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The title of this book by Paul Veyne, professor of Roman History at the University of Paris (Collège de France), is to some extent misleading. It is not properly a review and analysis of the social psychology of the ancient Greeks and their religion as it may be compiled from classical sources. Nor
is it actually a critique of the system of belief of the ancient scholars and mythographers (e.g., Diodorus Siculus, Apollodorus). And it is not, strictly speaking, a contribution to an in-house debate among classicists on the methodology of interpreting Greek religious belief. If anything, it is a plea for a method of literary interpretation in which the mode of expressing the criticism of texts implicitly describes the theory behind that criticism. It is, I believe, a study of epistemology in hermeneutics, and this, at first glance, seems to make it of some interest to psychoanalytic theorists.
Psychoanalysis has, almost from its inception, been preoccupied with the issue of what in its subject matter and its theory can be considered veridical. Many have asked, to what extent do the mode of investigation of psychoanalysis, the results of these investigations, and the language and underlying assumptions of its theory partake of a scientific Weltanschauung? Is psychoanalysis a science? Yet another example of this debate can be found in a polemical paper by Wallace (1989). He takes exception to one of the more recent serious attacks—this one by Grünbaum—on the scientific claims of psychoanalysis. An influential book by Spence (1982) also addresses imposing problems concerning the extent to which psychoanalytic methodology can be considered as participating in the “clean” empiricism of natural science. Spence's view is that the psychoanalytic situation, the actual clinical interaction between the analyst and the analysand, creates its own brand of narrative truth and that this truth is only imperfectly transmissible to outside observers. One of the criteria of scientific r