Although Vered Lev Kenaan does not feature Orpheus in her work, the image of the Thracian poet appeared and lingered in my imagination as I read her words. In particular, I thought of Orpheus’ journey to the underworld and his wife Eurydice’s thwarted return to the world of the living. Orpheus’ journey from the underworld is, of course, defined by its disruption and altered by the poet’s fatal backward glance at his dead wife, a visual encounter that forces her to recede from his sight rather than continue the journey with him from the realm of the dead. The fleeting encounter between Orpheus and Eurydice is evocatively captured in a sculpted relief from the late fifth century BCE, extant in several Roman copies (see image 1).

Image 1. Sculpted marble relief. 5^th c. BCE, Roman copy, Naples Archaeological Museum.

Following the standard interpretation that the relief represents the moment when Hermes in his role as psychopompos (or “soul-guide”) reclaims Eurydice from Orpheus for her return to the underworld, this image depicts the point at which living and dead are temporarily united through confrontation. The sculptor of the relief places Eurydice in the center of the image; she is the visual hinge between the dead, represented by Hermes, on the viewer’s left, and Orpheus, on the right, representing the living. Hermes pulls Eurydice by the wrist in one direction while Orpheus beckons with bent arm in the opposite direction, as Eurydice herself temporarily hovers between death and life.

It is this image that simultaneously marks a reunion and a separation, a pause that defines the moment at which forward motion stops and receding motion beings, that became for me a visual icon for several of Lev Kenaan’s central points as I read her illuminating work. In my reading, the experience of Orpheus and Eurydice provides a nexus point for two facets of Lev Kenaan’s discussion: the bidirectional experience of the katabasis, the visit to the underworld, and the “contact between times” that belongs to the “sphere of the unconscious” (6). It is the intersection of these two ideas that I would like to focus on in my response.

In her section entitled “The Past: Buried and Unburied,” Lev Kenaan suggests that the encounter between the conscious and the unconscious necessitates the obliteration of the unconscious, rather than its preservation, for the unconscious is by nature “unchangeable” (38–39). In a footnote to her discussion, Lev Kenaan suggests the analogy of a scene from Federico Fellini’s 1972 film Roma, in which a team of engineers exposes the rooms of an ancient Roman house during their excavation of the tunnels for the Roman subway system; within minutes of their exposure to light, the frescoes adorning the walls of the house begin to fade from view to the amazement and horror of the onlookers (40n8). The scene can be viewed below. 1

Fellini’s iconic scene brings to life Freud’s use of the metaphor of archaeological excavation for the “moment of exposure when the past is recognized in the present” during the encounter with the unconscious, and thus creates in the reader’s mind a helpful visual illustration of this psychological process, in particular, “the stage in which she (the subject) recognizes the links between her conscious and unconscious experience” (40). When applying this dynamic to Fellini’s scene, the faces in the frescoes represent the dead, who, like Eurydice, experience a temporary return from the past to the present, only to fade from existence when exposed for too long to the breath and light of the living. In this sense, they also represent the unconscious, which “dissolves” upon contact with the realm of the conscious (40). It is helpful to think of the subway excavation scene in Roma in terms of its larger context within the film. The scene is the culmination of a visit by a German film crew to the excavation site for the tunnel, with an Italian engineer as their guide. We can read the entire scene as a katabasis. 2

Lev Kenaan’s formal discussion of the katabasis comes in her analysis of Homeric digression, where she compares the two as follows: “Using the journey to the land of the dead as a metaphor, digression takes the form of a walk back from the present to the past, and yet one which induces, at the same time, the reverse movement, in which the temporarily awakened dead return from the past to the present” (105). The katabasis, in her discussion, is a metaphor for the way memory operates in the context of the scene between Odysseus and his nurse as she washes his feet in book 19 of Homer’s Odyssey in which the origin story of Odysseus’ scar serves as a digression from the central narrative. Beyond this specific example and in light of the broader scope of Lev Kenaan’s work, I suggest that the idea of katabasis is productive for thinking specifically about the journey that enables the unconscious to emerge into the realm of the conscious. The metaphor of archaeological excavation trades upon a notion of a journey between the earth’s surface and its underworld, in which the present tunnels down to excavate and expose the layers of the past. Thus Fellini’s scene is additionally useful for linking Lev Kenaan’s ideas about the encounter with the unconscious with the idea of katabasis.

While the fictional fading frescoes of subterranean Rome in Roma demonstrate the evanescence of the past at the moment of encounter with the present and are thus potent symbols for the metaphor of archaeological excavation for the exposure of the unconscious to the conscious, Freud was particularly interested in the excavated site of Pompeii (not Rome) as “a present that allows the past to appear” (42). I would thus like to introduce for comparison another cinematic parallel for the irruption of the past into the present through the process of archaeological excavation, this time at the very site of Pompeii, which for Freud was so iconic. Engaging with two sections of Lev Kenaan’s work in particular, “Facing Ancient Experience” and “The Past: Buried and Unburied,” I turn my attention now to an excavation scene in Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 film Journey to Italy, an important predecessor to Fellini’s Roma. This scene, like its counterpart in Roma, intertwines archaeological excavation and the encounter with artifacts from the past in a manner that evokes the katabasis.

Journey to Italy tells the story of a married couple, Alex and Katherine Joyce, who travel from England to Naples in order to sell a property left to them by a family member. Once they have arrived, the film tracks the disintegration of their marriage through their separate explorations within their new environment. Towards the end of the film, Alex suggests to Katherine that they divorce. Moments later the pair is called away to the ancient site of Pompeii by their friend and guide in order to witness a remarkable technological feat. The couple momentarily puts aside their personal crisis to follow him. Their journey to the site of Pompeii can be read as a katabasis, as it is a journey of the living to the land where the dead are entombed. But in this scene, we do not see a descent that reveals preserved just artifacts, but rather it is the dead themselves that emerge into the world of the living. This scene is viewable below. 3

As their guide explains, the couple will witness the process of “plaster casting” the cavities that have been left by the disintegrated bodies of ancient Pompeiians who perished during the city’s destruction. He urges the couple to come see “a man at the moment he was surprised by death.” This description foreshadows the imminent reactions of Katherine and Alex, who will be similarly surprised by the plaster corpses as they emerge, materializing as a stark reminder of death. Bodies that have had no substance for two thousand years, as their guide comments, become material entities through the technology of the plaster casts. In this scene, long-dead victims of Pompeii’s destruction emerge from their burial chamber to shock the inhabitants of the world of the living with the incongruity of their presence. But despite their obvious strangeness, the film makes it clear by Katherine’s reaction that the ancient couple bears a relation to the modern one, as the entangled bodies of the native lovers reflect and distort the estrangement of the foreign tourists. This could be read as the pivotal moment in which the subject recognizes the link between unconscious and conscious experience. In the transformative journey of these bodies from underground to surface, from void to matter, their state of evanescence is converted to one of endurance. Like the frescoes in Roma, these bodies were obliterated by exposure to heat and other elements that they could not withstand prior to, rather than as a result of, their encounter with the living; unlike the frescoes, these bodies are made into objects on their journey to enable engagement with those who inhabit the present.

Sandro Bernardi describes Rossellini’s film as a journey to a world in which “life and death embrace in a continuous exchange,”4 and this embrace is nowhere more prominent than in the scene with the casts at Pompeii. Like double Orpheus figures, Alex and Katherine come face to face with their counterpart Eurydices: the bodies of a couple being excavated from the ruins. Even though Alex and Katherine have descended into the “underworld” of Pompeii, the appearance of the casts that creates an encounter between the living and the dead can be read as a kind of reverse katabasis: at the moments when the casts emerge, the underworld intrudes upon the world of the living. This is precisely the “bidirectionality” that Lev Kenaan suggests as defining both the katabasis and also the path of the unconscious (105).

In her introduction, Lev Kenaan describes the difficulty of translating the unconscious from the past to the present as follows: “It can be translated from the past to the present only on the condition that it could have been restored as an experience in the first place” (15). The unconscious is an “unrecoverable absence,” according to Lev Kenaan (15). This transformation from essence to embodiment in Rossellini’s scene suggests a solution to the frustration of “unrecoverable absence” by giving absence a physical presence. The bodies themselves, immaterial and irrecoverable, are, through the casting process, given material form that allows them to be recovered and recognized by those engaged in their reception. The formation of the casts suggests the process by which not only the past, but the experience of the past (“a man surprised at the moment of death”), gains embodiment, is transmitted, and thus made available to the subjective response of those in the present. Rather than fading from sight at the moment of subjective engagement, the casts allow for subjective engagement with the past to endure.

Both Roma and Journey to Italy present their characters’ fleeting encounters with long-buried objects as confrontations that result from irruptions of the past into the present. In both cases, revelation of the object involves a moment of mirroring, in which object and viewer behold one another across the narrowed chasm of time and space. But in the case of Rossellini’s film, technology that allows movement towards the light and air allows the past to be comprehended and the alienation of present from past is temporarily suspended, while in Fellini’s film, technology that admits light and air into the burial chamber erases the possibility for comprehension, and alienation is restored.

These scenes can be considered in light of Lev Kenaan’s discussion of Freud’s idea of the unconscious as susceptible to change by the dynamic conscious, and his use of the metaphor of excavation at Pompeii to illustrate this process. While the scene from Roma showcases the impossibility of preserving the unconscious once it is exposed to conscious thought, the scene from Journey to Italy illustrates another dimension of the encounter, namely the formation of the physical artifact from the absence that characterizes the unconscious. The emergence of the casts and the identification of the living viewers with the newly-formed artifacts as they appear illustrates the moment of subjective identification with the ancient text that is so key to Lev Kenaan’s understanding of the ancient unconscious. Rather than emerging from the past as artifacts, the casts in their making draw attention to the translation of past to present as a dynamic process that both transforms and renders antiquity accessible to modernity and the unconscious accessible to the conscious.

In her inspiring work, Vered Lev Kenaan encourages us to think of the recovery of the ancient unconscious as a process directly related to the reception of antiquity in the modern world. While Fellini’s scene of the frescoes expresses a unidirectional approach from modernity to antiquity that results in destruction, Rossellini’s scene shows us a bidirectionality: Katherine and Alex travel to an ancient site, but their ancient counterparts simultaneously “travel” upwards from the past and from their burial places to meet the living. The unconscious is revealed as though rising to meet the realm of the conscious, enabled by transformation, rather than simply waiting to be exposed, and thus destroyed in the moment of encounter. It is this image that sticks indelibly in my mind, alongside that of Orpheus and Eurydice captured in a moment of bidirectionality. Both images bring to life for me the central concerns of Lev Kenaan’s book: the interplay among past and present, ancient and modern, the unconscious and the conscious during the encounter between the dead and the living, when evanescence and endurance coexist at the moment of reception.

This essay takes off from a footnote early in Vered Lev Kenaan’s book,

One source of philological ambivalence towards psychoanalysis lies, in my view, in a confusion often made between psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytic hermeneutics. There is, accordingly, a need to differentiate between the role of the unconscious in shaping narratives of self-disclosure, the products of analytic sessions, and the role of the unconscious as a principle of exegesis. The latter is the present study’s main concern. (23n38)

Lev Kenaan indirectly exemplifies psychoanalytic hermeneutics in analyzing Oedipus Rex and psychoanalytic practice in analyzing dreams. As a professional psychoanalyst and amateur literary psychoanalytic hermeneutist, I’ve long been involved in writing and teaching about tragic drama—ancient, Shakespearean, and modern, with psychoanalytic perspectives. I want to illustrate the two modes with an example drawn from my life.

My vignette involves my identifying and explicating a seemingly hitherto unidentified text. I first present a very condensed version of a psychoanalytically informed explication of a text, paying particular attention to some themes important in Lev Kenaan’s book. I next present a psychoanalytic exploration of my reactions around this text that involved unconsciously driven “symptoms.” The analyst, the patient, and the literary-artistic-psychoanalytic interpreter are the same person. The text is a seventeenth-century Flemish tapestry and the story it represents. The clinical piece is a self-analysis—extending from 1993 to the present and crystallized by reading The Ancient Unconscious and preparing this essay.

In 1993, during the awful war engulfing much of the former Yugoslavia, I was a participant in a conference on “Psychiatric Consequences of Ethnic Warfare” at the Woodrow Wilson International School for Scholars in Washington, DC. During his welcoming comments, the director pointed to a somewhat faded tapestry hanging in the meeting room. He said there would be a prize for identifying the tapestry scene—a bearded man being slain by an armored warrior and horrified women looking on, hitherto unidentified by anyone of or coming to the center. Oddly, no one had consulted the Smithsonian loaners of the tapestry. It seemed familiar, its violent content resonated with the subject of the conference, but no recognition. Throughout the day, I remained puzzled.

Then, two colleagues presented a videotaped interview with a Bosnian refugee survivor of Serbian aggression, part of the Stephen Spielberg Holocaust archive at Yale University. The man was describing atrocities he’d witnessed in the course of the conflict: Serbian forces, military and paramilitary, had no regard for civilians, killing women, children, not even respecting old age. “Old age” was the trigger for a cascade of thoughts, memories, associations, and an experience of instant recognition: the scene was at the fall of Troy, with Pyrrhus/Neoptolemus, the avenging son of Achilles, killing aged king Priam at the altar and a horrified Hecuba.

I then flashed on the Players scene in Hamlet where Hamlet asks a player to recite a speech about the slaying of Priam, a graphic speech which Hamlet begins to recite, and the player continues.1 The speech drew upon Vergil’s Aeneid 2 and other Classical sources available to Elizabethan playwrights. I’d just been teaching Hamlet in an undergraduate fall semester course. Already a mycelium was forming of the tapestry’s historical-cultural-literary heritage, my personal history, my several roles as an interpreter, and millennia of political history—ancient Greek, Roman, sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Western Europe, World War II, the subsequent struggle to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, and the ongoing atrocities in parts of the former Yugoslavia.

My Analysis of This Scene and Story of the Trojan War

I have not attempted here to “psychoanalyze” the content or characters of the Trojan tales so much as to complement Lev Kenaan’s formulation of an “ancient unconscious.” The “full meaning” of the text does not become apparent only at one point in time, but rather built into a poetic text are multiple possible construals and constructions becoming manifest over time and space. This tale has numerous iterations from early Homeric and non-Homeric epic sources, through fifth-century tragedy, vase-paintings, Vergil’s Aeneid 2, medieval versions, Shakespeare (especially Hamlet, The Rape of Lucrece—an ekphrasis), 17th century tapestries, and various subsequent tellings. Each version already refers to previous temporal and historical layers, e.g., the epic sources are referring to “events” many centuries earlier, and simultaneously reverberate with contemporary conditions, especially of war and violence (this tapestry was possibly created during the Thirty Years’ War). Versions also reflect a future time, the Homeric, “a tale for men in times to come.”

There is thus a “telescoping,” a crafted anachronism, as it were. Each iteration represents something latent in previous versions, which are “pregnant” with meanings yet to be unfolded, a futura (as Lev Kenaan elaborates Auerbach’s Mimesis and Freud’s Nachträglichkeit). Each iteration also “begets” new possibilities of different and sometimes contradictory identifications—who the aggressor is, who the victim is, as well as contradictory interpretations, such as the costs of war in a society valorizing military might. (“Ares the money changer—urns with ashes in exchange for live young men,” Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 437–55).

Another recurrent tension is that of telling/not telling tales of “pity and terror,” how much a narrator can bear to tell or not tell and how much audiences desire and are fearful of hearing: Aeneas begins with “infandum” and then yields to “incipiam.” In sum, the literary, dramatic, and visual artistic potential of these “epic” tales allows both for articulation, expression, and “putting into words,” powerful currents of feeling and response to lived situations of the audience, as a collective and as individuals, and simultaneously allows for distancing and relief of distress for that audience. Taking all these dimensions into account, I suggest that the manifest text of the poetic work already provides something of its own psychoanalysis.

My Self-Analysis

The Riddle of the Sphinx, or, Oedipus Rex Redux. I proceed in this somewhat free-associational discourse as though my symptom, or presenting problem, was my delay in recognition. My associations span the years roughly from age seven or so to the present with considerable “telescoping,” and I’m not able to neatly dissect what I thought and when about the tapestry on the day of the meeting and in the ensuing days and years until this writing. Sometime during the meeting, perhaps at the moment of the Bosnian man’s interview citing the Serbians not even respecting old age, there came to me a verse of a stirring song from my teenage years in a Zionist youth organization—about rescuing survivors of the Holocaust whom the British Mandate authorities were forbidding to enter Palestine: “You may lean on my arm, o you old one” [sav zakain], Even for such [an aged] person, you [the British, the Arabs] have barred the gate, and a day shall come or vengeance and payment.” These words encapsulate the organizing theme, as I now see it, of my associations: that of a “rescue fantasy,” in which I am cast as some kind of heroic helper, rescuer, savior, and thereby gaining recognition, love, appreciation, and victory over adults and peers that hitherto had been denied me. Also, there is an element of competitively and comparatively besting peers or adults who were not able to effect what I could. Clearly, this fantasy/daydream was consolatory and soothing but also spurred ambition and the direction of my labors, including my choice of profession.

A connected memory begins for me on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day, age eight. WWII was pivotal for me: war games with friends, heroic enactments, maps, worship of relatives in the military, anguish and exaltation, were daily fare. The fate of Jews in Europe and the postwar story of the creation of Israel continued with heroic rescuing themes and beginnings of action in Zionist youth organizations. This included fundraising on New York subways (illegal) and plotting with friends on smuggling ourselves into Palestine to fight, as was actually done by several of our leaders.

In home life, my father faltering in business in the later Depression years, was now a hero working in an aircraft factory. Meanwhile my mother’s struggles with self-esteem often excluded me from efforts to “rescue” her. My maternal grandmother was suffering with painful cancer and my paternal grandmother became demented, conditions from which I could not rescue them. In my middle teenage years, my later professional commitment as psychiatrist and psychoanalyst began to crystallize. Overlapping with interests in the poetry of war, whether Homer (beginning Greek in high school) or the World War I British poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen (see his poem on a poison gas attack, which exemplified “that old lie, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”).

In college, pursuing pre-med studies, after exposure to Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, I majored in “Greek and Hebrew,” and became a kind of psychoanalytic Classics warrior, especially tangling with a classmate who dismissed my interests. Also, other forms of political activism and protest crystallized, a bit dormant in medical school, but resurfacing in years of psychiatric and psychoanalytic training, especially around nuclear war issues and the Vietnam War.

Fast-forward to 1988 together with my wife, I became very involved with studying and organizing around the impact of war and communal violence on children, and we took a sabbatical year in Israel teaching and starting projects on “Children and War.” In brief, the person who arrived at the conference that day at the Woodrow Wilson center was a psychoanalyst, an amateur but deeply committed Classicist, and “warrior” for the rights and needs of children caught in armed conflict. That person also brought with him ongoing conflicts around real and alleged deficiencies in each of those parts of his person: as a psychoanalyst, I was not being with my patients that day; as a Classicist, I was not just an amateur, but an intruder, and not rigorously trained; as a “warrior,” I was more of a student, a writer, and organizer of others around issues of children in war, but not on the front lines, working day-by-day with children caught in armed conflict. So, conflicts around my credentials, conscious and unconscious, as it were, contributed to a delay in recognition. Indeed, a satisfying interpretation.

But something was not quite right, something nagged at me. As I got further into writing this essay, I needed to do some “messy files archeology” and search for the newsletter of the Woodrow Wilson Center; finally found in the equivalent of Middle Bronze III of my files was the article discussing my deciphering the tapestry. But folded into the newsletter was an August 1993 letter from the director thanking me for my contribution, asking if I was wearing the center tie, the prize, but acknowledging, in effect, that at long last he had consulted the curators at the Smithsonian who identified the tapestry as Flemish, ca.1625. “They also have their version of the subject, which I am told has to do with the death of Saint Peter! I am trying to get a copy and if successful will send it to you.” So, unconsciously I was waiting for, but not wanting that letter refuting my solution of my private Riddle of the Sphinx. I had gradually erased the knowledge of my error and remained content with my interpretation! For writing this essay, I then looked up St. Peter the Martyr and learned that St. Peter Martyr was killed in 1252 in Como, Italy, and that, embroiled in some bitter controversies in the church, he was killed by his enemies. My seeing the scene as Priam and Hecuba was a plausible first guess/impression; my interpretation had much merit but was wrong! Donning a more scrupulous art-history hat, I would have pursued a more authoritative opinion, and donning a more scrupulous psychoanalytic hat, I would have stopped and asked myself if perhaps I did not really know for sure if this was the slaying of Priam. To borrow and paraphrase a quotation from Nietzsche that was cited by Freud: “Memory says yes, pride says it cannot have been, memory yields.” Proper atonement: Try and correct the record in the center’s archives, but not return the twenty-seven-year-old tie!

Yet, in framing antiquity as an inaccessible domain, Freud exposed classical philology to its own insecurities. (Lev Kenaan, 14)

The moderns too have a foreign nature. Like the ancient Greeks, they succeeded in repressing it by molding a modified, idealized, self-image that has become their second self. (Lev Kenaan, 63)

In which direction does the classical unconscious lead? Backward, to the fragmentary ruins of antiquity awaiting reconstruction? Or forward, towards its future iterations, as heralded by the ancient world’s dreamscapes loaded with potentiality? In The Ancient Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and the Ancient Text, Vered Lev Kenaan maps out a bidirectional approach. In so doing, she takes us much further than such a dialectic would seem to imply, often in ways that generate striking insights into both the ancient and modern worlds: “We can say to begin with that we are looking for a radical change of perspective, one that would allow us to see that the passage of time is not a barrier to the interpretation of the ancient text so much as the condition and grounds of it” (30). By framing her study of the unconscious as a series of questions pertaining to relational temporality and untimeliness, she illustrates how our persistent instincts toward delimiting the horizons of our ancient texts—repressing them, so to speak—keep us from a deeper, more nuanced understanding of both antiquity and the philological methods that shape our inquiries.

Much like the unconscious itself, the initial premise that “the Egyptian-Roman transmission of the story of Oedipus testifies to the continuity of the Greek past in the present” (2) masks a much deeper exploration that gets at the very heart of classical alterity and the dialectic of modernity and antiquity. On the one hand, The Ancient Unconscious is a cultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical philology during the emergence of psychoanalytic theory—spanning from Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jacob Burckhardt, Johann Joachim Winkelmann, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Hans-Georg Gadamer, E. R. Dodds, and numerous later interlocutors. On the other hand, the monograph offers a series of textual “analyses” that include Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Homer’s Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, Virgil’s Eclogues and Aeneid, and Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica. Through these transtemporal exchanges, Lev Kenaan shows us how Father Chronos is always at the mercy of our maternally-charged psyche that leaves him continually exposed, from the slopes of Mt. Cithaeron’s classical landscapes to the Theban crossroads that constitute our own hermeneutic blind spots.

The Ancient Unconscious opens with the discovery of the Oedipus fresco at Tuna el-Gebel, Egypt, in 1934—uncanny not merely as another instance of colonial ideological reception, but also, as Lev Kenaan notes, the very same year Freud first completed a draft of Moses and Monotheism. Extending this nonlinear transtemporality to the fresco’s triptych, Lev Kenaan, like the Sphinx herself (that primordial Freudian analyst), awakens in us an awareness of our own inescapable position as Oedipal subjects as we gaze upon the tripartite visual narrative. By reading the images from left to right (as we Westerners would be inclined to do), we soon realize that we are already engaging in the very same anachronism deployed in “Sophocles’ play as well as . . . Freud’s retrospective psychoanalytic plot” (5):

The visual experience of the Oedipus fresco resists continuity. . . . Understanding the meaning of textuality through contact between times, historical moments that disown any priority under the law of chronology. (4/6)

However, should we instead choose to view the fresco’s three scenes “concomitantly,” we not only glimpse “an intersection of different times,” but also the “visual possibility in which being unconscious and gaining consciousness coalesce” (5).

This hermeneutic strategy gets further unraveled in chapter 1 (“The Ancient Unconscious? Towards a Methodology”). Therein, Lev Kenaan underscores the untimely, much-contested legacy of psychoanalysis as a model for understanding our own relationship with antiquity, yet one that is still highly relevant, not only for classical studies, but also for the humanities more generally. For classics in particular, this remains an ongoing problematic. Employing the words of Nicole Loraux, whose scholarship as part of the Paris School played a vital role in inaugurating new theoretical methodologies for the study of antiquity, Lev Kenaan writes, “The threat of anachronism, ‘the capital sin against method,’ can thus partly explain why, deep down, practitioners of modern classical philology are antagonistic towards psychoanalysis” (11).1

Lev Kenaan, however, makes “the capital sin against method” the guiding principle of her work:

This option . . . seeks to rearticulate the Freudian unconscious as a dynamic principle of textual meaning and, specifically, as a paradigm of a text’s essence as unfolding, in time, through readings and misreadings, through a constant fusion of horizons that give birth to the “classical text.” (7)

It is in this chapter that she draws upon Gadamer’s Truth and Method, specifically his notion of a “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung), in order to fully embrace the idea of untimeliness as an inexorable element in the study of antiquity.2 In fact, it would be perfectly correct to push for such a methodology even if the focus of her monograph were entirely literary. The study of classical receptions, although occasionally contested as a form of “anachronistic philology,” has slowly gained acceptance for showing how our relationship with antiquity is always-already premised upon several millennia of estrangements, temporal removes, and misreadings. That Lev Kenaan embraces this so resolutely and with such precise clarity, while nevertheless accounting for the many different local histories of the (post)classical text, is undoubtedly the finest achievement of The Ancient Unconscious.

In terms of anachronistic estrangement, one of the main highlights of Lev Kenaan’s monograph is the rich cultural history of the reemergence of the “classical unconscious” that she lays out in chapter 2 (“Hegel’s Antiquity: Far Away, So Close”) and chapter 3 (“Freud on the Acropolis”). Any reader, whether scholar or layperson, seeking to understand the complex relationship between antiquity and modernity would do well to begin their exploration of the topic with these two extremely illuminating chapters. In the first, Lev Kenaan shows us the lasting influence of German idealism (and Romanticism) on the development of modern classical philology. Having already begun this exposé in chapter 1 with a discussion of von Humboldt’s “goal of recovering the richness of the lived experience, the Erlebnis, of the ancients”—which, in von Humboldt’s own words, “attempts to restore and preserve [monuments] as purely and faithfully as possible, and seeks to use them for obtaining reliable knowledge of antiquity” (15)3—in chapter 2 Lev Kenaan builds on these through a series of Hegelian lenses which shaped the latter’s understanding of antiquity (especially his 1809 Nuremburg Gymnasium speech “On Classical Studies”).4 These include alienation; the privileging of Antaeus (as opposed to Heracles) and his link to the primordial, maternal earth; German unification and nationalism (with Greece as a model for its adolescent form); nostos (i.e., the “return” home); Heimatlichkeit (the sense of being at home); and belatedness.5

Much of this is summed up in Lev Kenaan’s appraisal, “Hegel wants the modern student to recognize in the classical texts a perfect form that could become integral to the modern human spirit,” through which “antiquity cradles the modern experience of the unconscious” (60). I myself was quite impressed with Lev Kenaan’s reading of Hegel’s analogy of golden fruit in a silver bowl for antiquity. For she places especial emphasis on his idea of “the multiplicity of their destinies” (48), wherein the fruit preserves the seeds of the ancient unconscious for later generations of interpreters seeking it as a model for their classical receptions. Such a generative reading certainly complicates my own view of Hegelian idealism (more on this below), which saw in Hegel a greater weight bestowed upon the richness of the imagery (gold and silver) and its ready-picked, still-life, reflective outer form that has long served as a lure to classicists unconsciously seeking self-fulfillment through antiquity.

Not surprisingly, Freud complicates matters. Inasmuch as we see some areas of thematic overlap with Hegel, especially the persistent question of Heimatlichkeit, with Freud this shifts more to concerns about derealization, self-alienation, and estrangement. As Lev Kenaan points out, Freud’s merging of the conscious and unconscious on the Acropolis was deeply linked to feelings of melancholia that were tied to the awakening of childhood memories—namely the inability to reconnect with his mother and an ambivalent relationship with his father. The resulting inability to relive such moments inspired both a negation and a disavowal of the existence of antiquity (72–80). Especially salient in these analyses are the discussions of Freud’s experiences as a Galician Jew for whom—unlike Hegel, von Humboldt, and Winkelmann (another interlocutor included in this chapter)—the idealism of the Grand Tour would not have offered the same wholly positive affirmations of German autochthony.

Moreover, Lev Kenaan judiciously shows how this identity issue is further complicated by Freud’s allusion (seemingly an unconscious intertextual cathexis) to Virgil’s first Eclogue and its central theme of dispossession which emerges in the dialogue between Tityrus and Meliboeus:

Meliboeus’ flight from his fatherland is a fact; yet its reality is strangely negated, as Tityrus’ hyperbolic adynaton shows. Exile, uprooted people, and forced migrations are for him only imaginative possibilities that remain impossible in Tityrus’ real world.” (85)

As I read through this section, I kept wondering about the intrusion of Augustan Rome onto Freud’s visit to the Athenian Acropolis (another noteworthy transcultural estrangement), until Lev Kenaan finally addressed it at the end of the chapter (88–89). In fact, this guided form of self-realization of key themes, which were only belatedly confirmed as I, the reader on my couch, became the analysand within the many layers of text I was analyzing, was a highly effective strategy that continued throughout the monograph.

These examinations of Hegelian philology and Freudian archaeology raise an even broader possibility concerning their respective legacies in classical hermeneutics. By this I mean both the unconscious acceptance of Hegel as a central model in classical studies and the conscious resistance within that same field to Freud (although even with Freud, as Lev Kenaan shows, the unconscious still plays a major role). From a historical perspective, we should ask just how much more (than we consciously affirm) did Hegelian Geist, and the resulting ability to locate and simultaneously identify with the internal essence found in something foreign (that is, the an sich in das Ding), influence the longstanding classical ideal that studying the classics serves not only as an act of self-reflection, but also as a means of self-edification.

Such a supposition begs an additional counterfactual: just how different would the history of philology look had it followed a Kantian rather than a Hegelian turn in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? If earlier classicists had pursued a more experiential, transcendental framework—one based on the not so far-fetched idea that the scholar of antiquities is only able to discern limited, selective fragments of passed down representations, and that their actual essences (the ancient things in themselves) remain largely foreclosed—would classics have embraced Freud’s theories of the unconscious more readily, rather than disputing them so fiercely? Would classical reception studies have taken root much earlier than their sudden rediscovery only at the tail end of the twentieth century? I think the answer is yes, although there is no way to ever prove this beyond the hypothetical. Nevertheless, a number of recently utilized theoretical methodologies in classical studies owe their formation at least in part to Kantian notions of a priori intuition, the unique experiences of self-consciousness, and the categories these generate (whether conscious or not). They include Lacanian structural analysis, Deleuzo-Guattarian territorializations of the subject, object-oriented ontologies, and even identity-based theories (including postcolonial, subaltern, feminist, and LGBTQ, to name only a few).

The last three chapters of The Ancient Unconscious shift their primary locus from Hegelian and Freudian modernity to the vestiges of extant classical texts. Although I do not have room to delve as deeply as I would like into these highly illuminating chapters (and so I hope other symposium participants will do so more extensively than I have), I would nevertheless like to discuss a few general criticisms which these chapters brought to my attention. For they lend themselves well to a Syndicate discussion informed by a desire to delve more deeply into some issues that I felt were given less attention in The Ancient Unconscious than I believe they merit. Nevertheless, none of these should in any way be seen as casting doubt on the immense success of Lev Kenaan’s remarkable study.

First, I wish that slightly more space had been devoted to the discussions of Virgil’s works that mostly took the form of chapter epilogues. In particular, Aeneas’ paternal and political encounters in the Virgilian underworld would have offered a useful memory-dream corollary to the Odyssean “digressive katabasis” at the heart of chapter 4. I myself hoped to hear more about how the hero’s descent into the underworld, like the analysand’s descent into the unconscious, affords some of the strongest connections between not only past and present, as Lev Kenaan herself suggests, but also past and future:

Like katabasis, digression is a bidirectional movement in time. Using the journey to the land of the dead as a metaphor, digression takes the form of a walk back from the present to the past, and yet one which induces, at the same time, the reverse movement in which the temporarily awakened dead return from the past to the present. . . . As such, its ultimate object, the encounter between the living and the dead, reveals the very essence of digression, which is to connect the present and the past. (105–6)6

In this respect, I was surprised that Lev Kenaan chose not to mention “the twin gates of Sleep” in the Aeneid (6.893), in particular the longstanding debate over the significance of Anchises leading his son Aeneas to depart from the underworld through the Ivory gate (through which “the Spirits of the Dead send false dreams to the upper world,” 6.896), since this seems to offer a powerful metaphor for unconscious cathexis. Furthermore, there was significant opportunity to discuss the trans-temporal dynamic of memory-as-prophecy and its prominent role in the political incarnations of the underworld in the Aeneid, most notably the parade of Roman heroes (6.756–892). For the connection to unconscious ideology becomes especially evident when we juxtapose this Virgilian passage with Etienne Balibar’s work on ideological memory, fantasy, and nationalism in his essay “The Nation Form.”7

Insofar as the Odyssey is concerned, the bridging of past, present, and future through the “unconscious underworld” (if I can use the term) is quite prominent during the failed nostos stories told by figures such as Achilles and Agamemnon in Odyssey 11, which link the foreclosed Iliadic past with uncertainties about Odysseus’ eventual return to Ithaca. Likewise, the awakening of the hero on the shores of Phaeacia in Odyssey 6 (which Lev Kenaan incisively links with the trauma flashback during the scar ekphrasis scene in bk. 19) is what leads to the encounter with Nausicaa and her escorting Odysseus to the court of Alcinous (itself a kind of dreamlike, intermediary location). This, in turn, culminates in the further awakening of repressed memories during the songs of Demodocus (bk. 8) that generate the narratives of trauma and suffering which Odysseus himself relates over multiple books (bks. 9–12). Furthermore, it is here that we glimpse the full range of monstrous, primordial, and sublime dreamscapes, including the violent Cyclops and Laestrygonians, instantiations of divinities such as Aeolus, and even the bewitchings of Circe and the Sirens (the latter given clear intertextual associations with the Muses, including earlier memories of the Trojan War, 12.181–91).8 In sum, these cathected sequences offer some of our broadest vantages onto additional timescapes within the larger epic cycle.

However, a more significant question arose when I reflected upon the monograph’s almost unwavering focus on canonical authors like Sophocles, Homer, Hesiod, and Virgil (Artemidorus being perhaps the sole exception). Was the ancient unconscious truly limited to the canon when it came to its mythical manifestations in memory or dream form (and its expression only manifest in works such as the Oedipus Rex, the Odyssey, the Eclogues, the Aeneid, and even Hamlet and the book of Genesis)? Or was this rather the historical byproduct of Freud’s privileging of the Oedipus complex (in a manner not so different from the earlier German idealists)? And would it be worthwhile to consider subsequent challenges to this model by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (not only their joint historicizing of the emergence of the Oedipus complex as a byproduct of capitalist forces on the nuclear family in the early modern era, but also Guattari’s attempt to decouple the unconscious from a structured linguistic framework that privileges the symbolic canon)?9

In reading Lev Kenaan’s extremely nuanced analyses at the historical, philological, and theoretical levels, I don’t think she would be opposed to such interrogations. Thus, I only ask given that the topic of the canonical versus noncanonical unconscious was something that was never explicitly discussed in a work that places so much emphasis on the ancient unconscious as a fundamental bridge between the ancient texts and their postclassical receptions. In chapters 4–6, I was often left wondering whose complexes I was experiencing in such dream-induced cathexes of memory and their subsequent repressions (unlike in chs. 1–3, where it was much more apparent that I was witnessing those of von Humboldt, Hegel, and Freud). Those of Odysseus and Oedipus themselves? Artemidorus’ or those of his later readers? Augustine’s? Freud’s? Erich Auerbach’s? Jean-Pierre Vernant’s? For this was certainly a parade of heroes. Yet I find it hard to believe that the ancients (and also their modern interlocutors) went to bed every night only to dream of Oedipus, or that Oedipus only found his way into the unconscious of philological giants.

Antiquity is certainly a complex entity. The brilliance of Lev Kenaan’s work is to show us that it is also, as the result of various competing influences on classical philology and their accompanying ideological complexes, an extraordinarily protean assemblage. And that any attempt to separate these closely interwoven histories, or to isolate the one from the other, is largely to reduce ourselves to an Oedipal state of agnoia (“ignorance”). At best, we actually end up unknowingly killing father Chronos through our unconscious drives to keep all things classical in their idealized places. This is itself not a wholly dreadful proposition given that anachronistic misreadings do continually shape the classical tradition and offer new, unexpected insights into the ancient world. At worst, however, our philological instincts lead us to tread too cautiously in our acts of zētēma (the “search for truth”).10 And so we sleep unawares with our maternally-induced desires to avoid such a violent patricidal reading in the first place, proclaim ourselves king of a Thebes whose millennia of layered histories have fundamentally altered its original state, and seek in vain to wall off antiquity from modernity, even as our own unconscious ideologies seep in and continually reshape those ancient vestiges. Lev Kenaan masterfully shows us that as surveyors of antiquity, we cannot ever truly separate our own lived, historical experiences from the ancient objects of our inquiries. By virtue of the unconscious and its innumerable dialectics, we continually reconstruct that philological ship of Theseus (or ship of Cadmus, we might say, land-locked Thebes be damned)—with each new reading, at every port of call on the postclassical horizon.

Vered Lev Kenaan’s powerful book makes me wonder yet again about the strangely abstinent ethos of modern philology, which chose to limit itself to tending the wound of the ancient archive—its texts, artifacts, and sites—with seeming selflessness. Seeming, I say, because it really was a matter of professionalization and discursive strategies of mastery, of fencing off a domain where only the properly credentialed could be trusted to interpret for the ancients to the moderns. It is as if the philologist were like what we call Indian agents in the United States, people authorized to treat with the natives penned in their putatively sovereign reservations by an alien polity that had already devoured their landscapes and lifeways, but paused mid-genocide to squirrel a few away for the record. Much as philology would like to trace its genealogy back to the librarian-scholars of Alexandria, it really doesn’t begin to take its familiar shape until early modernity, when the printing press helped to effect the transformation of Greek culture from a Byzantine tradition written in its own hand and pronounced in its own accent to a network of printed objects in the hands of Western Europeans, heavily mediated by Latin and the printed page, pronounced differently (and often badly), and thoroughly commodified for a new context—one that did not involve much in the way of actual Greeks anymore (or sunshine) until the nineteenth century. Then a kind of gunboat Western Classicism rebuilt the Acropolis into an official ruin after it discovered there were still Greeks there who could be counted on to clap for their ancestors. So, we got the postcard we needed, and Antiquity was fully open for business, only now finally with beaches.

Despite this curious process of reification and translatio studii, philology extended the promise of learned liberation—in Lorenzo Valla’s early case, liberation from the preposterous claims of the Donation of Constantine, or later, liberation from the papist haze cast over the Scriptures for the Protestants, for whom the editing of both the New Testament and Homer were coeval tasks. Then philology more daringly extended the promise of liberation from Christianity itself, that dangerous discourse whose notorious anachronism was to read over and over again its end in its beginning and middle, the whole of history writ large as an economy of fall and redemption, each part and parcel linked to a greater whole, which all must join or be damned in the light of Truth. Christianity had a powerful sense of history, after all, powerful enough to redeem the world of its scattered irrelevancies by seeing historical pain as the pathway to perfection—that is, an actual and discernable process to make good on the goodness of Creation, and not just a welter of blind and bloody forces. Once you’ve gone and nailed God to the cross, you’ve really grabbed that wolf contingency by the ears: hold on to it, and you’re saved, let go of it and despair will devour you, as history just recedes into shit happening again while the idols look on with dead eyes.

By the time philology let go of the wolf, philosophy had grown arms long enough to make us feel, if not safe, at least more than wolf-bait—for there was now so much to know, and knowing seemed enough: hominids, dinosaurs, galaxies, pathogens, brainwaves. So, philology just turned to making editions and exhibits, because now it really was just enough to know. And then? Sarajevo, Verdun, Nanjing, Guernica, Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Rwanda, Sarajevo again—in sum, shit happened, a lot of it, and we did it to ourselves on Reason’s watch. While many still grope for the wolf’s ears with Jesus’ hands, Secularism meekly fiddles with the machinery of desire (or consumption, as we now instrumentalize it), still unsure whether to tell us it is we who are the consumed at this point—or at least the illusion of our future.

Psychoanalysis at various times has been described as both a Jewish science and a religion—a Jewish science originally in ironic contrast to Christian Science, it must be said, though the Nazis meant it differently in their witless vulgarity. The thought occurs to me that this may explain philology’s resistance to it: not that psychoanalysis presents itself as something new and dangerous, but rather as something old and repudiated. Part of the exhausting nature of secularism is that hard work of sloughing off the faded chasubles, from when Faith still blessed the projects of philology. Christianity’s hermeneutical anachronism made the past unfinished business, as interpretatio Christiana could find what it was looking for in Vergil’s fourth eclogue and Aeneid, in bespoke Sibylline oracles it pretended to find, in Plato and Aristotle, even in Statius (so Dante) or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of all places. It was all Egyptian gold to be plundered, in Augustine’s vivid metaphor (De doctrina Christiana 2, 40.60), who was himself as great a plunderer of the pagans (Vergil, Sallust, Livy, Varro, Cicero) when he built up the City of God as Alaric was in Rome. So, philology, in its liberated secular embarrassment, built fences and hung signs: FINISHED. LET IT BE. KEEP OFF THE GREEKS. BE KIND TO THE JEWS. Now we are to be adult enough, it seems, to stop looking for redemption in lost worlds, since the messages shooting forth from antiquity are not addressed to the likes of us. Like the museum guard watching lest you get too close to the masterpiece, philology must always give us that stern look that says, “Keep your distance.”

But how are we to be modern without the mirror of the ancient? All modernity is, really, is an -ity of the modo, the “just now”; it is just-nowness. So now, just . . . what? Just stay at your post; post as in post-modern, post-needing-to-see-yourself-in-a-process-of-history? “We don’t need to share a history; a method is enough”—that message just in from the Guild. So, let me get this straight: in the end, this is about “the real work” of history, as if this is just an employment scheme? Just tend the archive and ask nothing for yourself beyond a modest dignitas, a salary and health insurance, and eventually a parking space. To love antiquity too much is to embezzle, to steal it for your own selfish needs, to misappropriate in an act of presentist imperialism. “Man, I just work here. I guard the bank.” So, this philological austerity is a reaction formation against our own greed? A defense against our own compulsion for antiquity?

As Vered Lev Kenaan rightly argues, this fear of anachronism is a powerful thing, one that requires us to ignore our own desire in order to objectify the ancient other, or to constitute that other as an object—of knowledge, of display, of editions, of information. But Freud taught us from the start such cultural investments in objects are by their very nature libidinal, cathexes giving shape to our agency by co-opting our desire—just ask the archaeologist Norbert Hanold, the protagonist of Jensen’s Gradiva, a story where desire runs amok and much mischief is afoot. Desire is such a leaky thing; look where it went to shape modernity’s antiquity—after antiquity no longer meant living, as Dante puppets Vergil to say, al tempo degli dei falsi e bugiardi (Inferno, canto 1). Here’s a truth that’ll set you free: when the one true God becomes a bother, the false gods are more fun. Classical studies provided a good holiday from Christianity since at least the time of Machiavelli, a safe place to play out one’s desire through a kind of personal safari. How else could one reinvigorate virtue into virtù if not through revisiting Romulus’ fratricide? Machiavelli needed Livy to overcome Augustine’s reading of that dire deed, which typifies the earthly city’s sinful divisions as opposed to the harmony of City of God for the plundering bishop (De civitate Dei 15.5). But once Jehovah himself joins the false and lying gods, well then Romulus is a good candidate again for a foundational will-to-power, since the ends (Rome) justified the means (dead Remus). To think such daringly modern thoughts in the Cinquecento, one had to run wild with the Romans, though Machiavelli was still quaint enough back then to actually dress up for the occasion.1 And running wild and naked in one’s unredeemed humanity was part of what the beaches of antiquity always offered to modernity—you see, it really is Christianity’s fault for making us want bad things. I am not just talking about sex—though I am definitely talking about sex—but a host of other fantasies: an organic community, an aesthetic citizenship, a culture at home in nature, a mixed constitution, a wholly human humanity, “the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome”—these last the words of Edgar Allen Poe (“To Helen”), a slogan that at least connects with Greek kleos and Roman maiestas more honestly than Winckelmann’s “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” or Matthew Arnold’s “sweetness and light.” Maybe the purpose of that fence philology had to put up went the other way around: DO NOT FEED THE MODERNS. That really makes more sense, given that the other side of the fence is a graveyard while the moderns are needy and noisy.

So, psychoanalysis itself is an anachronism, a return to the past as unfinished business, to antiquity turned into a dog park of desire where we let our baser selves run free. Bad moderns! Down boy! Put your Oedipus away! But Freud wasn’t content to leave it at an ontogenetic level; it’s not just that we are, each of us, full of missing persons and steered by our dark and infantile selves, projecting onto everything like hurling freshmen. There is that great embarrassment (certainly to his Welsh biographer, Ernest Jones): the “archaic heritage” of inherited memory, the inherited experience of the primal horde and the primal patricide, that big bang theory of culture which refines from the murdered Urvater the fossil fuel of phylogenetic guilt, a surplus production in fact that explains the discontent in civilization, das Unbehagen in der Kultur.

What a strange religion is psychoanalysis, which offers guilt without redemption, and strives toward achieving only a melancholy agency in the light of unreason. What a grand mythology only to make us more at home in our sadness, in our quiet bougie threnody for Kultur’s demands at the cost of our instinctual nature. The myth of the primal horde arrived in a sense to ground the Oedipus complex in the space of prehistory, a complex that had hitherto floated about as only a trauma in infantile fantasy: Im Anfang war die Tat, Freud concludes Totem and Taboo, speaking through the mask of Faust. Such a dreadfully modern antiquity, where we scroll back to the beginning of culture only to find Nietzsche’s Übermensch (Freud’s words, not mine), whose epic reign paradoxically begins only once you kill him.2 You see? The dead guys win again, only this time it’s modernity haunting modernity, a really messed up cannibal-Darwinian-ape-troop tragedy, brought to you by Lamarckian genetics; but it will do for a start. Nu, shall we talk about Moses? Same deal: primal father, primal patricide, primal guilt. This is why we can’t have nice things, Freud said at the end, exiting just in time to miss the Holocaust. Good timing for an untimely man, especially considering what happened to his sisters. The Germans hate the Jews, Freud argued in Moses and Monotheism, for giving them Jesus; it can be no surprise that they also hate psychoanalysis, the Jewish science, a religion for hysterics and artists and the occasional Welshman. But what good philologists those Germans turned out to be—this Freud himself would never deny, he went to the Gymnasium after all. So, are we all to be good Germans now?

Lev Kenaan plants the flag firmly of ANACHRONISM and dares to say no, challenging us to do the same by enlisting other Germans, namely Gadamer and Hegel, to come to Freud’s aid through the melding of horizons, an odyssey of positive self-alienation, and a dilation of the self’s temporality, for we are never “just now”—if we were, why would meditation be so much work? Whether we take the hermeneutical mind-meld with the ancient text as a festive encounter (Gadamer) or a cathartic exploration of guilt and transgression (Freud), the compresence of the past is inescapable once we enter the encounter, even if elusive and incapable of totalization. Who knows where the past really is, but what we read changes us, as it draws us into conversations we did not start and cannot end. It’s not about progress, as Gadamer pointed out, but participation. And Freud certainly got his participation medal—or rather statue. What could be more Greek than the desire for kleos? Freud’s first self-consciously oedipal desire was to become, somehow, famous enough to have his bust in the Arkadenhof of the University of Vienna, with the Sophoclean tagline, “who knew the famous riddles and was a most powerful man,” something he had read in preparing for his Matura examination in high school. Ernest Jones, Freud’s diligent shabbes goy, made sure he got it in the end, and it was safely unveiled in 1955 when the Austrians were merely Austrians again. So, is this a monument to Freud’s Oedipus, or Sophocles’ Freud? Or to Ernest Jones’ oedipal relationship with Freud? Or Freud’s oedipal relationship to Vienna? That single bust can spawn a thousand discussions, once we let the unconscious haunt the conversation, and Lev Kenaan’s book makes a wonderful place to start.

I wish to express my appreciation and gratitude to Syndicate for its wonderful project of supporting the life of books by reviving the Platonic symposium in our digital age. Books are written to be discussed. Their desire is to incite new thoughts and ideas within an imaginative community of readers, encountering one another at different times and in different places. The present volume of the Syndicate symposium brings together five perceptive readers to reflect on The Ancient Unconscious, and in so doing has allowed a meaningful encounter to take place.

This encounter was especially significant in the context of the epidemic crisis, which alas accompanied our conversation from its very beginning. Our conversation thus finds itself in the august company of literary texts whose imaginative communities are constructed by the threat of the epidemic: The memory of the great plague hovers over Plato’s Symposium, and for the Decameron’s storytellers, the plague of fourteenth-century Europe constituted a real and present threat. By contrast, however, with the contagiousness of an epidemic, intellectual contact among the members of a symposium, including the present one, produces a wonderful work of contamination and crosscutting influences. The epidemic is at least metaphorically inseparable from our discussion of the work of the ancient unconscious, a discussion which is always about the connections and unexpected contact between different perspectives and experiences.

I was fortunate in these uneasy times to be engaged in this discussion about The Ancient Unconscious. It was indeed a great privilege to have Emma M. Brodeur, Emma Scioli, Richard Armstrong, Bennett Simon, and Kyle Khellaf as my interlocutors and the book’s reviewers. Their participation in the symposium is a great token of friendship. Each one of them engaged me with bright thoughts and eye-opening new perspectives.