Jessica Elbert Decker

This introductory chapter outlines the methodology and the trajectory of analysis in the chapters that follow. Like every chapter of this book, it begins with a fragment of Sappho that will frame the analysis—here, Sappho’s fragment 188 reads μυθόπλοκον, which means ‘myth-weaver’ as imagination in the creation of narratives is a primary objective of this project. The images of ‘motherless daughters’ and ‘female monsters’ are explored in the context of the Ancient Greek myths that will be studied throughout the book, and the narrative of Athena winning the Olympian throne is introduced as a guiding theme. Unlike the tradition of patricide that precedes her, I suggest that Athena will win the Olympian throne from Zeus through cunning rather than bloodshed. Complicit with her mother, Metis, the first wife that Zeus swallowed, Athena will use her metis—which translates to ‘cunning resourcefulness’ as her birthright from her mother and outwit Zeus. Each chapter closely studies a concept, theme, or text in Freudian theory in order to reveal the patterns of androcentric fantasy that underlie them; this introduction ends with a short summary of each chapter’s themes and arguments.

This chapter explores the strange borderland between bios (life) and techne in the symbolic constellations of Ancient Greek myth. Through analysis of the figure of Hera, I demonstrate that monstrosity represents feminine sexual sovereignty and the feminine agency of creation that is repressed by androcentric imagination. Through an exploration of Freud’s notion of the uncanny in its relation to the maternal body, I argue that this category of the uncanny reveals androcentric fantasies about the maternal body as monstrous. In Freudian theory, this powerful mother is often described as the “phallic mother” since the only form of power that androcentric fantasy can imagine must be understood as “phallic.” Androcentric fantasy cannot fathom feminine agency, so any feminine agency that is nevertheless perceived is dismissed as accidental—and thus takes on the character of the uncanny. The strange and irrational belief in the phenomenon of ‘maternal imagination’ reveals that the feminine power of creation that is repressed by androcentric fantasy is not only the power to create life through birth but also a radical power of imagination.

In this chapter, I will read Ancient Greek origin myths using the tools of psychoanalytic practice that Freud invented and demonstrate how the mythical edifice is slyly transported into ‘philosophy,’ and so interludes with Plato or Aristotle will show how unconscious fantasy winds its way into ‘truth’ as it is codified in a metaphysical or a scientific system. The chapter explores five feminine figures that appear as foundational to the Olympian cosmos, as their tales exemplify androcentric fantasy at work: Aphrodite, Pandora, Hekate, Metis, and Athena. Close analysis of these narratives demonstrates the ways in which myth makes birth a masculine power and consistently undermines or erases feminine (or queer, or non-binary) agency, while simultaneously making feminine links or lineage impossible. War is the heart of androcentric fantasy, and this is confirmed by the manner in which birth is imagined in these myths, ambiguating birth and war in androcentric imagination.

So many threads to be woven together: Ariadne’s thread, the umbilical, the string in playing “Fort-Da!,” Arachne’s multiple weavings of the rapes of women by male gods, Penelope’s use of metis in weaving and unweaving the shroud as a ruse to defer the suitors until Odysseus’ return. This final chapter will be the most hysterical of all, winding multiple ways through narratives and charting new directions. Linear composition is unimaginative and lacks depth and texture: one snip and whoops, there goes the whole thing! Weavers and poets know the strategy of multiplicity, as does the unconscious wish: only through the weavings of so many others does any fabric come to fruition. This concluding chapter traces multiple paths through imaginative structures in order to express the multiplicity of meaning that is accessible when the imagination is not rigidly tamed by binary structures and androcentric fantasy.

This chapter explores Sappho’s model of eros as egalitarian reciprocity between lovers that adopts many of the values associated with Ancient Greek practices of hospitality, where both lovers offer respect and unconditional receptivity to one another and attend to each other’s needs with precise awareness. Sappho’s model of eros sharply contrasts with the androcentric model of eros that emphasizes hierarchical value and competition, conquest, possession, and mastery over the love object. Reading the Freudian cases of Gretl (“The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”) and Dora (Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria), I will demonstrate that androcentric fantasy cannot fathom lesbian eros and violently responds to it as a threat to the illusion of male control over women. In the cases of Gretl and Dora, Freud’s blindness to the possibility of lesbian eros reveals many of the androcentric fantasies that are built up to ensure the dominance of the father over the daughter and the primacy of the phallus and phallic desire as the only possible form of active sexuality. Dora and Gretl, as patients of Freud, speak through their case histories and show the way toward “hysterical” communication and the validity of bodily, and feminine experience.

This chapter is a close reading of the case of Little Hans, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, and presents the case history as a young boy’s initiation into androcentric fantasy. Freud’s case histories often privilege the role of the father and leave the mother in the shadows, and the case of Little Hans is exemplary because Freud uses it as confirmation of his castration theory and the Oedipus Complex. Little Hans has a phobia: he is afraid that a horse is going to bite him. Despite Little Hans’ repeated identification of the horse as his mother in the case history, Freud and Hans’ father craft a narrative that gives the phallus primacy and subverts the role of the mother in the creation of children. Hans is made to accept, as his initiation into the patriarchal culture, the ‘fact’ of female castration and to believe in male parthenogenesis—precisely the symbolic patterns that were explored in the Ancient Greek myths in Chap. 2.

This analysis will proceed in three sections: first, I will examine the presentations of Aphrodite in the mythopoetic tradition (Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, and Empedocles), then I will demonstrate the manner in which Plato splits Aphrodite into two in Symposium and all the while erases her by shifting androcentric worship to a male god, Eros. Plato utilizes myth but deliberately bends it to his philosophical wishes and seems to emphasize a binary structure and furthermore, one that reflects androcentric fantasy in its hierarchical values (e.g., Aphrodite Ouranos is superior to Aphrodite Pandemos). Finally, through a close reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I will demonstrate the way in which Freud follows the playbook of Plato and splits eros into two by defining libido solely as masculine while casting female desire into masochism and the death instincts.

My close reading of Freud’s “The Economic Problem of Masochism” focuses on his claim that masochism is natural to the feminine constitution and challenges this assumption by demonstrating that the cultural oppression of women creates this alleged masochism. Through a study of women in Euripides’ tragedies, I demonstrate that women in Ancient Greek culture were subject to a “cultural suppression of the instincts” and made to sacrifice their lives through compulsory marriage and childbirth. Androcentric fantasy uses this smokescreen—that women are ‘natural’ masochists—in an attempt to justify the enforced servitude and lack of agency women are afforded in androcentric cultures. Ancient Greek marriage practices reveal that marriage was understood as a means of ‘taming’ maidens in order to control their supposedly excessive sexuality and destructive instincts. I argue that androcentric fantasy imagines the feminine to be helpless and infantile as a counter-formation to the abject fear of powerful women and mothers with agency, particularly because women have been associated with death in the androcentric imagination. “The Athena Complex” refers to Zeus’ swallowing of Metis as representation of the “cultural suppression of the instincts” that is inflicted on women in androcentric cultures, making them appear helpless and masochistic.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Medusa Complex:Matricide and the Fantasy of CastrationJessica Elbert MayockThe theoretical structures of psychoanalysis have excluded the female subject by placing her outside of the Symbolic, and feminist theorists' responses to this problem have been divided. Some theorists (such as Kristeva) accept the notion of an unalterable Lacanian Symbolic, while others (such as Irigaray) maintain that the current Symbolic is a manifestation of male fantasy, and suggest that feminist thinkers explore the possibility of reorganizing the Symbolic. Amber Jacobs, in her recent work On Matricide (2007), takes up this challenge by analyzing matricide in myth in order to reveal matricide as latent content untheorized within psychoanalysis. Jacobs claims that the structure of the Lacanian Symbolic illegitimately asserts the "law of the father" as the only possible law, excluding any possibility of a "law of the mother" by erasing the maternal role in theory and symbolization. Her project, following Irigaray, is to make visible those unconscious contents excluded by the patriarchal imaginary in order to "be able to intervene into psychoanalysis for the purpose of working toward theorization of unconscious structures that are not reducible to the structure of Oedipus alone" (Jacobs 2007, x). If Jacobs's suggestion is correct, then analysis of Freud's evidence for the Oedipus Complex (and its accompanying concepts) will reveal repressed contents and traces of these untheorized unconscious structures—particularly those associated with the maternal body.With these considerations in mind, I take up the Freudian case of Little Hans, where Freud finds his most seminal evidence for castration anxiety [End Page 158] and the Oedipus Complex. I will demonstrate Freud's systematic occlusion of the maternal body through his overvaluation of the male body/the phallus in order to expose the elements of male fantasy that construct the Oedipus Complex. I organize these psychical elements in a configuration called "The Medusa Complex," since Freud uses the image of Medusa to explain his theory of castration. In rereading the details of this case, a powerful male fantasy begins to emerge: the desire to appropriate the female generative power. This is achieved through the theory of castration, which the decapitation of Medusa symbolizes, and the unconscious wish for male parthenogenesis—one product of this wish is the Lacanian Symbolic structure, where only the male principle of the phallus is generative. The Medusa Complex is comprised of the two intertwined male fantasies of female castration and male parthenogenesis, as well as the associated resistances that result from initiation into this paradigm. The theory of castration and the Oedipus Complex are attempts to conceal the powerful maternal body and assert male superiority and dominance.In the case of Little Hans, "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy" (1909), Little Hans develops a fear of horses (especially biting horses) and is afraid to go out into the street. Hans's treatment is undertaken by his father, a medical doctor, who keeps careful notes and acts under Freud's supervision (mostly via letters). The boy's phobia begins around the time his little sister Hanna is born, as Freud and the father eventually admit, though her role in their narrative is nonexistent.1 They interpret Hans's phobia as a classic Oedipal triangle in which he desires his mother and fears the hostility of his father; his fear is translated into fear of the castrating father. Throughout the case, Freud and the father emphasize the boy's alleged awe of the adult male genital organ. In this paper, I will revisit the case (preserved in careful detail by the boy's father) and systematically return the maternal body to its rightful place within the narrative, shifting both the structure and the meaning of the phobia.I am here reading the case as an example of manifest content—like the surface content of a dream—in order to expose the male desires that create it. The current Symbolic is essentially a dream of the male imaginary, and my method is to reveal the latent content of the dream, especially the fantasies that inform it. Desire is the generating force behind this dream, and until we encounter and understand this desire, it will continue to compulsively...

Contemporary Western thinkers recognise the destructive effects of long-standing attitudes of mastery over nature and the dualistic and hierarchical thinking that informs them. Heraclitus’ metaphysical position is ideal for reframing these traditional stances for several reasons: first, Heraclitus’ concept of identity is dynamic and relies on a sophisticated understanding of opposites that recognises ambiguity; secondly, his philosophical position produces a model of truth as multiple rather than univocal; and finally, in Heraclitus’ self-making kosmos, human beings are not separate from the processes of physis but inextricably entangled in them. Heraclitus’ philosophy offers relevant avenues for reimagining contemporary philosophical issues, particularly theories of identity, the multiplicity of truth, and the proper ethical human relation to nature.

This paper explores Heraclitus’s linguistic method as a structural expression of his cosmological philosophy. Through an analysis of the various kinds of motion that Heraclitus describes, including the crucial motion between opposites, this essay delineates the meaning of ‘everliving fire’ as emblematic of his cosmos. The image of the synapse frames this analysis as it is simultaneously a motion and an expression uniting two poles; ‘syn’ also invokes Heraclitus’s notion of ‘shared logos’ as xynon, contrasted with human incomprehension as axynetoi. The divine principle of Zeus and his thunderbolt serve as a source of motion; these motions of fire govern not only the cosmos, but human perception and thought.

Heraclitus has often been read through Aristotelian and Stoic paradigms that do not contextualize his text in the poetic tradition with which his fragments engage. This paper is a close study of Heraclitus’s DK 1 as a demonstration of his poetic methods, and argues that Heraclitus’s text is an example of what Marcel Detienne calls magico-religious speech. Heraclitus’s logos is a living thing, not only words but ‘works,’ as Heraclitus refers to his logos in DK 1, using the Homeric formula “words and works.” Heraclitus’s teaching is experiential, and depends on memory as the antidote to oblivion and forgetting, often associated with sleeping and death. In reading DK 1 and following the paths that it traces to other fragments, Heraclitus’s teaching as a method of escaping the private world is revealed.

Double speak refers to two parallel devices that are often deployed together: simple repetition, which is frequently used as both emphasis and as an indicator of double speak, and ambiguous syntax such that the phrase uttered may have multiple meanings at once. This paper explores the use of double speak in early Ancient Greek poetic texts, beginning with Homer and tracing its use through the texts of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles. Double speak seems to be employed in order to mediate between mortal and divine, creating a double audience: a god or goddess is capable of speaking in two registers at once, so a mortal listening will infer one meaning, while from the perspective of the god or goddess speaking, the statement will have another meaning supplemental to the first. This paper demonstrates the manner in which these Presocratic thinkers employ double speak as a means of disrupting human binary habits of thinking and creating a “quantum awareness” where the subject is able to perceive the relationships and paradoxes that exist between the knower and the seeming objects of knowledge, as well as the habits of thinking and perceiving that nourish the repetition and growth of those patterns.

This book is a feminist analysis of Greek myth and tragedy that reimagines the structures of Freudian theory. The objective of this analysis is political—by revealing the structures that undergird patriarchal oppression, feminist thinkers can work to transform these symbolic constellations through the work of sabotage, parody, and imagination. Jessica Elbert Decker attempts here to read Freudian theory through a wider lens of Ancient Greek culture, since our contemporary philosophical and social culture has inherited many of its symbolic structures (e.g., patriarchy, binary thinking). The major argument of the book is that our Western philosophical, social, and symbolic systems are, as they were in the Ancient Greek world, suffused with a set of values that reflect one version of masculinity and androcentrism, and that those values are destructive to human beings as well as the non-human world, including other beings.

Empedocles of Akragas (modern Agrigento) is arguably Sicily’s most important Greek intellectual. He was considered not only an influential philosopher, but also a poet, an orator, a doctor, and even a god. As a philosopher, Empedocles focused on reality, tracing it to the composition and decomposition of four immutable elements: water, air, fire, and earth, which are moved by two opposing forces, Love and Hate. He is said to have been an enemy of the aristocracy despite his noble birth, and to have died on Mount Etna after throwing himself into a crater. And yet there is no companion-style volume on Empedocles; at best, he is treated as one among many in studies of Pre-Socratic philosophers and philosophy more generally. We aim for this collection to fill that gap. The papers cover Empedocles’s philosophical ideas and understanding, his interactions with contemporary thinkers, and his reception in the hands of later Greek and Latin writers, through to the present day.

Borders are essentially imaginary structures, but their effects are very real. This volume explores both geopolitical and conceptual borders through an interdisciplinary lens, bridging the disciplines of philosophy and literature. With contributions from scholars around the world, this collection closely examines the concepts of race, nationality, gender, and sexuality in order to reveal the paradoxical ambiguities inherent in these seemingly solid binary oppositions, while critiquing structures of power that produce and police these borders. As a political paradigm, liminality may be embraced by marginal subjects and communities, further blurring the boundaries between oppressive distinctions and categories.