Instead, she develops a theoretically sophisticated understanding of the unconscious on the basis of Freud’s psychoanalysis and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics according to which meaning involves the “dynamic relationship between ancient texts and their modern readers” (34).
Such an approach would surely fall victim to the charges of anachronism against which Classical Studies defends its object of study. By advancing a theory of the unconscious intimately wed to textual hermeneutics, Lev Kenaan explores points of contact between the past and the past’s future crucial for the interpretation of ancient texts.īut Lev Kenaan does not simply apply psychoanalytic theory to ancient texts nor does she seek to revive a simple objective understanding of the unconscious-that is, she does not try to locate or define a “positive” account of the unconscious in the experiences of the ancient authors or tragic protagonists of the texts she so astutely interprets throughout her book. In her recent book, The Ancient Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and the Ancient Text, Vered Lev Kenaan calls for a “loosening” of philology’s “unwavering commitment to historical contextualization” (17) in order to open a new terrain for analyzing the complex relationships between antiquity and modernity.
1 Due in large part to its resistance to anachronism, classical philology in particular has guarded its disciplinary walls against inaccurately or inappropriately attributing psychoanalytic concepts to ancient sources, even as, and perhaps especially because, Freud relied on the figure of the antiquity in his explication of the unconscious. Classical Studies has long been resistant to, if not hostile towards, psychoanalytic theory originating in Sigmund Freud’s so-called “discovery” of the unconscious.
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