Discussion of Martin Grotjahn's Article, The New Technology and Our Ageless Unconscious

There is a notable parallelism between the Greeks' own account (insofar as it can be reconstructed) of the mature, responsible person, and Grotjahn's, which proceeds in terms of psychoanalytic theory. Since Grotjahn takes the ancient Greeks to represent a model of maturity, it is imperative that this should be so; entirely apart from the fact that the existence of such a parallel, amounting almost to an isomorphism, is the most convincing “proof” of the warranted assertibility of both accounts. The two indeed differ, but principally in the way a map differs from the terrain it represents.

Specifically, the Greeks lacked, or seemed to lack, an adequate account of the role played by the dynamic unconscious in the development of the psyche, which, according to many, was Freud's most important contribution. This lacuna, however, does not invalidate the truth of the Greek view; it merely requires that it be supplemented. In other words, the Greeks identified successfully the formal, final, and material “causes” of psychic development, but lacked what Grotjahn has given in Freudian terms, that is, an account of the efficient cause, much in the way Newton specified the efficient cause of Kepler's laws by introducing the concept of “force-at-a-distance.”

There is only one thing which Grotjahn says that, I believe, requires explication. To his statement that the Greeks were “unwilling and incapable” to project their libido onto mechanized objects in the external world, I would add the stipulation: “and to let it remain there.” The Greek libido had to proceed in every conceivable way outwards in experience; but it then had to return inwards upon itself in order that fullness of experience of the phenomenal world should be converted into symbolic awareness of the noumenal world. For example, we know that the Greeks constructed innumerable mechanical gadgets—and then destroyed them, not from fear of the autonomous technological society that is so wide-spread today, but because it