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What might one dyspeptically expect from a book entitled The Ancient Unconscious? From its subtitle, Psychoanalysis and the Ancient Text, we might reasonably fear yet another reading of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, trying to show how Sophocles did not merely inspire or justify Freudian theory, but also demonstrates it. There have indeed been many such attempts at engaging with ancient Greek and Latin literature from both Freudian and Lacanian perspectives, ranging from the trivial hunt for so-called Freudian symbols to more sophisticated explorations of the expression of desire and the role of mythic narrative in providing images through which the unconscious can be traced. Žižek smartly parodies (the criticism of) such approaches when he writes that ‘Richard II proves beyond any doubt that Shakespeare had read Lacan…’.
Alternatively, the title might provoke the reader to anticipate a study of how the mind is conceptualized in antiquity and the place of the unconscious in such conceptualization. There have been some serious attempts to look at the history - back to antiquity - not just of madness but also of how the mind's structure is imagined. Although it is evident that the term ‘unconscious’ has no equivalent in Greek or Latin, and that the function of the unconscious is inaugurated as a theoretical concern only in Freud's writing, it is nonetheless possible to excavate how the hidden recesses of the mind - its blindness, self-deceptions and misprisions - are articulated either in the extensive medical and philosophical discussions of antiquity or in the broader literary representations of mental life. If dreams provide a royal road to the unconscious, there are both the ancient dream books, from which archive Freud focused on Artemidorus, and plenty of literary and philosophical versions of dreams and their analysis to explore. Above all, there is much recent critical investigation of ancient engagement with a theory of memory. There is certainly room for a psyc