Freud and the legacy of Greece.

Abstract

This thesis traces Freud's debt to classical Greece and argues that the development of his theory should not be considered apart from its roots in this legacy. The psychoanalytic project sheltered under the umbrella of Altertumswissenschaft and used the "ancient world to illuminate the modern". Winckelmann's Hellenism provided the foundations to German culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and dominated the educational and cultural institutions in which Freud lived and worked. Nietzsche later challenged Winckelmann's Apollian vision of Greece, and his "psychology of the Dionysian condition" acknowledged both irrational passion and sexuality. Freud is heir to both Winckelmann's and Nietzsche's Greece, and the dialectical tension between the rational and irrational, the mind and the body, that is evident in the reception of classical Greece in the nineteenth century is often paralleled in Freud's work. Hellenism is an essential element in Freud's theory of dreams and the unconscious. Greek mythology grounds the Oedipus complex, and informs his theorising on human sexuality. It plays an influential role in early sexology, and many of the challenges to psychiatry and neurology have their origin in Greek classicism. Not only does psychoanalysis rely on content drawn from this legacy, but its methodology as well as it structure are deeply influenced by Freud's knowledge of ancient Greece and his involvement in classical scholarship.