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This volume of the Cornell Series in the History of Psychoanalysis is a strange case of a book that does not know what it is talking about. It is not merely that it makes factual errors and is shockingly ignorant of the relevant scholarship (though the sections on Greek tragedy, in particular, are excruciatingly naïve and ill-informed). It is not even that the central concepts of the book - myth, culture, history, context, psychoanalysis - are used in such thin and uncomprehending ways that any serious scholar of such ideas would be flabbergasted. (This is the first book I have read on myth which pays not even lip-service to any contemporary anthropological understanding of the term.) Rather, what makes this book so striking is the lack of self-awareness at the centre of its project.
This book looks at stories of Electra in H.D., Heiner Müller, Hofmannsthal, Strauss, Musil and Plath, and from them claims that Electra rather than Oedipus or Antigone (or any other candidate) is the dominant myth of the twentieth century. This is not an obvious collocation of culture heroes. Hofmannsthal and Strauss are deeply connected, of course, and produced a hugely influential play and an opera on Electra; and Musil at least comes from something of a similar intellectual background (though Scott has to state with a certain bravado that the 2000 pages of A Man Without Qualities is ‘a thinly veiled allegory of Electra’ to bring him into the fold: scholars may argue about how thin or thick the veil is here). H.D. has links enough with Freud and classics, but scarcely centres her work on Electra (rather than Iphigeneia, say); Plath wrote one poem which refers to Electra, and one, ‘Daddy’, where in an interview she described the speaking voice as being that of ‘a girl with an Electra complex’. Müller, who is celebrated in Germany, but scarcely known outside, wrote a play Hamlet-maschine, which, as the name suggests, is a version of Hamlet. It is not clear how this list could constitute