My Basket 0 item - £0.00

Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities

Author(s) : Rachel Bowlby

Reviews and Endorsements

Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible - 'a likely story!' - have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story.

This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies - Oedipus and others - which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands of his stories of how children develop and how people change (or don't). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.

Contents:
1. Freud's Classical Mythologies;
2. Never Done, Never to Return: Hysteria and After;
3. Fifty Fifty: Female Subjectivity and the Danaids;
4. The Other Day: The Interpretation of Daydreams;
5. A Freudian Curiosity;
6. The Cronus Complex: Psychoanalytic Myths of the Future for Boys and Girls; 7. Oedipal Origins;
8. Playing God: Reproductive Realism in Euripides' Ion;
9. Retranslations, Reproductions, Recapitulations