Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece: The Classical Roots of Modern Psychiatry. Bennet Simon, Ithaca and London:  Cornell University Press, 1978,  335 pp.

“This book,” the author declares in the opening sentence, “is a product of two passions, one for the Greek classics and the other for psychiatry and psychoanalysis.” It is obviously a labor of love, a show of impressive erudition in both fields. It is not a primer on the subject, nor a systematic exposition, so that a certain degree of familiarity is needed. Nor is it always easy reading. It is, however, a personal commentary—serious, considered, and at times whimsical. The lion's share of this book is devoted to an examination of the analogies between ancient Greece and modern America. Raised in a climate of Freudian, neo-Freudian and other theories, Simon approaches his subject with a distinct ideological bias, a procrustean bed of sorts, which begs a number of questions.

Modern Western man lives in a civilization founded upon the Judeo-Greco-Christian heritage and modern science. The latter in no way contradicts the fact of a psychological continuity, both intellectual and emotional, between the ancients and ourselves. Because of this continuity we can still sympathetically follow the fates of the heroes in the Bible, Homer, the Greek tragedies, and the dialogues of Plato. We subscribe to the same universal psychological and philosophical postulates: the power of thought and speech, the lawfulness of life, and the ubiquity of conflict: reason versus passions, good against evil, man against man, and man against himself. To compare how they dealt with such universal problems and how we do, to point out differences and similarities, is one thing. To use our theories and prejudices as a yardstick by which to measure and judge the ancients, and beat them with it, is another. It is to his doing the latter that I object, and which has led the author to some slipshod—and at times shocking—conclusions.

As his yardstick of the most evolved and superior concept of mind, Simon adopts the notion of an “internalized mental structure that has organization whose parts have particu