of the erotic.

The unconscious as a figura futurorum

The triangulation of classics, psychoanalysis, and comparative literature is the proper context for discussing the exegetical significance of what Erich Auerbach, the father of comparative literature, turned into a conceptual cornerstone: the figura futurorum. Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex through the lens of Auerbach’s figura futurorum, the chapter explains the fruitfulness of analogy for psychoanalysis and comparative literature and the kinds of linking (Oedipus–Hamlet, savage–neurotic) that have been crucial in the making of Oedipus’ future into the central plot of psychoanalysis. The universalism of Freud’s claims for psychoanalysis are examined, and shown to depend on his relation to classical antiquity in the formulation of his own experience.

The ancient unconscious?

A split is identified in modern European self-consciousness between an embrace of its formative influences in the ancient world and a historicist guarding of modern boundaries. When philology takes a conservative role, it criticizes boundary-breaking Freudian investigation; anachronism is seen as unsound and unscientific. But cultural constructions belonging to each era, relying also on unconscious processes of formation and transmission, are shown to be transgressive of historical periods. Philology is shown then in a sense to be unjustifiably reifying the differences between different times and places, and to be disallowing perception of the mutual dependence of humanity in modern and ancient times.