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Greek Folktales and Psychoanalysis: A Dialogue

Author(s) : Anna Angelopoulos

Reviews and Endorsements

This book follows the road of oral folktales and their enigmas to take us back to the dawn of humanity. Dreams, stories, descriptions of analyses are interwoven to convey the substance of life, while enigmas introduce alternatives and metamorphoses. But interpreters in quest of meaning are needed to decipher these enigmas without fear, at the «crossroads in the labyrinth» where we might meet the minotaur, if we have lost Ariadne’s thread, offered us by the authors of the book. The metamorphoses we speak of sometimes spark jubilation and prompt a paradoxical insight into the encrypted truth of the patient, who until then had lost his way in his own life.
Patrick Chemla, Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, Bezannes, France

This remarkable work reminds us of the fundamental ties between folktales and psychoanalysis; its chapters re-examine one by one the great concerns of human life: love, death, envy, rivalry, power and failure. The work draws on folktales derived from famous myths, to help us understand the paradoxical and contradictory objectives of human beings, by placing human nature in an easy to understand psychopathological perspective. This is not just one more book of psychoanalytic theory applied to folktales, but an essential vade mecum inviting each of us to live, to love and to die accompanied by echoes of oral tales as ancient as human existence on earth. The book reinstates dialogue in its role as a means of creating cohesion, pulling us back from the edge of a possible chasm of barbarity.
Pierre Delion, Child Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, Lille, France