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This is a little book which widely rewards the attention and the dedication demanded for its reading. It collects a selection of essays read on the occasion of the first international congress about ‘Tragedy then and today: From Aristotle to the third millennium’, which took place in 2002 in a place whose name is a legend— Stagira—and in a natural environment whose ‘sweet absence of any excess’—a quality which the world we are living in particularly needs—was underlined in the opening speech.
The little learned book has been edited by two psychoanalysts who, although Greeks by birth, have been Italians of adoption for many years: Andreas Giannakoulas and Sarantis Thanopulos, to whom we owe also many exacting translations of the published texts. To them go my keen thanks, but also the subtle remark for having pointed out to the congress the participation of exponents of art and international culture, but not always the specific disciplinary sphere which the authors of the texts in the volume belong to. The fact that psychoanalysts were present among the participants—and their texts are collected in a specific section of the volume—seems completely natural: to them Freud began to talk about the unconscious forces which govern the human being by means of the ‘tragic’ myth par excellence, the Oedipus myth.
Changing the order of the review, it is their texts (parochialism?) that I wish to begin to outline. I begin with Giannakoulas's very personal and ‘proud’ choice: by proud, I mean, of his belonging to the psychoanalytic family, to the language spoken