The Book

More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles’ tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was a kind of everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfilment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex—child, mother, father—suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies—Oedipus and others—which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today’s issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud’s own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands of his stories of how children develop and how people change (or don’t). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.

The SpeakerRachel Bowlby is Professor of English at UCL. Her other books include Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola; Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis; Shopping with Freud; Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf; and Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping.