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FREUD'S ROME: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LATIN POETRY. By Ellen Oliensis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 148.
ELLEN OLIENSIS'S book provides provocative, witty, and highly enjoyable analyses of themes we might consider "psychoanalytical" in the poetry of (mainly) Virgil, Catullus, and Ovid. Divided into three chapters ("Two Poets Mourning," "Murdering Mothers," and "Variations on a Phallic Theme"), plus Introduction and Afterword, Freud's Rome does not evince a belief in Freudian theory - nor does it show complete scepticism either. Instead of psychoanalysing fictional characters in Latin poetry (a mode of reading favoured by psychoanalytic critics in the early and mid-twentieth century), in order to excavate their unconscious wishes (whether murderous or incestuous), Oliensis is interested in "the textual unconscious," moments when the text seems to say something at odds to what appears to be the authorial voice/intention. Intriguingly, the textual unconscious erupts in Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid when issues of mourning, relationships between mother and child, and signification of sexual difference are addressed, issues which Freud himself analysed.
Latin literary studies has recendy benefited from ebullient psychoanalytic criticism from Michael Janan, Paul Allen Miller, and Erik Gunderson, work which Oliensis addresses. The scholarship of Gunderson, Janan, and Miller, however, is more informed by the seminars of Jacques Lacan. Oliensis's return to Freud, then, offers a challenge to literary critics. But it is not Oliensis's contention to defend Freud for his misogynistic, homophobic, and imperialist logic, but to show that Freud has got us interested in what we do when we mourn; what we think about our relationships...