The Psychoanalytic Field

        There is nothing triumphal about such an observation since Freud’s was not a logical inconsistency, let alone a clinical hypocrisy. Freud’s was the deep-seated psychological ambivalence one lives through and witnesses daily, on the couch, in the bedroom, and on the street. What the ambivalence does however is betray the sway of not a single myth but that of a host of Olympian characters crowded inside a Pandora’s box from which the psychoanalyst falsely hoped he could retrieve only those scripts he had deemed useful. Alongside an Oedipus, a Dionysus, and a Sisyphus, one can also find an Adonis born out of incest but suffering none of the trials of an Antigone, or a Thamyris blinded by the Muses for his mortal vanity rather than for his poetic blunders, or even a Nemesis countering the careless and haphazard fortunes bestowed by a Tyche. The reference to Nemesis here is not to her modern day collapsing onto a logic of opposition and enmity but to her original place in the classic Greek lexicon as a nymph-goddess of redress symbolized by the wheel of transformation from peak to pit, and back again.

        While swearing allegiance to some of the gods, demi-gods, and dramatis personae of ancient Athens, Freud had in fact refused to acknowledge and suffer his idols as multiple, impetuous, and violent.