A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World by Richard H. Armstrong (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2005); reviewed by Edward Chaney

This is a remarkable book, which should be read by anyone interested in the humanities or indeed the human condition. Reading through to its dramatic, if somewhat depressing conclusion, I found myself wondering how many scholars of any age working in Britain today could match the erudition, depth, breadth and narrative skill of this relatively young Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Houston. Richard Armstrong has applied his ancient and modern languages to examining Freud's intensely personal, lifelong relationship with myth, literature, history and archaeology, focusing on his use of these, not merely to support but to construct psychoanalysis, the extent of whose subjectivity he thus exposes.

In Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism , Freud drew heavily (some would say too heavily) on the works of a Scots Professor of Social Anthropology, Sir James Frazer, and an American Professor of Egyptology (and Hebraist), James Breasted. During his lifetime Freud's greatest English-speaking advocate was the Welshman Ernest Jones, who already felt a sense of educational inferiority vis-à-vis his Viennese colleagues. The translating, editing and publishing of Freud was done by James Strachey and various Bloomsburies, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf. But despite Freud's eventual exile and death in what he called ‘free and generous England’ and indeed W.H. Auden's acknowledgement that Freud had become ‘a whole climate of opinion’, outside academic literary circles English enthusiasm has remained relatively restricted, the fascinating Freud Museum still being one of London's best-kept secrets, as much a place of pilgrimage for foreigners as a shrine for the natives. Perhaps significantly, abridged editions of Frazer were introduced by Mary Douglas, the brilliant British anthropologist who eventually migrated to America. Both the Random House paperback reprints of the Hogarth Press Standard Edition of Freud and its Viking/Penguin rivals (albeit