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Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry (review)

2011; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 132; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajp.2011.0022

1086-3168

Sharon L. James,

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

Reviewed by: Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry Sharon L. James Ellen Oliensis . Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry. Roman Literature and Its Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi + 148 pp. Cloth, $80; paper, $26.99. This Cambridge "little book" takes up residence in the influential aerie of psychoanalytic studies in Latin poetry, whose best-known members are the Lacanianists Paul Allen Miller and Micaela Janan. Oliensis' contribution is to (re)introduce the father of psychoanalysis to the club. She rightly insists that "the 'Freud' of Freud's Rome is not just a synecdoche for psychoanalysis" (11), and she carefully distinguishes Freud from Lacan. She focuses on mourning, motherhood, and sexual difference, and she studies what she calls the "textual unconscious," looking at issues of sexuality in Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil, an approach she describes as "psychotextual criticism" (1). The unconscious is the master element here: Oliensis acknowledges that Roman poets were aware of what they were writing, asserting correctly that "discourse regularly outruns the designs of the one deploying it; and this excess is structured and interpretable" (4). The "excess" amounts to evidence of the unconscious. But rather than psychoanalyze poets, Oliensis considers what we might call an at-large unconscious. It may now be that of a literary character but will later turn up in a narrator, an impersonal narration, or in the interstices between Catullan poems. Rather than bog down in precise definitions of the textual unconscious (as she notes, the concept has a history), Oliensis moves right into demonstrating its manifestations. Her interest, as she says, is "less where the unconscious abides than what it does," and she readily acknowledges that her findings must remain tentative, even speculative (12). The first chapter, "Two Poets Mourning," begins by considering how completely Catullus 101 accomplishes its official purpose of bidding a formal farewell to the poet/speaker's dead brother. But as Oliensis rightly notes, the farewell—accipe . . . ave atque vale—"is almost too efficient, the seal almost too tight" (16). Her interest lies in the way mourning "infiltrates, as if without the mourner's knowledge or consent" (17) texts that are not official instances of mourning. Thus Ovid's Orpheus, who survives his wife's second death, turns misogynist, seeking erotic guilt in women and absolving male lovers who lose their beloveds. Oliensis then moves on to Catullus 65 and 68b, acknowledging that an author who is also a poetic speaker is not identical to a poetic character such as Orpheus. Throughout this discussion (and the many other places where Catullus' poems numbered sixty-something turn up), Oliensis is sensitive to the difference between author and persona, noting reasonably that the "author-persona relation . . . is more likely to fluctuate than to remain constant" (26). In reading poem 65, she argues that the "Callimachean apple bears the burden not just of the poem but of the forgetting that is entailed in producing the poem: the apple carries (the aborted memory, the cast-off image of) the brother" (31). She goes on to review both poem 68b and its recent scholarship. This discussion demonstrates her impressive linguistic sensitivity, even on the level of the syllable. [End Page 327] Further consideration of the crucial words erus (68.76, 78) and era (68.136) would not have been amiss, as this term is not a common equivalent for the metaphorical domina of elite love poetry. In invoking the slave-master relations of comedy, it calls up a different register, one that seems linked to the textual unconscious under study here. But this concern is minor, and perhaps idiosyncratic: in these pages, Oliensis successfully points to an unconscious in operation and shows how the reader may be pulled into that operation. Chapter 2, "Murdering Mothers," studies Virgil's Venus and Ovid's Philomela. It begins by noting that Latin literature and Roman ideology focus overwhelmingly on fathers, at the expense of mothers, who are less prominent and of less apparent interest than in Greek myth and literature. There follows an extended discussion of Venus and mothers in the Aeneid, in which Oliensis ranges through the poem, and then over to Cyrene in Georgics 4, concluding with a consideration of...