Euripides, Freud, and the Romance of Belonging (review)

In this book, Victoria Pedrick scrutinizes two texts for what each has to say about the ways in which origin affects identity. The texts in question are ancient and modern, tragic drama and psychoanalytic case study: Euripides' Ion and Freud's analysis of the so-called Wolf Man, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, 7–122 [London: Hogarth Press, 1955]). Suffering, Pedrick claims, is at the heart of identity in each—abandonment in the former, witnessing the parents' intercourse (though perhaps only symbolically) in the latter. In each case, finding out what happened is difficult since there are competing versions of the truth. In each case, a solution is reached that claims to be authoritative but is undermined by the repetitions that have come before. The inconclusive nature of the answers suggests "that something profound and elusive lurks in the problem" (4). Whether we take a sociological or individual perspective on what constructs identity, Pedrick argues, there is a point at which the origin is unaccounted for. The importance of the origin, however, is not in any way lessened because it cannot be known; instead, the uncertainty leads to "an anxiety about our origins that both psychoanalysis and cultural studies strive to make sense of" (6). Pedrick examines the strategies by which the texts therefore simply stop addressing the question in order to "shut down the dread" (7).

How do these two texts relate to the painful past? Both tragedy and psychoanalysis make it public, though tragedy recreates the suffering in the audience, while psychoanalysis seeks to resolve it. "Structurally and by design, the case history replaces tragedy. The intrinsically performative nature of both genres allows us to consider how each engages its audience on the matter of identity, especially how both demand that the audience watch and believe what is seen or told about origins" (3). The theme of abandonment in Ion leads Pedrick to a reinterpretation of Freud (who ignored parental rejection as an option); conversely, the case study, used as a parallel text and not simply as a source of terms to apply to a Greek play, leads her to consider the play in terms not only of the primal scene but also of gifts and money.

Pedrick does not base her comparison solely on the texts. She argues that in the case study, more than the patient's identity was at stake, that Freud was also using it to establish psychoanalysis as a method and to work out his own problems within the psychoanalytic community (that is to say, his own identity). While Pedrick notes that both her texts have larger significances, for the institution of psychoanalysis and the institution of Athens, she spends more time on the former than on the latter, seeking a psychological narrative in the play rather than a political one and, at one point, explicitly declining to discuss the city (152).

She nevertheless devotes considerable attention to social context in chapter 1, "The Romance of Belonging: Texts and Contexts." Here, Pedrick develops her conception of "the romance of belonging," which, as its name suggests, takes off from Freud's "family romance." Freud theorized that children resolved their feelings of dissatisfaction with their family by fantasizing that they were adopted and "really" belonged to some much grander family. Freud did not take seriously the possibility that children might actually have been abandoned or adopted, whereas Euripides' play acknowledges the reality of that possibility. Pedrick argues that Freud thinks he has established the origins of the Wolf Man and his illness, but he omits other possible points of view. In particular, the primal scene theory only considers the child's desire to enter the parents' embrace; it ignores the fact that the parents may choose to abandon a child (25). Why is this possibility overlooked? Pedrick reads Freud's language "for evidence about the nature of . . . concealed urgency and intent" (26). Ignoring other possibilities allows...