Laughing with MEDUSA : Classical Myth and Feminist Thought

CLASSICAL PRESENCES

General Editors

Lorna Hardwick James I. Peter

CLASSICAL PRESENCES

The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and
Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past
in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of
change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities,
old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear
on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the
classical past.

LAUGHING WITH
MEDUSA

Classical Myth and Feminist Thought

Edited by

Vanda Zajko
and

Miriam Leonard

1

3

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Th e editors would like to thank the following for their help with
this volume: Gillian Clark, Ann Clarke, Mary Economou-Bailey,
Bob Fowler, Simon Goldhill, Duncan Kennedy, Genevieve Liveley,
Charles Martindale, Pantelis Michelakis, and Ellen O’Gorman. We
are also grateful to the anonymous readers for their incisive com-
ments and to Hilary O’Shea for her encouragement and support.
Finally we would like to thank all the contributors for their respon-
siveness, efficiency, and good humour.

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations x
List of Contributors xi
1
Introduction
Va n d a Za j k o and Mi r i a m Le o n a r d 21
45
PART I. Myth and Psychoanalysis 67

1. The Cronus Complex: Psychoanalytic Myths of the 121
Future for Boys and Girls 141
Rachel Bowlby 163

2. ‘Who are we when we read?’: Keats, Klein, Cixous,
and Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles
Vanda Zajko

3. Beyond Oedipus: Feminist Thought, Psychoanalysis,
and Mythical Figurations of the Feminine
Gri selda Po l l o c k

PART I I . Myth and Politics

4. Lacan, Irigaray, and Beyond: Antigones and the
Politics of Psychoanalysis
Miriam Le o n a r d

5. Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood
Si m o n Goldhill

6. Fascism on Stage: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone
Katie Fl em i n g

viii co n t en t s 189
209
PART I I I . Myth and History

7. A Woman’s History of Warfare
Ell e n O’Go r m a n

8. ‘Beyond glorious Ocean’: Feminism, Myth, and
America
Gr e g o r y St al e y

PART I V. Myth and Science 233
253
9. Atoms, Individuals, and Myths 275
Du n c an Ke n n e d y

10. The Philosopher and the Mother Cow: Towards
a Gendered Reading of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Al i s o n Sh a r r o ck

11. Science Fictions and Cyber Myths: or, Do Cyborgs
Dream of Dolly the Sheep?
Ge n e v i e v e Liveley

PART V. Myth and Poetry 297
327
12. Putting the Women Back into the Hesiodic 355
Catalogue of Women 381
Lilli an Do h e r t y

13. Reclaiming the Muse
Pen n y Mu r ra y

14. Defying History: The Legacy of Helen in
Modern Greek Poetry
Efi Sp e nt z o u

15. ‘This tart fable’: Daphne, and Apollo in Modern
Women’s Poetry
Ro w e n a Fo w l e r

contents ix
399
16. Iphigeneia’s Wedding
Eli zabeth Co o k 411
437
Select Bibliography
Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

3.1. Augustus John, Jane Harrison, 1909. Oil on canvas.
(Newnham Edmund Engelman, College, Cambridge). 69

3.2. Edmund Engelman, Freud’s Vienna consulting room, 75
1938; photograph reproduced by permission of
Todd Engelman; photo supplied by Freud Museum,
London.

3.3. Edmund Engelman, Freud’s Vienna consulting room: 77
detail of the wall at the foot of the analytical couch.
photo, as Fig. 3.2.

3.4. Jean-Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 78
1808. Oil on canvas, 189 Â 144 cm. (Paris:
Muse´e du Louvre.)

3.5. ‘‘Gradiva,’’ copy of a Roman bas-relief copy of
a Hellenistic relief of the fourth century bce in
collection of Sigmund Freud. (Freud Museum, London.) 82

3.6. The horizontal topology in Lacan 97

3.7. The horizontal and vertical topologies in Lacan 98

3.8. Bracha Ettinger, Eurydice no. 17, 1994–6. 113
oil and xerox on paper mounted on canvas,
25.2 Â 52 cm, mounted on chassis, 29 Â 55.5 cm.
(Private collection.)

13.1. Richard Samuel, The Nine Living Muses of Great 333
Britain, 1779. (Courtesy of The National Portrait
Gallery, London.)

15.1. Paul Klee, Jungfrau im Baum (Virgin in a Tree), 383
1903. (Paul-Klee-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum,
Bern.)

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel Bowlby is Northcliffe Professor of English at University
College London. Her books include Shopping with Freud (London,
1993), Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf
(Edinburgh, 1997), and Carried Away: the Invention of Modern
Shopping (London, 2000). Freudian Mythologies is forthcoming
from Oxford.

Elizabeth Cook has written poetry, fiction, and works of scholar-
ship. Her publications include Seeing through Words, a study of late
Renaissance poetry (New Haven, 1986) and Achilles, a fiction
(London, 2001). She is also the editor of the Oxford Authors John
Keats (1990). She has recently completed a translation of Seneca’s
‘Thyestes’ and the libretto of an oratorio for the composer Francis
Grier.

Lillian Doherty is the author of Siren Songs: Gender, Narrators,
and Audiences in the Odyssey (Ann Arbor, 1995) and Gender and
the Interpretation of Classical Myth (London, 2001). She is an
Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland,
College Park.

Katie Fleming is Lecturer in English and Classics at Queen
Mary and Westfield College, London. She has a particular interest
in the political appropriation of the classics in the twentieth cen-
tury and its implications for the theory of reception. Her curr-
ent work includes forthcoming articles on the use and abuse
of the past, and the place of antiquity in twentieth-century totali-
tarianism.

Rowena Fowler was until recently Senior Lecturer in English at the
University of Bristol. She has edited two volumes of the Clarendon

xii l i s t o f c o n t r i b u t o r s

Press edition of Robert Browning and is currently editing the verse
translations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the new collected
edition. She has also published articles on Robert Browning and
papers on Victorian and twentieth-century literature.

Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at King’s
College, Cambridge. His publications include Reading Greek
Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986), The Poet’s Voice (Cambridge, 1991),
Foucault’s Virginity (Cambridge, 1995), and Who Needs Greek?
(Cambridge, 2002).

Duncan F. Kennedy is Professor in Latin Literature and the Theory
of Criticism, University of Bristol. He is the author of The Arts of
Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy (Cam-
bridge, 1993) and Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textuali-
zation of Nature (Ann Arbor, 2002).

Miriam Leonard is Lecturer in Classics, University of Bristol. Her
research interests are in the intellectual history of classics with a
particular emphasis on the reception of Greece in modern European
thought. She has published articles on He´le`ne Cixous’s Oresteia and
Irigaray’s Plato as well as essays on Derrida, Lacan and the recep-
tion of classics in contemporary thought. She is the author of
Athens in Paris (Oxford, 2005).

Genevieve Liveley is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol.
Her teaching and research interests are in Latin literature and
culture, gender, and sexuality, and the classical tradition. Her pub-
lications include articles and essays on Latin poetry and contempor-
ary critical theory, and she is the author of Ovid: Love Songs
(London, 2005).

Penelope Murray is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of
Warwick. She contributed a chapter on Platonic myth to From Myth
to Reason? ed. R. Buxton (Oxford, 1999), and a chapter on Plato’s
Muses to Cultivating the Muse ed. E. Spentzou and D. Fowler
(Oxford, 2002). Her other publications include Genius: The His-
tory of an Idea (Oxford, 1989), Plato on Poetry (Cambridge, 1996),

list of contributors xiii

and Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical
Athenian City, ed. with Peter Wilson (Oxford, 2004).

Ellen O’Gorman is Lecturer in Classics, University of Bristol. She has
published Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus (Cambridge,
2000). She is currently working on another book, about the represen-
tation of Carthage in Roman literature, for readers interested in
history, cultural history, myth, aggressivity, trauma, and narrative,
and on a co-authored book about Rome and the historical novel.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art
at the University of Leeds. She has written extensively on the prob-
lematic of the feminine in the fields of social and feminist histories
of art and of cultural and psychoanalytic theory. Her publications
include Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories
of Art (London, 1988), Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire
and the Writing of Art’s Histories (New York, 1999) and Looking
Back to the Future: Essays on Life, Death and Art (London, 2000).

Alison Sharrock is Professor in Classics at the University of Man-
chester. She has published widely on Latin poetry and feminist
literary theory, particularly relating to the Ovidian corpus. At pre-
sent she is completing a book on Roman Comedy, and working on a
feminist reading of Lucretius.

Efi Spentzou is Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of
London. She is the author of Readers and Writers in Ovid’s Her-
oides: Transgressions of Gender and Genre. (Oxford, 2003). She
has co-edited with Don Fowler Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for
Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature (Oxford, 2002). She is
currently working on a project on subjectivities in Imperial Rome.

Gregory Staley is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of
Maryland. His article on Juvenal’s Third Satire recently appeared in
the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, and his chapter on
Rip Van Winkle as American Odysseus is forthcoming in a special
volume on America’s Classical Greece. He is editing a collection of
essays on American Women and Classical Myths, the subject of a
conference he organized in 1999.

xiv l i s t o f c o n t r i b u t o r s

Vanda Zajko is Senior Lecturer in Classics, University of Bristol. She
has wide-ranging teaching and research interests in the reception of
classical literature, particularly in the twentieth century, and in
mythology, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. She has recently
contributed a chapter on Homer and Joyce to The Cambridge
Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2004) and on Ovid and The
Taming of the Shrew to Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge,
2004). She is currently working on a book about literary identifica-
tions.

Introduction

V a n d a Zajko and Miriam Leonard
arise no/symbols massed
evident/the designated text
(by myriad constellations)
faulty
lacunae lacunae
against texts
against meaning
which is to write violence
outside the text
in another writing
threatening menacing
margins spaces intervals
without pause
action overthrow
(monique wittig, les gue´ rille` res)

Men lining up for her.
Having ideas about her.
Fingering her in their thoughts while they

finger themselves.

Our thanks to Ellen O’Gorman, Duncan Kennedy, and Simon Goldhill for
their comments on this introduction.

2 vanda zajko and miriam leonard

they paste her with their thoughts till there is
no air left to breath.
not one of them has ever seen her.

(elizabeth cook, achilles)

Monique Wittig and Elizabeth Cook, in their respective rewritings
of Homer, typify two different modes of feminism’s engagement
with classical myth. Written at the height of the Women’s Liberation
Movement in the late 1960s, Wittig’s lesbian Iliad radically trans-
forms what she sees as a founding text of patriarchal oppression.
Exposing the ‘lacunae’ in the Homeric narrative, she combines a
resistance to textual authority with revolutionary political activity.
In the spirit of 1968 Paris the journey from ‘hors texte’ to ‘action
overthrow’ is effortless. Cook’s description of Helen gives voice
to a character whose actions are central to other people’s accounts
of the Trojan War but whose inner consciousness is rarely explored.
As Cook points out, ‘having ideas about her’ is not the same as
‘seeing’ her—an interesting phrase, given that it is Helen’s visual
identity which has become so iconic. In a sense Cook’s approach
here exemplifies a desire of feminists to make visible and to fill in the
‘lacunae’ of the tradition. At the same time, her engagement with
the receptions of Homer betrays a self-conscious intertextuality
which is characteristic of the post-modern aesthetic.

Les Gue´rille`res and Achilles, however, both share a preoccupa-
tion with embodiment, a desire to reclaim the materiality of experi-
ence from the abstractions of its literary representation. Writing in
the ‘margins spaces intervals’ of the myth they not only alter its
perspective but challenge its very meaning. The differences between
Wittig and Cook in terms of national identity, political context,
generational outlook, and degree of reverence to the tradition are
outweighed by the common strategy of turning to classical myth.
Instead of creating new genealogies, many feminists have chosen to
revivify ancient narratives to arm contemporary struggles. There is
a tendency to overlook the strangeness of this choice. These myths
are after all not only the products of an androcentric society, they
can also be seen to justify its most basic patriarchal assumptions.
The transformation of normative stories into potent tales of resist-
ance has sometimes been a controversial endeavour for feminists.

introduction 3

The tensions involved in the commitment to classical myth expose
many of the conflicts within feminism itself.

Laughing with Medusa aims to explore how classical myth has
been central to the development of feminist thought rather than
focusing on feminist interpretations of specific myths. He´le`ne Cix-
ous’s ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ is regarded as one of the foundational
texts of the movement known as e´criture feminine, perhaps the most
sustained exploration of myth’s inspirational potential for feminism.
Cixous has been associated predominantly with a group of French
feminists but is distinctive in her determination not to lose sight of the
poetic qualities of myth in her theoretical work1. Indeed her intensely
lyrical voice has sometimes called her very status as a theorist into
question. But for Cixous the potential for dissidence that she identi-
fies in the poetic tradition is central to her very notion of theory. Her
project envisions a utopian space at the limits of the literary imagin-
ary: ‘There has to be somewhere else, I tell myself . . . That is not
obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a some-
where else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that
direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents
new worlds.’2 These new worlds are in fact the old worlds of myth
but they have been revitalized by Cixous’ revelation of their latent
hierarchies and by her championing of those who resist them. For her
this should not be confused with a na¨ıve form of escapism. Cixous
makes it clear that her project involves more than a defiant rejection
of the existing order. It is also a profoundly creative political engage-
ment with the way things could have been. ‘I take books; I leave the
real, colonial space; I go away. Often I go read in a tree. Far from the
ground and the shit. I don’t go and read just to read, to forget—No!
Not to shut myself up in some imaginary paradise. I am searching:

1 Ever since Plato the distinction between the poetic and theoretical
aspects of myth has merited discussion. Feminists have self-consciously
put this issue back on the agenda by questioning the denigration of poetical
writing. One might think, for example, of Susan Griffin, Women and
Nature: The Roaring inside Her (New York, 1978), bell hooks, Ain’t I a
Women: Black Women and Feminism (London, 1982) and Nicole Ward
Jouve, ‘The Street Cleaner’ (London and New York, 1988 ).

2 He´le`ne Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in H. Cixous and C. Cle´ment, The Newly
Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London, 1986), 63–132, 72.

4 vanda zajko and miriam leonard

somewhere there must be people who are like me in their rebellion
and in their hope.’3

Cixous’ claim is not in itself uncontroversial. For her contempor-
ary, Luce Irigaray, working with myth involves a different challenge
for feminism. In her important reworking of the allegory of the cave
from Plato’s Republic she shows how myth fossilizes existing hier-
archies. The way forward for feminists, she suggests, is to dismantle
the system by focusing on the contradictions which uphold it. Her
more deconstructive project emphasizes the historical embedded-
ness of myth and therefore reveals the potential impotence of Cix-
ous’ utopianism. The problem is exemplified by the possible
feminist responses to Cixous’ identification with the figure of
Achilles in ‘Sorties’, which has been the source of a debate between
the two editors of this volume. In her essay Vanda Zajko challenges
Miriam Leonard’s earlier scepticism about Cixous’ strategy. Leon-
ard had expressed her surprise that ‘Cixous can, on the same page,
perform the writing of the self around such incongruous figures as
the Holocaust survivor and the psychopathic hero of Homer’s mar-
tial epic’.4 For Zajko the identification provides Cixous with a
positive role model ‘in relation to whom she could negotiate her
own subjectivity’, it shows her ‘who she could be and therefore who
she was’.

Culture and history are sometimes seen as oppositional terms to
myth, but our debate illustrates how classics occupies a crucial and
special place as both myth and history. Whereas classics sometimes
operates diachronically as an originary point in history, at other
times it defines itself synchronically as a constantly evolving point of
reference. This duality is often regarded as an embarrassment or an
affront to those who would want to emphasize the specificity of the
classical past. Indeed much of the hostility towards ‘French Femi-
nism’ has been couched in terms of the perceived neglect of history
in structuralist and post-structuralist writing.5 For example, in

3 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 72.
4 Miriam Leonard, ‘Creating a Dawn: Writing through Antiquity in the
Works of He´le`ne Cixous’, Arethusa, 33.1 (2000), 121–48.
5 Although there may seem to be a natural association of myth with
structuralism because of the tendency to think of myth as ahistorical, it can
be argued that post-structuralism reinvokes the notion of history to

introduction 5

Feminist Theory and the Classics, Barbara Gold argues that ‘neither
Irigaray nor Cixous emphasizes the effects of culture and history’
and goes on to criticize their theories for leaving ‘little room for
social or political change’.6 But, as we have seen, Cixous’ relation to
history is complex and what is more leaves room for diametrically
opposed interpretations. Her obsessive returns to the specifics of her
biography (as an Austrian/French Jew born in Algeria)7 are com-
bined with a commitment to establishing an intimate familiarity
with characters from myth across time and cultures. She highlights
the contrast between the situatedness of women’s lives and the
archetypal qualities of ancient stories. It is precisely because
women are so circumscribed by their histories that myth becomes
essential for imagining a different future. Irigaray’s divergences
from Cixous have already been mentioned. In her influential work
Speculum of the Other Woman she defines feminism in terms of a
confrontation with history. By taking on the history of thought from

interrogate myth as well as other categories: ‘One crucial difference be-
tween structuralism and post-structuralism involves the question of history.
At first sight, the structuralist use of Saussure’s distinction between syn-
chronic and the diachronic appears to allow for the effacement of history
altogether. It is no accident that the essentially spatial model of structure
seems to work well for a phenomenon such as myth, where the usual
historical perspective is unavailable. But if the analysis of myth, a universal
‘‘grammar’’ of narrative, and even perhaps Foucault’s famous epistemes,
can avoid the question of their own historicity, it could be said that the
‘‘post’’ of post-structuralism contrives to reintroduce it.’ Derek Attridge,
Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, Post-structuralism and the Question
of History (Cambridge, 1987), 1. Within classics the figure of Jean-Pierre
Vernant interestingly combines a structuralist approach to myth with a
strong commitment to history. See his essay ‘Hestia–Hermes: On the Reli-
gious Expression of Space and Movement Among the Greeks’, in Myth and
Thought among the Greeks (London, 1987).

6 Barbara Gold, ‘‘‘But Ariadne Was Never There in the First Place’’:
Finding the Female in Roman Poetry’, in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and
Amy Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics (New York and
London, 1993), 75–101.

7 Cixous’ precise biography is relayed in a footnote in ‘Sorties’, 131: ‘My
father, Sephardic-Spain-Morocco-Algeria—my mother, Ashkeney-Austria-
Hungary-Czechoslavakia (her father) and Spain (her mother) passing by
chance through a Paris that was short-lived’.

6 vanda zajko and miriam leonard

Plato to Freud, she demonstrates how the myths of the past continue
to structure women’s experience in the present.

Within classics the issue of feminism’s relationship to history has
often been discussed in terms of a contrast between women’s history
and gender history8. The traditional periodizing account associates
the former with Anglo-American gynocritics writing in the 1970s
and the latter with the turn to discourse advocated by Foucault in
the History of Sexuality9. This collection refuses to limit its engage-
ment with the historical to a teleological narrative of this sort. The
difficulties of reducing the discussion of a subject such as women’s
involvement in warfare to a polarity between historical empiricism
and discursive analysis are explored in Ellen O’Gorman’s essay. For
her the two are mutually reinforcing and, moreover, their interrela-
tion defines what is specific about feminist history: ‘Feminist his-
toriography attempts to counteract the effects of [patriarchal]
discourse by configuring the project of writing women back into

8 Early ground-breaking works in women’s history include Sarah
Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (New York, 1975), Helene
Foley, Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York, 1981), Mary Lefko-
witz and Maureen Fant (eds.), Women’s Life in Greece and Rome (Balti-
more, 1982), Avril Cameron and Amelie Kuhrt (eds.), Images of Women in
Antiquity (London, 1983), J. Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan (eds.), Women
in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers (New York, 1987), Marilyn
Skinner, Rescuing Creusa: New Methodological Approaches to Women in
Antiquity, Helios, 13.2 (1987), Sarah Pomeroy (ed.), Women’s History and
Ancient History (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1991). David Halperin,
John Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin, Before Sexuality (Princeton, 1990) sig-
nalled a turn towards gender history. Other notable works include Halper-
in’s own One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (London and New York,
1990), Winkler, Constraints of Desire (London and New York, 1990), and
Zeitlin Playing the Other (Chicago, 1996). On the Roman side see Amy
Richlin, The Gardens of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman
Humor (New Haven, 1992) and Maria Wyke (ed.), Parchments of Gender:
Deciphering the Body (Oxford, 1999). Mary Beard, ‘Re-reading (Vestal)
Virginity’, in Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick, Women in Antiquity:
New Assessments (Oxford, 1995), 166–77 is a self-reflective account of our
evolving mythologies of women and gender.

9 For a feminist opposition to the dominance of the Foucauldian influ-
ence in classics see Amy Richlin, ‘Zeus and Metis: Foucault, Feminism,
Classics’, Helios, 18.2 (1991), 160–80. Halperin responds to Richlin in his
latest book, How to do the History of Homosexuality, (Chicago, 2002).

introduction 7

history as a transformation not only of women but also of history.’
O’Gorman’s emphasis on the agency of Helen in narratives of the
Trojan War also exemplifies a vital feminist critique of Foucault
which exposes his complicity with androcentrism in downplaying
the role of the subject in accounts of the past. And, as Lillian
Doherty shows, the relentless foregrounding of textuality has ex-
acerbated the marginalization of women from contemporary repre-
sentations of antiquity.

On the other hand the assumption that a certain kind of feminism
has a more immediate relationship with social change is one that
needs to be examined rather than merely asserted. It is not self-
evident that talking about women’s reality is inevitably a form of
political engagement, and the conflation of empiricism with activ-
ism denies the liberating potential of exposing phallogocentrism.
Structuralist and post-structuralist critiques of the subject have not
only been detrimental to feminism but have also animated its most
fundamental debates. For example, post-structuralism poses the
question of whether we can legitimately talk about a category of
women and of what is at stake in the use of the metaphor of
sisterhood. Thus Judith Butler acknowledges that there is ‘some
political necessity to speak as and for women,’10 but she also insists
that there is a necessity to interrogate identity categories:

Through what exclusions has the feminist subject been constructed, and
how do those excluded domains return to haunt the ‘integrity’ and ‘unity’ of
the feminist ‘we’? And how is it that the very category, the subject, the ‘we’,
that is supposed to be presumed for the purposes of solidarity, produces the
very factionalization it is supposed to quell? Do women want to become
subjects on the model which requires and produces an anterior region of
abjection, or must feminism become a process which is self-critical about
the processes that produce and destabilize identity categories?11

Simon Goldhill’s essay analyses feminism’s double and irreconcil-
able commitment to collectivism and to an identity category which
is necessarily exclusionary. As he puts it: ‘Feminism v feminisms,

10 Judith Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations’, in S. Benhabid, J. Butler,
D. Cornell, and N. Fraser (eds.), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical
Exchange (London and New York, 1995), 35–58 (49).

11 Ibid. 48

8 vanda zajko and miriam leonard

feminism for women v feminism for feminists are unresolved
debates’. The interrogation of identity categories has, however,
been one of the most successful projects of feminism12: distinctions
between private and public, the personal and the academic, the
autobiographical and the disinterested can no longer be so easily
taken for granted.

By structuring our own volume around such antitheses as ‘Myth
and History’ and ‘Myth and Politics’ are we vulnerable to the charge
of reifying the very categories that feminism has called into ques-
tion?13 Cixous is best known for her determination to destabilize
the hierarchical oppositions which order the symbolic systems of
the Western tradition. But it is the difficulty of moving beyond
binarism which is vividly highlighted by several essays in this vol-
ume. Feminism’s drive to oppose myth to logocentrism sometimes
results in the search for an elusive alternative. In her essay Gene-
vieve Liveley recounts how Donna Haraway ‘identifies a series of
key pairings. . . . which she claims, are radically destabilized by the
monstrous hybrid of entity and myth that is the cyborg. However,’
she argues, ‘cyborgs do not re-inscribe or re-embody the traditional
binarism between such categories’. Plurality in contrast to hierarchy
becomes, in Haraway’s schema, the telos of feminism. This begs the
question of whether plurality endangers the fundamental binary
opposition at the heart of femininism—are we really ready to
move beyond sexual difference? Post-feminism too often reduces
the post-structuralist move to subvert oppositional categories into
an end in itself. A politically engaged post-structuralism—which
does not have to be a contradiction in terms—makes us aware of

12 Nancy Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Auto-
biographical Acts (New York and London, 1991), Nicole Ward Jouve,
White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography
(New York and London, 1991), Jane Gallop, Thinking through the Body
(New York, 1988), Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’: Feminism and the
Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis, 1988). Within classics see
Judith Hallett and Thomas Van Nortwick (eds.), Compromising Traditions:
The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship (London and New York, 1997).

13 It could be argued that some of the best feminist writings in classics
have been structured around similar antitheses. The compelling work of
Nicole Loraux and Froma Zeitlin springs to mind.

introduction 9

the violence inherent in binary oppositions and also insists on their
expedience in negotiating ideological struggles.

The Oedipus myth is the obvious example of a narrative of vio-
lence which naturalizes gender inequity. From Deleuze and Guattari,
to Lacan’s notion of the Non/Nom du Pe`re, the post-structuralist
Oedipus has come to symbolize all modes of patriarchal authority.14
Feminists have played a particularly important role in exploring the
potential of moving beyond Oedipal formations. For example, Gri-
selda Pollock’s essay in this volume endorses Bracha Ettinger’s con-
cept of the matrixial as an alternative relational structure to the
Oedipal triangle. The matrixial here is used to describe the ‘co-
humanity’ fostered by the mother between Antigone and Polyneices
which is both beyond and anterior to the Oedipal drama. One might,
then, be tempted to characterize the matrixial as pre-social or even
archaic. But, as Pollock writes, ‘If we want to think beyond Oedipus,
we will have to rewrite these pseudo-chronological habits that hide
their ideological agenda and progressivist telos within chronology—
in art and cultural history as much as in non-feminist psychoanalysis’.
Rachel Bowlby develops this argument by analysing the way myth
in psychoanalytic theory has functioned both as an atemporal
archetype and as a means of understanding an individual’s develop-
ment through time. She juxtaposes Freud’s use of myths associated
with Cronos with his formulation of the Oedipus complex. She
argues that the chronology oscillates so that sometimes ‘the
Cronus-related myths are pre-pre-social’ and at other times ‘castra-
tion postdates and ideally draws a line under the mythical familial
involvements of the Oedipal myth’. She thus highlights the dynamic
which constantly shunts narratives backwards and forwards
between the categories of mythos and logos.

As Duncan Kennedy argues, these categories coexist within the
term mythology. This can imply that ‘mythology’ encodes ‘the as-
sumption that there is a logos, rationalizing and scientistic, that can
explain myths, thus establishing a hierarchy of logos over mythos’.
The collection From Myth to Reason? refutes the simplicity of
this developmental narrative by arguing, from one historical

14 Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1983).

10 v a n d a z a j ko an d m i r i a m l e o n a r d

perspective, for the interdependency of the categories in ancient
Greek thought.15 The dynamism of this interdependency is crucial
to the feminist interpretation of myth. Feminism’s identification with
myth can be understood as a desire to reclaim the underprivileged
term in the gendered opposition between rationality and the myth-
ical. But, as Alison Sharrock argues: ‘As soon as we identify one of
those ‘‘gendered oppositions’’, or notice how certain features like
force or reason tend to be gendered ‘‘masculine’’ while bodiliness or
passivity are gendered ‘‘feminine’’, we potentially create precisely
the segregated conditions which we sought to oppose.’ Capitalizing
on this contradiction, for strategic political reasons, many feminists
have employed the freedom of moving between the rational and
what is both prior and counter to it. Feminism thus functions both
as an alternative logos and a critique of logocentrism.

What are the implications of this idea for characterizing feminism
as a mode of reception of the ancient world? This volume explicitly
focuses on the importance of myth in the formulation of feminist
thought and politics rather than positioning itself as a feminist guide
to classical myth. Whilst feminism could be included as just one of
the many contemporary discourses which mediate our relationship
to antiquity, we privilege feminism as a particularly rigorous and
self-aware model for negotiating presentist concerns and their in-
vestment in the past. Feminists’ simultaneous aim of exposing
generalized structures of power, and their particular manifestations
in personal politics, offer a distinctive contribution to reception
theory16. Moreover, it is not only, as Lillian Doherty argues in
Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth, that ancient
myths reveal a obsession with sexual politics (‘in these stories
wives kill husbands . . . mothers kill sons and fathers sacrifice daugh-
ters with distressing regularity’17) but their reception has also

15 Richard Buxton (ed.), From Myth to Reason: Studies in the Develop-
ment of Greek Thought (Oxford, 1999). See also Geoffrey Lloyd’s import-
ant work in this area, Science, Folklore and Ideology (Cambridge, 1983).

16 An issue which is admirably addressed in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz
and Amy Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics (New York and
London, 1993).

17 Lillian E. Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth
(London, 2001), 12.

introduction 11

repeatedly reinforced the idea that gender is the central preoccupa-
tion of myth. From Hegel’s canonical reading of Antigone, to
Freud’s encounter with Oedipus, classical myth has been used by
modernity to encode sexual difference.

Feminism’s potency as a tool for exposing the ideological agendas
in processes of reception sometimes conceals its own collusiveness
with these very processes. Its status as a meta-narrative occludes its
role in the dynamics of narrativization. Feminists do not only
choose a specific set of protagonists from myth to include in their
narratives, but they also ignore certain aspects of their ancient
contexts and their more modern receptions. As Katie Fleming
argues in the case of Antigone, her ‘totemic value—her eternal
exemplarity—seems always already to recoup previous appropri-
ations, negative or positive, even if . . . this is won with a modicum
of historical and textual amnesia. As with any politicized appropri-
ation of classical mythology, feminism invests in a selective recovery
of its heroine’.

It will be obvious from the essays in this collection that some
mythical characters have been privileged at specific historical mo-
ments.18 Rowena Fowler, for example, shows how in the 1970s
‘women were drawn to particular female figures—Persephone,
Antigone, Philomena—and to patterns and situations which can
be rewritten or reversed . . . They spoke as strong women (Amazons)
or vulnerable men (Philoctetes); they tended to prefer the Sybils to
Muses and to reject the vigil at the loom in favour of the voyage
out.’ There is a temptation to believe that each generation produces
a more sophisticated and nuanced feminist reading which draws on

18 Whereas some myths and texts have been popular with specific brands
of feminism others, such as the Odyssey, have resonated across both tem-
poral and ideological differences; for an early example see Helene Foley,
‘‘‘Reverse Similes’’ and Sex Roles in the Odyssey’, Arethusa, 11 (1978),
7–26. More recently the ancient novel has been the subject of several
monographs which deal with gender, e.g. Simon Goldhill, Foucault’s
Virginity (Cambridge, 1995), Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in
Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Cleitophon (Cambridge, 2004). The essays
in this volume illustrate well how Antigone, for instance, has had an
enormous influence on the history of thought but has played a relatively
minor role for feminist classicists.

12 v a n d a z a j ko an d m i r i a m l e o n a r d

an ever-expanding archive of previous interpretations. But Penny
Murray interestingly shows us this process working in reverse:
whereas Germaine Greer has recently argued that the ‘image of
the muse denies woman’s active participation in artistic creation
and silences female creativity’, in the eighteenth century ‘the learned
ladies of the Bluestocking circle’ utilized the femininity of the muse
to legitimize their own creativity.19 Contemporary feminist emplot-
ments may unwittingly undermine the battles of earlier women.

The receptions of individual myths are not only linked to history
but also to national identity. In her essay on Helen’s afterlife in
modern Greek poetry, Efi Spentzou shows how for many Greek
poets the classical seemed increasingly insignificant against the
background of contemporary struggles. She reveals how Helen in
Ritsos’s Fourth Dimension ‘by her mere wretched presence, decries
the abuse of the classical symbolism and exposes the irrelevance of
the classical past, while the problems of the present are left to fester
beneath a shiny facade’. This image of Helen, weighed down by her
own reception, successively entrapped in adulatory representations,
shows how myths may sometimes become obsolete. The refusal to
forget the resonance of earlier receptions often has an ethical
dimension. In America, for example, according to Greg Staley,
while the Founding Fathers were steeped in classical culture,
they saw the rejection of ‘European myth’ as an ethical imperative
for the new nation. His essay raises the question of whether the
explicitly European genealogies of myth perpetuate the eurocentric
bias of feminism. However, for many it is Europe and America
identified together as ‘the West’ whose dominance needs to be
resisted. The universalist aspirations of classical myth can be chal-
lenged by those who feel excluded by this tradition.20 This is a

19 The description of Sappho as the tenth muse in antiquity has ensured
her high profile. Recently the growth of reception studies has added a new
dimension to her reputation. See Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho 1546–
1937 (Chicago, 1989), Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton, 1999),
Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho History (London, 2003).

20 On classics and eurocentrism see Martin Bernal, Black Athena:
The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation (London, 1987), Edith
Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy
(Oxford, 1989), Shelley Haley, ‘Black Feminist Thought and Classics:

introduction 13

question that Cixous herself addresses throughout ‘Sorties’ as she
negotiates the doubleness of myth—its complicity with colonialism
and its capacity to provide a space beyond it:

Yes, Algeria is unliveable. Not to mention France. Germany! Europe the
accomplice! . . . There has to be somewhere else, I tell myself.21

This book is written under the sign of the Medusa. Its title combines
a reference to Cixous’ seminal essay ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ with a
figure from ancient myth who has become an archetype through her
multiple receptions. As Marjorie Garber and Nancy Vickers put it in
their recent anthology The Medusa Reader:

Poets have called her a Muse. Feminists have adopted her as a sign of
powerful womanhood. Anthropologists read her image as embedded in
the paradoxical logic of amulets, talismans, and relics. Psychoanalysts
have understood the serpents wreathing her head as a symbol of the fear
of castration. Political theorists have cast her as a figure for revolt. Artists
have painted her in moods from sublime to horrific. The most canonical
writers (Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley) have invoked her
story and sung both her praise and her blame. The most adventurous of
postmodern designers and performers see her as a model, a logo, and figure
for the present age.22

Part of the power of Cixous’ essay derives from the inscrutable
figure of its title. The tutelage of the Gorgon as a beautiful and
laughing presence makes a challenge to the traditional subordin-
ation of body to mind seem both possible and plausible and, what is
more, it requires us to look again at the hollow triumph of Perseus.
Cixous’ use of the Medusa exemplifies the way that mythical figures
tend to transcend the restrictions of their particular textual incar-
nations. It is also shows how the potency of particular receptions

Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering’, in Nancy Sorkin Rabino-
witz and Amy Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics (New York
and London, 1993), 23–43. For debates within feminism see Gayatri Spi-
vak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London,
1987) and more recently and controversially Martha C. Nussbaum,
Women and Human Development (Cambridge, 2000).

21 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 72.
22 Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), The Medusa Reader
(New York, 2003), 1.

14 v a n d a z a j ko an d m i r i a m l e o n a r d

transform the mythical figure so that her subsequent and previous
identities are profoundly altered.

Laughing with Medusa is divided into five parts, each of which
juxtaposes myth with a particular kind of logos that has been
scrutinized by feminism. Freud’s obsessive engagement with clas-
sical myth inspires the discussion of the first part, ‘Myth and Psy-
choanalysis’23. Psychoanalysis is a clearly defined body of work
which has been involved in a long-standing and fruitful dialogue
with feminism.24 Each of the essays in Part I represents a major
strand in the reception of Freud, from feminism through Melanie
Klein to Lacan. Bowlby examines how the Freudian theory of
sexual differentiation is grounded in a reading of classical culture
and myth. It is based, on the one hand, on a gendering of the
linguistic constructions of the Latin and Greek languages, and on
the other, on an attempt to use the metaphor of archaeology to
understand the development of the self with reference to Greek
myth and history. The classical past thus becomes for psychoanaly-
sis a means of historicizing and legitimating its clinical findings.
Zajko uses a Kleinian model of identification to understand the
trans-historical power of myth. In particular she thinks about the
phenomenon of cross-gendered identification and explores its mani-
festation in a variety of poetic and theoretical contexts. Pollock
looks beyond Freud’s particular relationship with Oedipus to the
figure of Antigone. She discusses how Antigone’s relationship to her
brother Polyneices can be reconfigured as an unconditional bond to
the maternal other. The model of trans-subjective suffering that
Pollock finds in Antigone demonstrates the continuing power of
classical myth to question the premises of psychoanalysis even as
it has inspired them.

The focus on Antigone continues in the next part, ‘Myth and
Politics’. Since (at least) Hegel, Antigone has found herself at the
centre of a debate about political theory and its relationship to

23 See Page Du Bois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient
Representations of Women (Chicago, 1988).

24 Even classicists have acknowledged the impact of psychoanalysis:
according to Geoffrey Kirk psychoanalysis is one of ‘three major develop-
ments in the modern study of myth’: Geoffrey Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and
Functions in Greek and Other Cultures (Cambridge, 1970), 42.

introduction 15

sexual difference. Part II focuses on the reception of Antigone—
both the myth and the play—with each essay discussing a different
aspect of her ideological appropriation from Antigone’s role in the
politics of psychoanalysis to her manipulation in Nazi thought.
Leonard explores how the figure of Antigone has played a crucial
role in the history of psychoanalysis in post-war France. As Luce
Irigaray and Jacques Lacan compete for the figure of Antigone,
Greek myth becomes the battleground for psychoanalysis and its
definitions of woman. Goldhill asks why Antigone has proved so
irresistible to feminist political theory and in particular the political
theory of the family. Feminists have wanted to claim Antigone as a
sister but he uses Ismene to query the valency of the metaphor of
sisterhood. Fleming turns to Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and the con-
troversy of the Nazi appropriation of Greek mythology. She uses the
particular history of this play to highlight the ethical complexity of
reception and its relationship to feminism.

The third part explores the relationship between myth and history.
The traditional opposition between these terms provides the impetus
for feminism’s exploration of the benefits and limitations of historical
modes of analysis. The essays combine broad theoretical perspectives
on the contested boundary between the two categories with specific
case-studies from the modern era. They address the way ancient
mythical figures have informed more contemporary historiographical
debates about memory, representation, and national identity. O’Gor-
man begins by questioning feminism’s failure to engage in the project
of narrating a history of warfare. She argues that the figure of Helen in
ancient accounts of war offers a potential model for the feminist
historian to rethink history’s accounts of causality and accountability.
She compares different versions of ‘the Helen myth’ to redirect atten-
tion to previously unrecognized thematics. Staley examines the role of
myth in the construction of the nation and looks in particular at the
experience of America. He argues that for the Founding Fathers the
New World was no place for myth. Feminist writers, however, capit-
alized on America’s peripheral relation to the classical world to forge
an identification with mythical figures who occupied a similar pos-
ition within the ancient mythical topography.

Part IV, ‘Myth and Science’, investigates the continuing presence
of ancient mythic thought in the history and development of

16 v a n d a z a j ko an d m i r i a m l e o n a r d

scientific discourse25. The three essays discuss the ways in which
myths of gender have structured the theory and practice of science.
Kennedy’s essay introduces Lucretius and ancient theories of atom-
ism to explore the role of reductionism within feminist accounts of
science. He examines the spectre of ancient myth in science’s gen-
dered formulations of the natural world. Sharrock returns to
Lucretius to offer a reading which highlights the way De Rerum
Natura has become part of science’s investigation of its own geneal-
ogy. She analyses the tropes of personification and abstraction and
their gendering in scientific discourse and asks why Lucretius’s
scientific manifesto is framed by accounts of female mythical char-
acters. Liveley responds to the challenge posed by the previous
essays to think about what constitutes feminist science by dissecting
the work of Donna Haraway and the modern myth of the ‘cyborg’.
She shows how the utopia of feminist science fiction is modelled
upon ancient myths of hybridity but at the same time seeks to
distance itself from that ancient legacy.

The fifth and final part, ‘Myth and Poetry’, demonstrates and
scrutinizes the intimate relationship between creativity and the
feminine. There are various strategies available for feminist criti-
cism if it desires to reanimate female figures in ancient poetry.
Doherty examines the disruption of patrilineal narratives within
the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women by prising apart the mythic
stories from their reception in poetic discourses. She draws atten-
tion to the way most commentators have stubbornly refused to
acknowledge women as the subject matter of this text. She reminds
us that too often classics in its modern manifestations unthinkingly

25 For debates about feminist science see Mary Midgley, Science as
Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning (London, 1992), Evelyn Fox
Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, 1995) Donna
Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(New York, 1991). On ancient science see Geoffrey Lloyd, Science,
Folklore and Ideology (Cambridge, 1983), Ann Ellis Hanson, ‘Continuity
and Change: Three Case Studies in Hippocratic Gynaecological Therapy
and Theory’ in Sarah Pomeroy (ed.), Women’s History and Ancient History
(Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1991), 73–110, Lesley Dean Jones,
Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford, 1996), Helen King,
Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece
(London and New York, 1998).

introduction 17

replicates the male bias of its ancient sources. Murray explores the
significance of the Muses’ gender and the various ways their femi-
ninity has contributed to their reception. She argues that their
presence in the ancient texts is more multifarious than the tradition
has sometimes allowed. In Richard Samuel’s eighteenth-century
painting The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain she identifies a
model for reclaiming the image of the Muse as an emblem of female
capability. Contemporary women’s poetry continues to rework
classical myth. Fowler takes the example of the Ovidian myth of
Daphne in the works of Jorie Graham and Eavan Boland to examine
the role of individual subjectivity in the confrontation between the
poet and the female subjects of the mythic tradition. She considers
closely the relationship between formal experimentation and the
articulation of feminist ideals. Spentzou uses Helen to capture a
moment in the modern Greek nation’s identification with and rejec-
tion of a sense of the classical past. The revalorization of the figure
of an ageing Helen in recent women’s writing in Greece contrasts
with an earlier male tradition which had gone so far as to kill off
Helen.

The volume concludes with an especially commissioned fictional
account, ‘Iphigeneia’s Wedding’, by Elizabeth Cook in which she
gives expression to Iphigeneia’s ambivalent reaction to her meta-
morphic body. Unlike most classical accounts of this myth which
first depict Iphigeneia approaching her father at the scene of her
sacrifice, Cook begins the story in Mycenae, where it is her rela-
tionship with her mother which predominates. For Cook, as for
Cixous, myth becomes a space ‘far from kingdoms, from caesars,
from brawls, from the cravings of penis and sword’26. In its poten-
tial for independence and creativity the autonomous space of myth
becomes the contemporary ‘room of one’s own’:

Clytemnestra replied, ‘She is too young. She is not ready. She prefers
climbing trees with boys to the company of men.’

This was not true. Iphigeneia preferred to climb trees on her own.27

26 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 130
27 See Cook’s piece in this volume, Ch. 16.

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part i

Myth and
Psychoanalysis

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1

The Cronus Complex

Psychoanalytic Myths of the Future
for Boys and Girls

R achel Bowlby

hope, promise, threaten, and swear

Students of Greek and Latin used to be taught that special rules applied
when composing sentences that involved the verbs ‘hope, promise,
threaten, and swear’. The quartet is memorably nonsensical, like a
stupid jingle you can’t get out of your head; at the same time it seems to
suggest a kind of incantatory quality: witches brewing a mixed fate.
For what the verbs have minimally in common is their reference to the
future—or rather, their constructions, different in each instance, of a
particular orientation towards the future.1 ‘Swear’ has the sense of an
oath; it pairs with the ‘promise’ from which it is separated in the set-
piece order of words. ‘Hope’ and ‘threaten’ are then left to make a

1 See e.g. William W. Goodwin, A Greek Grammar (2nd edn. 1894; repr.
London, 1974), 275: ‘Verbs of hoping, expecting, promising, swearing, and
a few others, form an intermediate class between verbs which take the
infinitive in indirect discourse and those which do not; and though they
regularly have the future infinitive, the present and aorist are allowed.’

22 r a ch e l bo w l b y

diametrical semantic contrast between two ways of imagining or
imposing future possibilities: positive and negative. All four verbs
entail the presence of a second verb: ‘I promise to do that’; ‘I hope he
will’; ‘I swear to protect him’, and so on.

In Freud the difference of the sexes can be defined through their
characteristic orientations towards the future and ‘hope, promise,
threaten, and swear’ are close to the bone. For it is versions of these
verbs that supply the templates for the boys and girls of the future.
They open up or rule out certain possibilities, according to their
syntactical and semantic nature. In particular, a contrast between
hopes and threats is fundamental; it is the structuring distinction
that gives each sex its typical character. Femininity hopes (to be
masculine). Masculinity is threatened (with the loss of masculinity).
Despite appearances, the mode if not the mood of the future is
negative in both cases, not just that of being threatened; indeed it
is more, not less so for girls. This is because the hoping sex hopes in
vain.

The story that leads, in Freud, to sexual separation has been
frequently retold. For both boys and girls, a formative, traumatic
moment occurs when they realize the meaning of sexual difference
in relation to the presence or absence of a penis. Immediately prior
to that point, the ‘phallic’ phase does not distinguish between the
value of the sexes. The ‘discovery’ or ‘recognition’ (both words are
used) of castration—that the boy has something the girl does not, or
that the girl lacks what the boy has—does away for ever with this
imagined homogeneity. From now on, two sexes will be marked out
by their dissymmetrical relationships to the phenomenon of castra-
tion. One hopes to remedy it as something that has happened to her;
the other is threatened by the possibility that could happen to him,
as it visibly has to her. This mood, grammatical and emotional, then
governs their different futures; for her in particular it becomes what
can only be called a life-sentence—one that Freud repeats many
times in the course of his writings on female sexuality:

When the little girl discovers her own deficiency [Defekt], from
seeing a male genital, it is only with hesitation and reluctance
that she accepts the unwelcome [unerwu¨ nschte] knowledge. As
we have seen, she clings obstinately to the expectation of one

the cronus complex 23

day having a genital of the same kind too, and her wish for it
survives long after her hope has expired.2

The hope of some day obtaining a penis in spite of everything
and so of becoming like a man may persist to an incredibly late
age and may become a motive for strange and otherwise un-
accountable actions.3

The second line leads her to cling with defiant self-assertiveness
to her threatened masculinity. To an incredibly late age she
clings to the hope of getting a penis some time. That hope
becomes her life’s aim.4

The girl’s recognition [anerkennt] of the fact of her being with-
out a penis does not by any means imply that she submits to
the fact easily. On the contrary, she continues to hold on for a
long time to the wish to get something like it herself and she
believes in that possibility for improbably long years. . . . The
wish to get the longed-for penis eventually in spite of everything
may contribute to the motives that drive a mature woman to
analysis.5

The girl appears as the passive protagonist in a distorted fairy tale—
one in which wishes, hopes, and tenacity of purpose are not just
thwarted, but presented as impossible of fulfilment right from the
start. The story is not about a wish that comes true. Instead it begins

2 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al.,
24 vols. (London, 1953–74), xxi, 233; ‘U¨ ber die weibliche Sexualita¨ t’, in
Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie und verwandte Schriften (1905)
(Frankfurt am Main), 176. Except where specified, English translations of

texts by Freud are all quoted from the Standard Edition, hereafter SE,
followed by volume number. In this and in further quotations, italics are
added unless otherwise stated.

3 Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction
between the Sexes’ (1925), SE, xix. 253; ‘Einige psychische Folgen des
anatomischen Geschlechtsunterschieds’, in Drei Abhandlungen, 163.

4 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 229–30; ‘U¨ ber die weibliche Sexualita¨ t’, 173.
5 Freud, ‘Femininity’ (1933), SE, xxii. 125; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, Studie-
nausgabe (Frankfurt am Main, 1969–75), i. 556.

24 r a ch e l bo w l b y

in mid-wishing with a negative fulfilment, and it tails off without an
end into an indefinite future of wishing for what the unwished-for
knowledge has rendered unobtainable, unwishable. At the begin-
ning, she gets something defined as that which she does not wish for,
the ‘unwelcome’—unerwu¨ nschte, literally ‘unwished for’—know-
ledge. She clings and clings to the hope or wish for what she cannot
have; the same verb, festhalten—hold tight, hold fast—renders
‘cling’ all three times as well as ‘hold on’ in the passages above.
She wishes against all the odds that ‘in spite of everything’ (‘doch
noch einmal’, ‘one day’ (einmal), ‘some day. . . in spite of every-
thing’ (doch noch einmal), ‘some time’ (noch einmal), ‘eventually’
(endlich), her penis will come. Continuing in this way ‘to an incred-
ibly late age’, or for ‘improbably long years’, the girl lives out a tale
that like all fairy tales, good and bad, is unbelievable and unlikely; it
does not seem to involve a real, or realistic life. The princess simply
grows old in her hopeless hoping and impossible wishing; hope and
wish take her place as the active subjects: ‘That hope [Hoffnung]
becomes her life’s aim [Lebenszweck]’; ‘her wish for it survives long
after her hope has expired’ (’der Wunsch danach u¨ berlebt die Hoff-
nung noch um lange Zeit).

This post-castrational story of a woman’s life evokes all kinds of
features that seem to imply particular kinds of narrative outcome,
none of which is actually fulfilled. There are hopes and wishes but
no happy ending on the horizon; there are unlikely phenomena
leading to ‘strange and otherwise unaccountable actions’, but no
disaster or final revelation ensues. Nothing really happens as life
passes the woman by. In Totem and Taboo, Freud refers to ‘the
uneventfulness of her emotional life’.6 Years later in the develop-
ment of psychoanalysis, and years earlier in the development of the
little girl, this extended eventlessness would acquire a partial coun-
terpart in the pre-Oedipal period of exclusive attachment to the
mother, stressed for the first time in the 1931 essay ‘Female Sexual-
ity’. This is another time in the girl’s life that seems to go on for ever,
without significant changes taking place.

6 Freud, Totem and Taboo [1913], SE, xiii. 15; Totem und Tabu (Frank-
furt am Main, 1956), 22.

the cronus complex 25

the girl’s tragedy

But between the two periods of indeterminacy, the girl is briefly and
precipitately at the centre of a dramatic action, what is nothing less
than the end-point of a tragedy. The traumatic ‘discovery’ of her
castration involves the fulfilment of a negative destiny; in true
Aristotelian style, there is an anagnorisis and a peripeteia: recogni-
tion and complete reversal. The girl’s pride is revealed retrospect-
ively as having been the hubris of a mistakenly confident masculinity
on the part of one who was never going to be a hero at all. Castration
is her sudden downfall, in wretched realization of a destiny she did
not know to be hers.

Unlike the blur of the post-castrational non-story, the tragedy of
the girl’s castration involves one sharply telescoped event, her seeing
herself as lacking. Tragic ideas of fall, destiny, recognition, know-
ledge, and discovery are regularly associated with this moment as
Freud recounts it. The last two occur for instance in the first passage
of the four quoted above, in which ‘the little girl discovers her own
deficiency’, and reluctantly ‘accepts the unwelcome knowledge’.
What the girl ‘learns’ (erfahren is the discovery verb here) is not in
question; it is knowledge. This applies equally to ‘the girl’s recog-
nition [anerkennt] of the fact of her being without a penis’,7 insep-
arable from the drop in status that accompanies it: ‘She
acknowledges [anerkennt] the fact of her castration and with it,
too, the superiority of the male and her own inferiority.’8 The event
is sometimes grandly marked:

a momentous discovery [Entdeckung] which little girls are destined
[beschieden] to make. They notice the penis of a brother or playmate,
strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize [erkennt] it as
the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and
from that time forward fall a victim [verfallen] to envy for the penis.9

7 Freud, ‘Femininity’, 125; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, 556.
8 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’ 229; ‘U¨ ber die weibliche Sexualita¨t’, 173.

9 Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences’, 252; ‘Einige psychische

Folgen’, 162.

26 r a ch e l bo w l b y

The discovery (Entdeckung) of her castration is a turning-point in a
girl’s growth.10 But though this critical moment stands out as
a tragic event, it is not really an ending or denouement. It does not
resolve a pre-existing conflict; instead it creates an indefinitely
prolonged and futile struggle for the future. It is as a result of her
unfortunate ‘discovery’ that—and Freud uses the phrase more than
once—the girl will ‘fall a victim to’ penis envy.11 The verb verfallen
carries an idea of addiction as well as decline: unheroically, she
‘sinks into’ penis envy. In classic Greek tragedy, the recognition
typically makes explicit to the characters some fact or action of
their past, or some aspect of their identity of which up till then they
were unaware. Oedipus, in Aristotle’s paradigmatic example, is
forced to see that he is Jocasta’s son and Laius’s murderer. That
recognition is brought about wholly by the force of words. In other
cases, regarded with suspicion by Aristotle, the recognition involves
tangible objects: in Euripides’ Ion, for instance, the visible presence
of the identifiable accoutrements of the baby abandoned at birth.
The effect of a recognition in a tragedy need not be, as it is in
Oedipus, destructive; in Ion it produces what is primarily a happy
reunion of mother and son. In Freud’s tragic story, however, the
recognition of sexual difference is unequivocally negative. For girls,
it does not resolve a conflict but creates one: penis envy is a protest,
a rebellion, against what is simultaneously ‘recognized’ as true. All
is changed. All that is left is a contradictory future: the tension of a
wish that arises out of its being ruled out.

the boy’s bildungsroman

The Freudian girl is thus caught up in the end of a tragedy that is
followed by fragments of an unresolved fairy tale. In the boy’s case,
though the story likewise centres on the same decisive ‘turning-
point’ of seeing the girl as castrated, the sequence of events and
the genres in which they take place are very different. Being under

10 Freud, ‘Femininity’ 126; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, 557.
11 As well as in the passage quoted above, the verb occurs in this context
in ‘Femininity’, 125; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, 556.

the cronus complex 27

threat provokes a radical change; instead of being condemned to
‘cling’ to previous attachments, the boy is able to leave the mythical
sphere of family and childhood and move on out into a wider,
modern world. For girls, it is the recognition of castration that
pushes them into the Oedipal situation. In search of the penis,
they turn from the mother to the father; from this no subsequent
life-changing event will ever definitively release them. For boys the
possibility of castration—the existence of defective ‘girls’—is just as
traumatic a realization as it is for girls, but it resolves, rather than
instigating, the Oedipus complex: in deference to the threat they
give up their erotic wishes in relation to the loved mother and their
rivalry with the father.

Freud stresses the sharpness and neatness of the boy’s Oedipal
situation as a point of distinction between the sexes. In several ways,
his is a much more classic tragedy than the girl’s. First, there is a
clear conflict that arises from the realization of the possibility of
castration: ‘If the satisfaction of love in the field of the Oedipus
complex is to cost the child his penis [through the threatened
punishment of castration] a conflict [Konflikt] is bound to arise.’12
This conflict is seconded by the force of the passionate love triangle:

It is only in the male child that we find the fateful combination [schicksal-
hafte Beziehung] of love for the one parent and simultaneous hatred for the
other as a rival. In his case it is the discovery [Entdeckung] of the possibility
of castration, as proved by the sight of the female genitals, which forces on
him [erzwingt] the transformation [Umbildung] of his Oedipus complex,
and which leads to the creation of his super-ego and thus initiates all the
processes that are designed to make the individual find a place in the
cultural community [Kulturgemeinschaft].13

The characters of this drama are clearly differentiated according to
the motives and emotions that structure the conflict. Love and hate
and the disposition of roles produce the ‘fateful combination’ that
can be identified as such. There is a radical and forced (erzwingt)
upheaval (Umbildung). A hero is brought down to a human level.

12 Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924), SE, xix.
176; ‘Der Untergang des O¨ dipuscomplexes’, Studienausgabe, v. 248.

13 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 229; ‘U¨ ber die weibliche Sexualita¨t’, 172.

28 r a ch e l bo w l b y

This passage also brings out the teleological and reformulating
aspects of the boy’s post-Oedipal development: ‘all the processes
designed to . . . ’. In the German, the aspects of purpose and place-
ment come out more strongly. The processes directly ‘aim’ (abzie-
len). Finding a place is Einreihung: the man is not merely put
somewhere, but is subject to a ‘classification’ in which his individu-
ality is irrelevant. It is a movement from uniqueness and exclusivity
to equality and the sharing of ‘community’: a social revolution
following a shake-up (Umbildung) of the existing autocratic regime.
‘His Majesty the Baby’, in Freud’s immortal characterization of
infantile omnipotence, was the centre of his kingdom and the invul-
nerable source of royal commands and wishes. He has to give up his
unique position and give way to a community of citizens in which
each person, himself among them, has a place. The boy is from now
on involved in a very different kind of subjective universe from the
one that sustained his Oedipal wishes—one in which there are
contracts and conditions, promises and oaths.

Emotionally, the same motive forces are present for both sexes
but they too are reversed in the temporal order, contributing to the
very different stories. The boy starts off, Oedipally, in a situation
of ‘hopeless longing’ (hoffnunglose Neigung)14 in relation to his
mother, but he gets away from it; reversing the order, this state of
longing is where the girl arrives as she belatedly enters her own
version of the Oedipus complex after the traumatic recognition of
her castration. Then the girl too is subject to threats of various
kinds, but these are presented as being of a lesser order than those
that apply to the boy: they do not have the same determining
force. The girl’s ‘threatened masculinity’ (bedrohten Ma¨ nnlich-
keit)15 appears at the point at which she has just found out that
she is without masculinity in any case: when the difference of
masculine and feminine has just arisen, for the first time giving
masculinity, for both sexes, the quality of threatenedness. In
boys, crucially, the threat is combined with fear. But the girl has
nothing to lose and hence nothing to fear, so again the threat
appears as relatively small:

14 Freud, ‘Dissolution’, 173; ‘Der Untergang’, 245.
15 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 376; ‘U¨ ber die weibliche Sexualita¨t’, 173.

the cronus complex 29

The fear of castration being thus excluded in the little girl, a powerful
motive also drops out for the setting-up of a super-ego and for the break-
ing-off of the infantile genital organization. In her, far more than in the boy,
these changes seem to be the result of upbringing and of intimidation from
outside which threatens her with a loss of love.16

There is no big story, and no elementary emotions: ‘a powerful motive
drops out’, is missing from the plot. You cannot have a proper tragedy
without the force of fear (Aristotle’s phobos). As a threat, ‘loss of love’
is much vaguer than castration. The girl’s Oedipal situation, impli-
citly, lacks the sharp outline and hence the certainty of a ‘fateful
combination’ that will bring about the Umbildung, an upheaval
unbuilding followed by reconstruction, to which the boy is subject.
Thus during the early phase of her attachment to her mother, the girl’s
father does represent ‘a troublesome rival’, but still ‘her hostility
towards him never reaches the pitch which is characteristic of boys’
in their Oedipus complex.17 For the girl, the story whose traumatic
turning-point is the realization of castration is in other respects, before
and after that crisis, a domestic tale. In the passage above, ‘changes’
come about as ‘the result of upbringing’ and their outcome will be her
staying indefinitely at home. Instead of forcing her beyond the Oedi-
pal wishes that stay in the family, the discovery of her castration
encourages them. Thus there are ‘women who cling [festhalten] with
especial intensity and tenacity [Za¨higkeit] to the attachment to their
father [Vaterbindung] and to the wish in which it culminates of having
a child by him’.18 As in the previous examples of the girl’s later
orientations, clinging and wishing seem to be ends in themselves; the
women ‘cling’, over-cling (‘with especial intensity and tenacity’) to
‘the attachment’ to the father: they clingingly cling to clinging.

the myth of castration

In the outline story of male development, the boy is able to move
forward from a pre-civilized, myth-making state, into a reasonable

16 Freud, ‘Dissolution’, 321; ‘Der Untergang’, 250.
17 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 226; ‘U¨ ber die weibliche Sexualita¨ t’, 170.
18 Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences’, 251; ‘Einige psychische
Folgen’, 162.

30 r a ch e l bo w l b y

world of social responsibility in which infantile expectations of
heroic centrality have been abandoned and forgotten. Mythical,
ancient thinking is superseded by modern, rational thinking. Fear
of castration is the plot-clinching device that makes the break
between the early and mature phases, between mythological and
social orientations: the prince is forced to become a citizen, held in
place from now on by the understanding that his masculinity is not
invulnerable. Thus the boy is pushed beyond the familial scene of
passionate struggle, and into a new order of rules and measures. The
threat of castration is the precondition for his post-mythological
subjectivity; it is a marked turning-point. But it also remains as
the back-up to a newly circumscribed masculinity: it does not
altogether disappear from the psychological scene once its catalytic
role has been fulfilled.

In this respect, the castration complex differs sharply from the
explicitly mythological scenario of the boy’s development, the Oedi-
pus complex. This, Freud says in 1924, should ideally be seen no
more once the aftermath of the castration complex has done away
with it; ‘the process . . . is equivalent, if it is ideally carried out, to a
destruction [Zersto¨ rung] and an abolition [Aufhebung] of the com-
plex.’19 In the following year this is put even more forcefully,
making Zersto¨ rung and Aufhebung sound like calm philosophical
abstractions by comparison: ‘the complex is not simply repressed, it
is literally smashed to pieces [er zerschellte formlich] by the shock of
threatened castration.’ The complex goes out with a bang; and
Freud concludes that ‘in ideal cases, the Oedipus complex exists
no longer, even in the unconscious’. This dramatic destruction
radically re-forms the grounds of the boy’s existence: ‘[T]he catas-
trophe to the Oedipus complex (the abandonment of incest and the
institution of conscience and morality) may be regarded as a victory
of the race over the individual.’20 What is explicitly derived
from myth, the Oedipus complex, is surmounted. By contrast, the
castration complex survives as basic to the possible paths and the
impasses of adult subjectivity.

19 Freud, ‘Dissolution’, 319; ‘Der Untergang’, 248.
20 Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences’, 257; ‘Einige psychische
Folge’, 167.

the cronus complex 31

For the most part, the episode of the castration complex in
children’s development is presented without reference to any stories
or facts that might independently suggest or support it. There is no
equivalent to the overtly mythological scaffolding, built and
destroyed after use, that is attached to the idea of the Oedipus
complex. In that connection Freud many times reminds his readers
of the ‘legend’ represented in Sophocles’ play. His claim for the
universality of the experience is based directly on an appeal to the
power of the Oedipal themes of incest and parricide to move an
audience. The castration complex, on the other hand, appears to be
independent of mythical or ancient roots.

Yet castration does have its Greek myth, and Freud does refer to it
on a number of occasions. Behind the more developed mythology
from which the story of Oedipus is derived lurk the gods Uranus and
Cronus, father and son; Cronus is the father of Zeus. Freud brings
them up as a pair or trio several times. Their paternal and filial
exploits, sometimes involving Zeus and sometimes not, include
multiple infanticide and father-castration: Zeus may have castrated
his father Cronos, and Cronus did the same to his father, Uranus.
The Freudian Oedipus wishes to murder his father, and the mythical
Oedipus does so by accident; a Cronus, mythical or Freudian,
simply gets on and does it, and not for any secondary motive such
as gaining possession of a mother.

Zeus provides the pivot or dividing point between different or-
ders of legend. Cronus and Uranus, his father and grandfather, are
not the subjects of multifarious or elaborate narratives but are
confined to some pretty elementary pre-human acts: eating their
children and castrating their fathers. As fathers, they don’t exactly
do the family thing. Freud’s statement that the supersession of the
Oedipus complex implies the victory of the ‘race’ over the individ-
ual applies, a fortiori, to the movement of mythology beyond these
monstrous fathers, absolute and obsolete individuals who seek to
annihilate both their offspring and their own fathers. Tellingly, the
word translated by ‘race’ is ‘Generation’. Zeus, at first sight, does
not quite seem to fit in these connections; his other links, beyond his
progenitors, make him an unlikely pater-emasculator. Yet his pos-
ition is always to some extent that of one situated ambiguously
‘between’ different orders of divine existence. He mostly belongs

32 r a ch e l bo w l b y

to the newer world of gods who have relationships and enter into
the plots and affairs of both the immortal and the mortal worlds.
Zeus is both a participant and an arbiter; he has the ruling power,
and is supposed to be aloof and neutral in his role as judge; and yet
he is one among other gods, and not indifferent to mortal attrac-
tions and issues. He takes sides, although he also stands apart from
strife, divine and human. Thus Zeus’s normal transitional or strad-
dling place, between two incommensurable orders, is further con-
fused by his alleged perpetuation of his father’s and grandfather’s
anti-legacy: unfathering.

Freud himself hesitated between the legend which made Zeus a
father-castrator like Cronus himself, and the one which reported no
such thing, and thus clarified Zeus’s separation from those old gods.
It was the second of these that Freud usually took to be the more
authentic, but he hesitates and checks himself. Amost every time
that Cronus comes up in his writings, the issue is raised, and once
specifically in relation to the possible significance of making a
mistake about the story in this charged father–son connection. In
the chapter on ‘errors’ (Irrtumer) in The Psychopathology of Every-
day Life, Freud considers two passages from The Interpretation of
Dreams in which—as he would also do many years later, as we shall
see—he had made Zeus a father-castrator too, like his own father
Kronos: ‘I state that Zeus emasculated [entmannt] his father Kronos
and dethroned him. I was, however, erroneously carrying this atro-
city a generation [Generation] forward; according to Greek myth-
ology it was Kronos who committed it on his father Uranus.’21
Freud assumes, in identifying his mistake, that the event of castra-
tion was necessarily a unique one—not, for instance, the son repeat-
ing what the father had done.

Freud then asks how it was that he came to get this wrong—why,
as he strikingly puts it, ‘my memory provided me at these points
with what was incorrect (mein Geda¨ chtnis in diesen Punkten Unge-
treues lieferte)’, a formulation which makes the error into some-
thing like a useful resource. He explains it in connection with his
own family history. He was the son of his father’s second marriage;

21 Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1905), SE, vi. 218;
Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), 185.

the cronus complex 33

a much older half-brother, son of the first marriage, himself had a
son, Freud’s (half-)nephew, who was Freud’s own age. After getting
to know this brother on a visit to his home in England, ‘my rela-
tionship [Verha¨ ltnis] with my father was changed’ because the
meeting with the brother had prompted ‘phantasies of how different
things would have been if I had been born the son not of my father
but of my brother’. This then Freud sees as the source of ‘my error in
advancing by a generation the mythological atrocities of the Greek
pantheon’.

Freud’s ‘correct’ version of the myth keeps Zeus apart from the
sins of his fathers, and thus more clearly confirms Zeus’s place as
inaugurating a civilized order—one anchored in both the separation
and the continuity of ‘generation’.22 In fantasy, Freud’s own differ-
ence in age from his father (and half-brother) gives realistic support
to making the father redundant, or relegating him to the role of
grandfather. In his explanation of how he came to make the Cronus
mistake, he recalls a significant utterance on the part of his half-
brother:

One of my brother’s admonitions lingered long in my memory. ‘One thing,’
he had said to me, ‘that you must not forget is that as far as the conduct of
your life is concerned you really belong not to the second but to the third
generation in relation to your father.’ Our father had married again in later
life and was therefore much older than his children by his second marriage.23

The solemn, almost oracular tone of the ‘admonitions’ (Mahnun-
gen) links a carefully preserved memory to specific constructions for
the future. Mahnungen are also reminders; as surely as the brother
enjoined the young man ‘that you must not forget’, so the sayings
‘lingered long in my memory’, a source of authority and a granting
of permission to bypass the father on the part of the one who has
himself replaced that father. Freud took his lead, he seems to be
saying, from his older brother, in setting himself at a distance from
an old-world father; and also, as he doesn’t quite say, in making

22 In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, the complete breakdown of the social
and familial order is suggested by the blurring of the generations and the
associated overlapping of kinship categories like ‘mother wife’ or ‘sister
daughter’ that ought to be mutually exclusive. (See lines 1406–8.)

23 Freud, Psychopathology, 220; Zur Psychopathologie, 186–7.

34 r a ch e l bo w l b y

himself analogous to Zeus. This Zeus represents justice, leadership,
and the beginning of a new era. But the stretching out of gener-
ations, enabling Freud to appear in the place of Zeus, has also, so it
is implied, caused a muddle of another kind: if three is really two,
then ‘Zeus’ is not so far apart after all, and is seen like his father as
a perpetrator of mythological ‘atrocities’.

Everything that has to do with the castration myths seems to be
subject to this kind of blur and indistinction. Even Freud’s self-
correction turns out to need recorrection, or at least qualification.
Having stated that he was wrong to include Zeus among the unfilial
sons, he puts in a footnote that begins, self-mockingly, ‘Kein voller
Irrtum!’, ‘not entirely a mistake!’, and goes on to cite the Orphic
version ‘which has Zeus repeat the process of emasculation on his
father Kronos.’24 A further example of indistinction is that fathers
and sons in the Cronus story do not stay generationally separate;
instead each one is driven only and simply to do away with putative
progeny and fathers. In the myth of Uranus whom Freud never
mentions other than in connection with the castrating Cronus, the
confusions are even more extreme. Uranus (the sky), the son of Gaia
(the earth), has children with his mother but makes her swallow
them back; one of them, Cronus, castrates his father, at her instiga-
tion—and she is the mother of both parties, father and son.

psychoanalytic mythologies

Unlike Oedipus, Cronus and Uranus are rarely mentioned by Freud.
But it happens that they, and not Oedipus, appear in a passage
where Freud raises general questions about the relationship of
psychoanalytic theory to mythology. The passage is worth consider-
ing in some detail, as it is fundamental to the issues of knowledge
and story presented in relation to castration and sexual difference.

In The Question of Lay Analyis, Freud offers his sceptical
imaginary interlocutor an analogy with Greek mythology; this is
meant as a way of making the extraordinary psychoanalytic
description of infant sexuality seem less outlandish. He first appeals

24 Freud, Psychopathology, 218 (tr. mod.); Zur Psychopathologie, 185.

the cronus complex 35

to memories of the classical myths taught at school, mentioning as
an example the one about the god Cronus swallowing his children:
‘How strange this must have sounded to you when you first heard it!
But I suppose none of us thought about it at the time.’ The strange-
ness is initially both taken for granted and unexplored, not a matter
for thought. But now, Freud goes on, a meaning is clear: ‘Today we
can also call to mind a number of fairy tales in which some ravenous
animal like a wolf appears, and we shall recognize it as a disguise of
the father.’ Thus myths and fairy tales tell the same story, which can
be interpreted at another level to which, as ‘disguises’, they are
subordinate. Here the gods of mythology and the animals of fairy
tales converge in the same picture of the father. Psychoanalytic
theory has provided an explanation: ‘[I]t was only through the
knowledge of infantile sexuality that it became possible to under-
stand mythology and the world of fairy tales. Here then something
has been gained as a by-product of analytic studies.’25

Freud then moves from a devouring to a castrating father, and
makes a slightly different point about the relationship between
mythological and analytic understanding. And once more Cronus
is brought on as evidence:

You will be no less surprised to hear that male children suffer from a fear of
being robbed of their sexual organ by their father, so that this fear of being
castrated has a most powerful influence on the development of their char-
acter and in deciding the direction to be followed by their sexuality. And
here again mythology may give you the courage to believe psychoanalysis.
The same Kronos who swallowed his children also emasculated his father
Uranus, and was afterwards himself emasculated in revenge by his son
Zeus, who had been rescued through his mother’s cunning [List].26

Whereas in the first example the myth is strange but can be made
comprehensible through psychoanalytic understanding, here the
myth is taken as read; its familiarity provides the grounds for
believing an otherwise astonishing (‘you will be no less surprised’)
psychoanalytic story. Previously, psychoanalysis gave credence to

25 Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), SE, xx. 211; Die Frage
der Laienanalyse, Studienausgabe, iv. 302.

26 Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, 211–12; Die Frage der Laiena-
nalyse, 302.