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In 1984, Hartocollis and Graham organized a psychoanalytic symposium in Delphi, Greece. They organized the symposium around Ernst Kris's concept of “the personal myth” both because of the connections of the personal myth concept to Greek mythology and because Graham believes that the concept can be used as a bridge to bring together diverse theoretical positions, represented at the symposium by five main speakers, with a discussion by
Robert Wallerstein. Other contributors were given a broader scope to include the overall relationship between psychoanalysis and mythology, with a particular emphasis on Greek mythology and the story of Oedipus. This book includes original papers from the symposium as well as additional comments by the editors.
Despite Graham's claim that the personal myth is a unifying concept, the strength of this book is its diversity. The five main papers are relatively brief and readable. Authors as diverse as Jacob Arlow, Otto Kernberg, Donald Meltzer, André Green, and Ernest Wolf offer their viewpoints on the personal myth. The remainder of the book consists of a smorgasbord of papers dealing with aspects of the personal myth, interpretation of Greek mythology, application of paradigms from Greek mythology to modern case histories, and reinterpretations of the Oedipus complex. The authors come from a range of theoretical backgrounds.
James Naimann takes the reader closely through Sophocles' play, with a central focus on the analogy between self analysis and Oedipus' search for self-knowledge. He details that search as well as “resistances” coming from Oedipus and other characters in the play. Michael Bross and John Munder Ross each focus on the role of one of Oedipus' parents, Jocasta and Laius, respectively. The authors use the roles of those characters in the myth and the play to highlight the issues of real maternal seductiveness and paternal competition with the male child. Like Bross, Monique Schneider searches for evidence of personal mean