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Metamorphoses of Psyche in Psychoanalysis and Ancient Greek Thought is a title that no better prepares a reader for what the book will be about than the sight of a caterpillar prepares a child for its reappearance as a butterfly. While it is indeed about psychoanalysis and ancient Greek thought, I have compared it elsewhere (Psychoanalytic Inquiry) to the Kubrick film The Shining, because it’s less about the unconscious and more about the liminal and imaginal realms familiar to seers, mystics and visionaries. And it is, indeed, a work of vision, one that takes inspiration from the myth and literature of Ancient Greece to formulate a new vision of life and the performance art of psychoanalysis. But its beating heart is the author’s long dark night of the soul following the death by drowning of her mother when she was 17.
Marcia Dobson is the daughter of Helen Flanders Dunbar, a polymath born in Chicago in 1902, who became the mother of psychosomatic medicine, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Dante scholar, and a leader in the early pastoral care movement (Kaplan, 2023). At Yale University Medical School, she was known to her entirely male cohort as the “Pocket Minerva,” because she was physically tiny—4’11” and perpetually seen in 3 ½” platform shoes of her own design—and yet goddess-like in energy and intellect (Dobson, 2023, p.18). Marcia’s father, a writer, poet and the economics editor of the New Republic, was with her mother only 2 years before the two of them split up. Helen Dunbar was 39 when her daughter was born.
Marcia grew up in the shadow of her mother’s clinical work, her writing, travels to European mental hospitals after the War, and professional celebrity. Her mother seems not to have given much thought to what her daughter may have needed. Marcia was watched—not it seems all that closely—by maids and the two secretaries to whom Helen Dunbar dictated her six books. There is nothing said of nannies. So while it is true that she and her mother were alway