Throughout the 19th century, Greece acted as the ideal model for Germany, with an all-embracing power that is difficult to appreciate today. To long for Greece was a sign of the great German soul. Classical studies and Greek in particular dominated the German curriculum. One fundamental force that forms a bridge between the artistic fervour, the educational reforms and the broader politics of culture is German nationalism. Many of the leading writers, artists, and thinkers of the German-speaking world were explicit that their work is dedicated to the formation of a new nationalism. Greece offered an ideal of a society and a culture which the nascent state could strive for. May arguments were developed to make the geneological case convincing. One particularly significant approach is the invention of the Race, the People or in German, Das Volk.
Johann Gottfried von Herder laid down the criteria by which a race could be defined: they must have a shared body of myths, a shared language, a shared homeland and even a shared body type. The race was the Aryan race, its German branch the Teutons. Sir William Jones, a British linguist proposed an original language that existed in the far distant past which explains some of the apparent linguistic connections between the lauages of Europe and the East. He called this Indo-European. The language offered scientific proof that the Aryan Volk were a dominant power in the past- for it was their language and both Greek and German were descended from Indo-European..
A further argument was put in place by Karl-Otfried Muller who published a book in 1824 called the Dorians. The Dorians were said to have invaded Greece from the North and to have succeeded in colonising it. It was based on mythic stories told by much later Greeks in order to justify their political and territorial conquests. Muller contrasts the Dorians with the Ionians favorably. Strange as it may seem this geneology was widely believed. The tyranny of Greece over the German imagination had its ancestor cult.
Our image of the 19th century culture will be hopelessly inadequate if we do not understand how this nationalist myth was forged out of a longing for Greece.
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At the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna, it was perhaps inevitable that Freud should turn to a figure of Greek myth to express his revolutionary comprehension of the psychology of the self, which so changed how the modern world answers the question of where we come from. There’s no escaping Freud today Everyone now lives in a cultural environment deeply influenced by Freudian theory. The subconscious, repression, the Freudian slip, the Freudian symbol are part of what society knows, however scandalous his theories may have seemed to his Victorian audiences and no matter how much modern critics have questioned his propositions. Freud’s Oedipus has become part of how we all understand ourselves.
Freud made an anxiety of self-knowledge central to his therapeutic principles. The inability to escape what the past does to each of us, and the need to pursue a new knowledge of that past, are founding principles of Freudian psychoanalysis. If you do not know how your childhood development is formative, you are destined to spend your life locked into your unresolved Childhood problems (to rewrite Cicero again). What happens to the child and how the child resolves the tensions of his infant life make the adult what he or she is and the failure to resolve those tensions destines the adult to an infantile state. Knowing Where you come from is the pursuit of analysis. For Freud, Oedipus was the figure who epitomized that anxiety of self-knowledge, and Freud made out of Oedipus a master-narrative for the development of the modern mind and modern sexuality. Through Oedipus, Freud found the nasty secret of a sexual past in everyone’s mind. Without Oedipus, psychoanalysis would look very different indeed.
So why did Oedipus play such a role for Freud? Two answers immediately suggest themselves. First, the name of ‘Oedipus’ conveniently summarized the violent, ambivalent emotions of desire between children and parents that Freud saw as the emotional crisis in any child’s early development. Second, he recognized in Greek tragedy the type of exploratory and powerful conversation which psychoanalysis demanded. Freud was explicit about this debt. The action of Oedipus the King. he writes, depicts ‘a process that can be likened to the work of psychoanalysis" Oedipus’ painful, obstinate search for his self, which moves through questioning of the past back towards his engendering, reminds Freud of the work of analysis. The repeated language of ‘solving riddles’, ‘tracking the traces’, ‘hunting the truth’, in which Oedipus’ search is described, was also an obvious attraction.
But, more oddly still, Freud saw himself as Oedipus. He identified with Oedipus, the solver of riddles and tragic searcher for self-knowledge. The typically opaque words of Nietzsche ‘Who of us is Oedipus? Who is the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks’ -could stand as an epigraph to Freud’s lifelong obsession with Oedipus.
In 1873, Freud had made a special study of Oedipus the King, part of which he had to translate in one of his student exams. References to the Sphinx dot his correspondence. He gave one of his patients ‘the present of a picture of Oedipus and a Sphinx’ to thank him for his help in Freud’s self-analysis though we don’t know how the patient interpreted the gift. Around his consulting room as an analyst, he kept statues of ancient figures that he collected avidly. The Sphinx is clearly placed on top of the cabinet, proudly standing, facing the camel over the bowl. Higher on the shelves were busts of the great Greek tragedians, including Sophocles. Freud also had a whole cabinet dedicated to little terracotta statues of Eros, the Winged boy, god of desire.
All indicate Freud's deep and abiding involvement with the classical past. His engagement with antiquity is made most vividly evident by those ancient statues. Freud was passionate about archaeology. The model of excavation, layer by layer was particularly stimulating- both the technique itself and the authenticity of the discovered truth.
But when Freud says that ‘Oedipus’ fate moves us only because it might have been our own,’ or when other critics in the same tradition make such statements as ‘in some sense Oedipus is every man and every man is potentially Oedipus’, another appeal is being made too and it is deeply connected to the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Writing at the pinnacle 0f the German-speaking world’s love of Greece and its nationalist fervour, Freud is uncovering the dirty secret of desire and violence in the family history of the race. He is exposing a scandallous truth that threatens Germany’s national myth of a pure white origin in Greece. Greece, for Freud, provides the story to explain where we come from but it is not a story of glorious ancestry. Freud’s theories were a deep provocation to a German sense of identity.
The German context is of fundamental importance to Freud’s Oedipus. When Freud called his discovery ‘the Oedipus complex’, the name has a sort of instant authority from its classical status. Greece was so important to the West’s idea of its own development that a Greek hero was an immediately attractive figure for a new model of human psychological development. And, along with the Unconscious and the Freudian symbol, the Oedipus complex is probably still the most instantly recognizable indicator of a psychoanalytic approach. At the same time, Freud’s theories were really scandalous. He discovered that even children have sexual feelings, and that everyone’s sexual desires were at a deep level transgressive -a position even less popular in nineteenth-century Europe than today. Greece, in his hands, became a more primal, bloody and disturbing place than in most German schoolrooms. The provocation of Freud’s writing also knowingly exploited the lustre of the Greek.
Tracing Freud’s German Oedipus has overlapped several versions of the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Freud nind, and made Freud’s turn to ancient Greek models 3 way ”f 'ustifying his new method of investigation.
But when F reud says that ‘Oedipus’ fate moves us only because it might have been orir own,’ or when other critics in the same tradition make such statements as ‘in some sense Oedipus is every man and every man is potentially Oedipus’, another appeal i9 being made too and it is deeply connected to the qUEStiOU ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Writing at the pinnacle 0f the German-speaking world’s love of Greece and its nationalist fervour, Freud is uncovering the dirty secret of desire and V1.04 lence in the family history of the race. He is exposing a scandall ous truth that threatens Germany’s national myth of a pure white origin in Greece. Greece, for F reud, provides the story to explain where we come from but it is not a story of glorious ancestry. Freud’s theories were a deep provocation to a German sense of identity.
The German context is of fundamental importance to Freud’s Oedipus. When F reud called his discovery ‘the Oedipus complex’, the name has a sort of instant authority from its cla3r sical status. Greece was so important to the West’s idea of its own development that a Greek hero was an immediately attractive figure for a new model of human psychological development. And, along with the Unconscious and the F reudian symbol, the Oedipus complex is probably still the most instantly recognizable indicator of a psychoanalytic approach. At the same time, F reud’s theories were really scandalous. He discovered that even children have sexual feelings, and that everyone’s sexual desires were at a deep level transgressive -a position even less popular in hineteenth-century Europe than today. Greece, in his hands, became a more primal, bloody and disturbing place than in most German schoolrooms. The provocation of F reud’s writing also knowingly exploited the lustre of the Greek.
Tracing Freud’s German Oedipus has overlapped several versions 0f the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Freud worked to find where the self comes front, and located the point of development in infantile desires. There is in every human a buried history which makes us what we are. He named this model after a Greek hero whose story is the archetypal quest to find where he came from a buried history which also finds its turning point in transgressive sexuality. At the same time, Freud was writing for an audience engaged in a growing nationalism which ensured that the genealogical search for roots became a passion. Blood, the purity of the race, made where you came from a different sort of question. German nationalism, at all levels of culture, found a symbolic home and birthplace in ancient Greece, and put that claim into action in its education system, opera houses, literature its general cultural life. And for the twenty-first century Freud himself is one of the origins of a modern sense of identity we are all Freudians now. Our sense of self is mediated through a century of talk of Freudian slips, the subconscious, repression of sexual desire, psychological health even when Freud’s own writings may not have been studied in themselves. The intricate story of Freud’s German Oedipus reveals how many layers there are to the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Digging down through those layers uncovers just how intimately the history of the modern idea of the self and the political history of Europe are intertwined with the Greece of the Imagination.
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