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Coming from classics, a field not noted for its hospitality to theoretical modes of inquiry, Richard Caldwell offers in this book a psychoanalytic study of Greek myth. His focus is on Hesiod's Theogony, a poem of some 1000 lines from the eighth century B.C. that, with the epics of Homer, marks the beginning of Greek literature. Since the Theogony tells the story of the creation of the world “in which the first father marries his mother and is then castrated by his son” (p. 10), it lends itself readily to psychoanalytic interpretation, and Caldwell's book fills an important gap in both the psychoanalytic and the scholarly bibliographies.
Addressing the distrust of psychoanalysis on the part of scholars such as Walter Burkert and G. S. Kirk, Caldwell pitches his book to the unprejudiced reader who seeks to learn why Greek myth continues to be of compelling human interest. This strategy has much to recommend it, but leads also to the drawback that The Origin of the Gods has a humpbacked quality: the introduction is followed by a lengthy section on “Applied Psychoanalysis,” which reviews basic principles of psychoanalytic theory that Caldwell then brings to bear in his reading of Hesiod and his analogues in the second half of the book. Caldwell's exposition is sound and thought-provoking,