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In C. Fred Alford's view many of the earlier psychoanalytic studies of Greek tragedy by scholars such as Georges Devereux or Philip Slater suffer from being too reductive and strictly Freudian. Alford aims not to “reduce Greek tragedy to the categories of psychoanalysis,” but to “enlarge” and revise psychoanalysis through his interpretation of the
Greek texts (p. 3). Alford's self-consciously eclectic and postmodern study draws selectively and critically on the psychoanalytic studies of Melanie Klein and later object relations psychologists, Robert Jay Lifton and Jacques Lacan. Despite the many advances in psychoanalysis since Freud, in Alford's view no one has “since Freud, put all the pieces together: psychoanalysis as an account of human nature…, psychoanalysis as an account of civilization and its discontents, and psychoanalysis as therapy, showing how each operates according to the same basic principles” (p. 24). Through studying the Greek tragic poets, Alford hopes to develop a form of “humane antihumanism.” Both tragic poets and postmoderns agree “that man is the object, but not the subject, of his own desires” (p. 23). The poets tell us a story about “what it is like to live as humanly as one can in a world in which even man himself is often hostile to his own humanity” (p. 25).
The strongest and culminating chapters of the book (Chapters 5 and 6) explore the Greek tragic view that humanity is not free but is nevertheless responsible. Subject to the vagaries of the gods, necessity, destiny, an unchangeable character, and uncontrollable passions, the Greek self is “overdetermined.” Yet because “action is not seen from the inner-world of the actor but from the network of relations he or she participates in”—relations that risk being shattered “if an act is not made good”—tragic characters are responsible (p. 126). “Even though the Greek self may not have been a center of self-reflection and consciousness, it was a center of responsibility.” Existential psycho