If there is a Greek tragedy that is not often associated with choral song this must surely be Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. The play has become synonymous with the story about the young Oedipus’ fate made famous by Sigmund Freud, and as such it has been canonized as the founding myth of psychoanalysis. As Freud first put it, in the fourth of his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis: ‘The child takes both of its parents, and more particularly one of them, as the object of its erotic wishes … the child reacts to this by wishing, if he is a son, to take his father’s place, and, if she is a daughter, her mother’s … The myth of King Oedipus, who killed his father and took his mother to wife, reveals, with little modification, the infantile wish, which is later opposed and repudiated by the barrier against incest.’

As a socially and politically engaged composer, Leonard Bernstein created works for the stage that dramatize and explicate the changing status of women, gender relations, and heteronormative sexuality in the society around him. His Trouble in Tahiti (1951), for all its parodic hilarity, constitutes a powerful critique of bourgeois marriage under McCarthyism and establishes the garden as a recurring trope in his subsequent theatrical compositions. The woman-authored Wonderful Town (1953) turns a nostalgic eye on working women in 1930s Greenwich Village, and, elsewhere in Manhattan, West Side Story (1957) both advances the garden trope and gives us Anita, the wise and powerful Latina. In Trouble in Tahiti’s sequel, A Quiet Place (1983) the garden returns musically and textually to prompt a loving reconciliation between non-binary characters and the family patriarch, brokered by a woman.

This chapter develops the topic of blood as a figure of species identity in readings of late Victorian anthropological writing on totemism and on blood brotherhood. The totem, according to its first theorist, is always a species, and totemism is a theory of species identity. Besides anthropology, the chapter discusses Kipling’s Jungle Book and Stoker’s Dracula. It closes with a return to Freud, to the species concept in psychoanalysis, and to species identity as constituted by diet.

This chapter develops the concerns of Chapter 4 by discussing the relation between Freud’s concept of the symptom and Darwin’s reading of defunctioned and residual structures as evidence of species identity and affinity. Freud’s unconscious emerges in this analysis as emerging from the nineteenth century crisis of the species concept.

This chapter introduces the human as a question. It revolves around the figure of the Theban Sphinx and her interaction with Oedipus and traces her presence from the ancient world into the works of Sigmund Freud. The chapter invokes the Sphinx as a presence that both prompts and challenges the way we think the human. Oedipus’ troubled humanity stands at the intersection between his success in solving the Sphinx’s riddle and his apparent failure to understand how her words apply to his own existence. As such, the Sphinx’ intervention at Thebes exposes a deep-seated vulnerability at the core of the human condition – a vulnerability springing from the fact that while the riddle can be solved with the powers of reasoning, the human as a riddle remains enigmatic and beyond the application of logos.

How to theorise the pleasure of thinking? Psychoanalysis is the rare discipline of psychology that has accounted for the pleasure of thinking. Chapter 3 follows a historical presentation of psychoanalysis; it first presents how, when founding psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud theorised thinking and its pleasure, an experience he obviously himself had. The chapter then explores the two next generations of psychoanalysts. It thus focuses on two post-war authors, Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott, who, in very contrasting ways, give us elements to further understand psychic activity and its pleasures. Finally, it examines the work of contemporary theoreticians who, building on Freud, Bion, and Winnicott, turn their interests to the modalities of thinking and, with it, allude also to pleasure (André Green), whether in sublimation (Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor), daydreaming (Thomas Ogden), or the pleasure of insights.

Sebald virtually identified with Kafka. He published two substantial essays on The Castle, inspired by Walter Benjamin. Foregrounding the theme of death, he draws on Freud’s ambivalent concept of the death-drive, and associates Kafka also with Schubert’s Winterreise. Drawing implicitly on Canetti’s Crowds and Power, he interprets the protagonist of The Castle as a messianic figure seeking to confront the Castle’s power. Another essay uses Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, with its Darwinian implications, as pretext for a meditation on cultural and evolutionary decline. In Sebald’s fictional works, Kafka is present throughout much of Vertigo, which in part follows Kafka’s own journey through Northern Italy from Venice to Lake Garda and alludes to Kafka’s ‘The Huntsman Gracchus’, set in the lakeside town of Riva. Sebald explores Kafka’s state of mind, as attested in letters and diaries, returning to the theme of death and also hinting at Kafka’s possible homosexuality. In Austerlitz, a significant quotation from The Trial is worked into the text. Altogether, much of Sebald’s work represents a homage to Kafka.

This chapter traces the origins of psychodynamic psychotherapy back to the late eighteenth century and to the development of ‘moral treatment’ by Pinel in Paris and William Tuke in York. It also considers the contribution of Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism, and its revival as hypnotism in the second half of the nineteenth century by Jean-Martin Charcot and others. It then goes on to consider the work of Freud and the various critiques of his theories. Next the chapter considers the phenomenon of shell shock in the First World War and how it led to further developments in psychotherapy. It then looks at the creation of the Tavistock Clinic in the early twentieth century and the work of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Object relations theory is outlined, and the work of therapists such as Fairbairn, Bowlby, and Winnicott is examined. Finally the chapter briefly considers ‘the turn to the child’ in psychotherapy, the development of group psychotherapy, and the attempts to treat psychosis with psychotherapeutic methods.

4. This chapter gives a detailed account of LTMKs significance, unveiling important new influences and contexts. It provides an original reading of the novel centring on idiocy.

3. This chapter considers Waiting for the Barbarians with relation to a thematics of impasse and bafflement. It argues Coetzee designed the novel to stall the emergence of meaning.

This chapter explores short American fictions that are like jokes, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s contrast between the “tendentious” joke, which generates “pleasure by lifting suppressions and repressions,” and “innocent” humor, its pleasure based on “the liberation of nonsense.” In opposition to ideas of the classical American short story as a compact vehicle of epiphany, it argues for a countertradition of short fiction of “innocent” comedy, which features the linguistic slapstick generated by language learning and exposes the instability of language. It frames the immigrant Leo Rosten as an inheritor of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry, all of whom draw on lexicography and language learning to explore the “innocent” humor of unstable language. Like Boris Eikhenbaum in his description of O. Henry, Rosten’s best-known protagonist, the English-language student Hyman Kaplan, asserts that Russian Jews such as himself are especially attuned to the comic potential of English.

In the surrealist revolt against the state, the Church, and the family, the mother figure became a key target, both as custodian of bourgeois-patriarchal values and as symbol of Catholic doctrine. In works such as Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928), Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s L’age d’or (1930), and Joyce Mansour’s Jules César (1955), mothers are attacked and violated, suffering a fate similar to those of the detested mother figures in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade. Yet not all mothers in surrealist art and literature are portrayed in such unequivocally negative terms. Focusing on Leonor Fini’s Mourmour, conte pour enfants velus (1976) and Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend (2004), this chapter traces an alternative history of surrealist representations of the mother, one in which this figure is rendered more ambiguous and at times even invested with revolutionary potential. These novels, the chapter suggests, elaborate representations of maternity in critical dialogue with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. As such they resonate to some extent with the (largely contemporaneous) work of French feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, in which the concept of maternity becomes configured as an alternative to the phallocentric symbolic order.

This chapter addresses the most common problems in historiographic approaches to religious content in Freud’s oeuvre through a close reading of Freud’s first foray into the ancient Mother cult that appeared in the Zentralblatt at the end of 1911. I explore how misleading assumptions about the untitled four-paragraph text known as “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” reflects broader issues in scholarship on religion in psychoanalysis. I demonstrate that these historiographical trends on religious content has effectively obscured Freud’s main point, which turns out to an editorial epistle announcing Freud’s editorial control of the Zentralblatt after Alfred Adler’s resignation hidden in the metaphoric chaff of religious hootenanny.

The book concludes by looking at what Jung and Freud published and did not publish on Jonah after their break. This retrospective perspective helps us evaluate the legacy and aftereffects of what was written during the founding years of the psychoanalytic periodicals. The book concludes with a reappraisal of Freud’s decision to end his life on the Jewish Day of Atonement during the Second World War in the context of the extraordinary ways the story on the Book of Jonah played out before the First World War.

This chapter maps five stages of the founding history of the psychoanalytic periodical enterprise, beginning with Freud’s pre-analytic phantasies around a journal, its social form, and unavoidable emotional content. Freud later nurtured a small group of followers expressly to establish a periodical and found the discourse on religion critical to the enterprise. With the arrival of competing periodicals on the scene, the use of religious rhetoric editors utilized the discourse on religion to narrate group dynamics within the Freudian circle and to enact change in the periodical enterprise itself. In is only in 1912 that religious content became a charged site in Christian-Jewish debates for working out contemporary rivalries and for marking out one’s territory. Jung and his circle began to abandon the analogic treatment of religion for the evidence that the history of religion could provide as the basis for their theoretical differences with Freud.

Freud next elaborates consequences of the structure he has postulated, as he examines the material dreams use (his Chapter V) and the mechanisms by which they reach their manifest form (his Chapter VI). The former investigation allows us to see whether his conception illuminates characteristics of dreaming he has not yet considered, like its favoring of recent and indifferent impressions. The latter effort – his delineation of the means by which the underlying “latent,” wish-fulfilling content of dreams changes into its manifest form – assumes the theory without providing any additional grounds for its evaluation. His fifth chapter turns out, on inspection, also assumes the theory.

A novel contribution of the fifth chapter is the assertion that dreams serve to guard sleep. The sixth chapter introduces the idea that dreaming is a primitive mental process. Freud overstates the case for the former and has yet to elaborate the import of the latter.