This chapter assess the philosophical foundation for Cicero’s views on human social relationships and community in the Roman Republic. Starting from De officiis 1.153, I argue that such a foundation is provided by the specifically Stoic notion of the community of gods and human beings, and of human beings as sharing rationality. The De officiis is then assessed on the basis of Cicero’s emphasis on the social aspect of virtue. The remainder of the chapter traces this same theme throughout Cicero’s theoretical writings (including his works on rhetoric), first in the earlier De inventione, De legibus, and De republica, and second in the De finibus and the Tusculanae Disputationes. Hence the commitment to this Stoic foundation for sociability is a constant in Cicero’s oeuvre.

“We think back through our mothers if we are women” Virginia Woolf famously declared in A Room of One’s Own, and she relished rescuing from obscurity women of earlier generations who had been lost to history, lost to memory. This chapter addresses the more complex relationship of Virginia Woolf with her own mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Drawing on Woolf’s diaries and letters, her unfinished memoir, her great autobiographical novel To the Lighthouse – and on Julia Duckworth Stephen’s own extant writings – the author explores Virginia Woolf’s lifelong, evolving relationship with what she called the “invisible presence” of her mother, who had died when she was a girl of thirteen.

In the face of current perplexity and debate about the nature of the republican tradition, this chapter recalls and more fully recovers the republican aspects of Cicero’s political philosophy. The creators of the American Republic, especially John Adams, and many others including contemporary scholars, have looked to Cicero as a major figure, if not the founder, of the republican tradition. Analysis of Cicero’s definition of res publica provides the basis for an interpretation that at its core is consent, not necessarily formal and explicit, implying liberty. To be fully human is to be free, and to be free is to be a consenting partner in a political community that is just and at liberty to set its own course. A dynamism toward equality coupled with the necessary wisdom and virtue and their implication of inequality are also essential to Cicero’s republicanism. These essentials are to inform institutions and practices. The practical wisdom in institutions includes the rule of law, indirect rather than direct popular government, and mixed government. Roman (and thus Ciceronian) republicanism can be differentiated in some respects from that very self-conscious and much-heralded form of republicanism that developed in the America of John Adams.

The chapter seeks to identify the triple historicity of Cicero’s relationship to philosophy. The first part presents Cicero the historian, who sought to clarify the history of philosophy and its reception in Roman society, as well as to analyze the resistance of his contemporaries to the practice of philosophy, which was considered incompatible with political action. The second part describes the intellectual revolution, under the designation of “reason,” which some of the Roman elite developed as a remedy to the crisis of the Republic; Cicero appears there as the witness par excellence of this intellectual experience in the service of the city. The third part of the chapter examines Cicero the philosopher himself, actor of this revolution. The analysis of his work allows us to see the multiple facets of this man who was also reader, translator, and disseminator of texts and ideas, and to identify his place in relation to his literary milieu, and in particular to his friend Varro.

Janet Malcolm famously described psychoanalysis as “the impossible profession.” Writing about “The Varieties of Psychoanalytic Experience” is an equally impossible task. Although the discipline of psychoanalysis was founded by Freud, it has altered dramatically since. I have chosen to focus on the following key issues and concepts: transference, countertransference, and intersubjectivity; the shift from oedipal to preoedipal concerns; the transformations wrought by feminism, social and political studies, and continental theory. These converge on questions of psychoanalysis in relation to history and culture, especially in regard to theories of trauma and mourning. In this sense, psychoanalysis (like literature and literary studies) demonstrates its flexibility, variability, and relevance to contemporary life. The very instability of Freud’s narrative method, as demonstrated in his Dora case history, insures its significance and continuity over time.

The prefaces of Cicero’s late dialogues indicate that they share a pedagogic function with the philosophical practices of the Hellenistic Academy. In the first part of this chapter, we give a few examples showing how the late dialogues serve this end, and use them to argue that Cicero’s texts systematically enact, as well as represent, an Academic pedagogical methodology. In the second part of the chapter, we use these results to propose that Cicero’s earlier, “Platonic,” dialogues are equally sophisticated in the modes through which they effect Academic aims concerning philosophical education. As starting points for further inquiry, we indicate a few of the devices the early dialogues employ to prompt the reader to reflect on her job as a philosophical critic.

The Partition of the South Asian subcontinent in 1947 into modern nation states of India, Pakistan is the historic event that not only inaugurated nationalities where political identities were based on religious differences, but also erased the collective identities different religious communities shared in their struggle against British colonialism over two centuries. In the celebration of India’s independence, the unprecedented violence of Partition is written out of the narrative of the nation as an aberration, a cataclysmic moment of madness. This chapter engages with this moment of madness captured in the Urdu short stories of Sa’adat Hasan Manto and highlights the psychoanalytic role of literature in remembering the violence that haunts India in the its pervasive communal strife. Focusing on Manto’s short stories, this chapter explains how literature allows working through the repressed violence of Partition fostering possibilities of mourning collective communal losses.

This chapter draws on the thinking of Freud, Bion, Ricoeur, Winnicott, as well as on the literary-psychoanalytic writings of Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas, to consider the value of psychoanalytic thinking and procedures in understanding the experience of reading literature in groups. The chapter argues that shared literary reading – specifically the live read-aloud model pioneered and practised by UK charity The Reader – creates conditions analogous to those of the psychoanalytic situation, particularly in providing a "holding" environment for, and stimulating the release of, unconscious material in ways that cannot be predicted in advance. In addition, the neutrality of the literary text in respect of the reader’s inner life makes available a wide range of possible interpretations of the unconscious material disclosed (in place of the single interpretative authoritative of the therapist) while also offering a personal-human language for interpretation and expression (in place of the language of therapeutic orthodoxy).

Cicero’s epistolary corpus is still partly unexplored from a philosophical angle. Modern scholars have left aside discrete and fragmentary allusions to philosophy, though the letters are a laboratory in which the origins and the development of Cicero’s thought appear more clearly than in his later works. The study of Greek words loaded with philosophical connotations, especially when these words are not translated, is particularly enlightening from this point of view. In this chapter, I successively study three different uses of philosophical Greek in Cicero’s letters: (1) Greek language betraying the influence of a philosophical model on the letters (the influence of protreptic) long before the Hortensius was written in 45 bce; (2) Greek language coming from implicit quotes, whether they serve a purely philosophical purpose or interweave philosophy and literature; (3) Greek language revealing the progressive elaboration of a philosophical work, De finibus, and its analysis of the Stoic theory of οἰκείωσις in book 3.

Building on Gustavo Pellón’s classification of Spanish-American novels as documentary novels (novela testimonio), historical novels, detective novels, and marginalized novels, this chapter places them into two groups of psychoanalytic categories: voyeurism/exhibitionism and sadism/masochism, that influence the identity of the subject. The schematic voyeurism-exhibitionism/sadism-masochism in the novels explored in this chapter places focus on concepts that imply an Ego placing its gaze on the world; it acknowledges that we are in constant repetition, learning how to deal with the levels of violence and pain, which, in essence, is translated into how to deal with the Eros and Death drives. Examining Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco as a case study, the chapter explores the applicability of psychoanalysis as it applies to these texts and considers some of the other categories of novels that emerge from this larger, complex cultural context of Latin American literature.

This chapter shows how Shakespeare’s influence on Freud influenced Freud’s reading of Shakespeare. Using the Oedipus complex as the means which Freud famously negotiated questions of literary drama, the chapter revisits his well-known preoccupation with Hamlet by focusing specifically on the issue of recognition. Recognition (or anagnorisis, as Aristotle termed it) is a structural element within drama – and tragedy above all – because it involves relations between things both like and unlike. Freud did not simply recognize his own oedipal dramas enacted within Shakespeare’s play. He also responded to the multiple recognitions staged within Hamlet itself, and to the relations of likeness and unlikeness that are played out there on many different levels. The chapter thus sheds new light on the mutual and creative relationship between literature and psychoanalysis by showing that – as a form of recognition – it, too, is a relationship characterized by an ongoing play between sameness and difference.

This chapter provides a critical account of Cicero’s discussion of the nature of the soul and the emotions in the Tusculan Disputations. The first two sections trace the key steps of Cicero’s argumentation as he critically evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of various competing views in the Greek philosophical tradition. Cicero ultimately purports to favor Plato’s position on the immortality of the soul and the Stoics’ cognitivist account of the emotions. The final section draws attention to the ways in which Cicero employs and evaluates these philosophical resources in the realm of therapeutic practice, as he reflects on his own experience of suffering and loss. Cicero showcases the practical utility of a flexible therapeutic model that focuses on the transformation of beliefs: while he clearly favors the Stoic explanation of the emotions, he does not feel compelled to recommend only the therapy in agreement with that explanation. This pragmatic approach can be seen as a distinctive aspect of Cicero’s own philosophical practice.

Cicero’s De natura deorum, De divinatione, De fato, and Timaeus offer a coherent development of some of the questions first raised in De republica and De legibus. In the specific context of the mid-first-century bce debate between Stoics and Epicureans, Cicero raises three far-reaching issues: can a rational discourse on religion be developed without a solid cosmological and theological foundation? What use can be made of historical and anthropological observations of cultual practices? Is it possible to reach a universal definition of the psychological process which accounts for human attitudes towards the gods? Cicero’s authorial strategies frame skeptical arguments so as to suggest constructive answers and preserve human freedom and moral responsibility. A mythopoetical discourse on the universe offers sufficient background as “provisional physics.” Historical enquiries help define precise limits for political thinking on religion. Philosophy explains psychologically how the admiration for the beauty of the world leads to ethical accomplishment.

Many of Cicero’s translations of Greek concepts (assent, comprehension, quality) have become common terms in philosophy but also in ordinary language in many European countries. Some of them, pertaining to epistemology, ethics, or physics, are studied in this chapter to show why and how Cicero set out to create a Latin philosophical vocabulary. He wanted to extend the supremacy of Rome to an area formerly reserved to the Greeks. He tried to avoid technical terms or neologisms and preferred open notions to closed concepts. He aimed at conveying the complexity of Greek philosophical doctrines in Latin and sometimes brought out certain nuances which did not exist in the Greek terms (as in the case of probabile). Cicero’s originality as a philosopher does not lie in creating a new system but in providing philosophy with a new language and in promoting the idea that philosophy was not the privilege of Greek culture but a field open to human ingenuity.