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Freudian Mythologies
Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities
Rachel Bowlby
272 pages
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216x138mm
978-0-19-927039-2
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Hardback
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22 February 2007
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- Combines scholarship in diverse areas: psychoanalysis, classical studies, feminism, and philosophy
- Connects of older writings (Freud, Greek tragedy) with contemporary issues about new reproductive technologies, changing family forms, and sexual identities
- Close reading of many kinds of text and story
More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfilment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex - child, mother, father - suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone
far-reaching modifications. 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.Readership: Literary scholars and students, Classicists, Psychoanalysts.
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Rachel Bowlby, Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature, University College London
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"Bowlby's study offers up an impressive intellectual overture to that debate, but it is also an engaging and stimulating study for academics who are not of a psychoanalytic persuasion themselves, but are interested in the potency of myth and its effect on the construction of identity politics." - Lucie Armitt, Contemporary Women's Writing "...an engaging and stimulating study for academics who are not of a psychoanalytic persuasion themselves, but are interested in the potency of myth and its effect on the construction of identity politics." - Lucie Armitt, Contemporary Women's Writing "a very welcome contribution to a growing body of work that continues to probe Greek tragedy with speculative thinking
and political urgency." - Olga Taxidou, Textual Practice "[this] lively and engaging new book... engrossing and enriching re-readings of Freud and his texts of reference." - Peter Brooks, TLS
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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
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