"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.
Richard H. Armstrong is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Houston.
What People are Saying About This
Suzanne Marchand
In this intriguing book, Richard H. Armstrong excavates Freud's vast and diverse ancient 'archive,' showing in wonderful detail the ways in which psychoanalysis was built on archaeological, mythological, and historical analogies and evidence. Armstrong has done a wonderful job of documenting Freud's imaginative reconfiguring of the neoclassical tradition, and showing how his sources of resistance to it—his Jewish identity and his debts to French and English anthropology and natural science—were also incorporated into his conception of the psyche. Finally, Armstrong poses a very timely question: if, as seems likely, twenty-first-century culture is no longer so deeply entangled with the ancient world as was Freud's fin de siècle, is psychoanalysis, too, obsolete?
John Peradotto
This book, to use Richard H. Armstrong's own words, 'hovers around Freud's couch' to record the fascinating dialogue between the ancient world and the architect of psychoanalysis. Armstrong's interests are not to use psychoanalysis to interpret classical thought, but rather to show how classical thought shaped psychoanalysis. I know of no more riveting or detailed account of the complex role classical antiquity played in Freud's life and works.
Bennett Simon
A Compulsion for Antiquity is a lively and enlivening, deeply scholarly, work on the dynamic relationship among Freud, the development of psychoanalysis, and the role of the resurrected and re-created nineteenth-century images of classical, biblical, and Middle Eastern antiquity. It stands out among the already fine literature on Freud's intellectual and spiritual matrix.
Peter L. Rudnytsky
For his boldness of argument, astonishing breadth and depth of learning, gift for apt quotation, and stylistic verve and panache, Richard H. Armstrong should be awarded the yellow jersey of Freud studies. His tour de force provides the first comprehensive account of how antiquity is implicated in psychoanalytic theory and argument, and how Freud's 'compulsion for antiquity' in turn provides a paradigm for the entire reception of classical culture in the age of High Modernism.
