You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Graziella and Nicos Nicolaïdis are members of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society. They offer us a wide-ranging survey of Greek mythology, based on the interest of the inventor of psychoanalysis in the myths of Oedipus and Narcissus. They see myth as a ‘history of desire [that] offers itself as a formation of unconscious desires—like a structure—having a libidinal value for the people (group), in the same way as representations, dreams, fantasies or delusions for the individual’, and devote their book to the evocation of this kinship between mythology, Greek tragedy and psychoanalysis. In the characters of tragedy or the heroes, gods or demigods of the myths, they find the conflicts, forms of identification or projection, splits, defence mechanisms and sublimations revealed by psychoanalysis in the individual: ‘Both the individual and the people construct an apparatus, which is psychic in the case of the subject and ethnic and cultural in that of the people’.
The authors examine a number of different accounts of the origin of the world, which they divide into several categories according to the degree of ‘oedipification’ of their construction, ranging from the Germanic and Scandinavian myths, in which ‘the splitting of good and bad