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It would, perhaps, be an understatement to say that the past, especially Graeco-Roman antiquity and archaeology (digging up the past), interested Freud. As everyone knows, that which was ‘prior’, to use Ricoeur's idiom, was his main preoccupation (p. 37). During his eight years (1865 - 1873) at the Leopoldstädter Gymnasium, Freud studied Latin and Greek. There, one of his masters was the classics philologist Joseph Nahrhaft. In the university entrance examination, he had to translate from Greek to German 33 verses of Oedipus Rex and his translation was considered the best (Knoepfmacher, 1979). Some of his key ideas, however problematic they may seem to us now, he elucidated by turning to the Homeric tradition, to Sophocles, Virgil and other Greek and Latin literary sources. That is to say, despite a staunch belief in ‘science’, the path in thinking that Freud opened out was hermeneutic. As such, it was concerned, above all else, with texts. Thus, Freud, as Foucault put it ‘more than anyone brought the knowledge of man closest to its philological and linguistic model’ (Foucault, 1970, p. 361). Philology, of course, is founded, as it were, on the concept of the sēma (sign) and on notions of exegesis, ‘of signification, meaning: the array of methods elaborated by philologists …designed for the deciphering of texts’ (Forrester, 1980, p. 308). In some ways, it is this, more than anything else, that situates Freud's work firmly within the conceptual confines of the nineteenth century (Burrow, 1967). Such is, roughly, the territory through which Professor Lev Kenaan journeys in this volume.
Concerned largely with questions of methodology and the history of philology, in the first of the six sections that make up the book, the author skilfully weaves her way through a number of knotty issues in the fraught history of the relationship between the study of the classics and psychology. Psychological and psychoanalytic studies of the classics are, of course, notoriously naïve an