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

Victoria Pedrick's Euripides, Freud, and the Romance of Belonging is an in-depth inquiry about abandonment, personal and cultural identity, the site of primal suffering, and the impact of the past in the shaping of the present. She chooses Euripides' Ion and Freud's case history of the Wolf Man—in "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis"—to frame her discussion, because both texts are concerned with the question of the initial trauma and the origins of family. The Ion is truly a tale of abandonment and reunion since, in the play, an infant who is the product of Apollo's rape of the Athenian princess Kreousa, is exposed by his mother. The child is rescued at Apollo's request, brought to the god's temple in Delphi, where he grows up, and is finally recognized by Kreousa, now married to Xouthos, king of Athens. On the other hand, Freud's case history suggests only a fear of abandonment on the part of a patient that Freud named the Wolf Man because of a childhood dream that haunted him. This fear first emanated from the boy's feeling that his father preferred his sister to him, and resurfaced toward the end of therapy, as the anxiety of the coming separation from his psychoanalyst.

Pedrick argues that both authors fall short of successfully tackling the problem of the construction of identity because Euripides fails to show, and Freud fails to identify, the precise moment of the initial trauma. She asserts that the site of the original suffering is located right after birth, when the parents are faced with the frightening choice between embrace and abandonment—amounting to murder in some cases. Victoria Pedrick calls the recreation of this decisive instant "a romance of belonging, as an adaptation of and a challenge to Freud's family romance" (9). The author makes a compelling case for her innovative thesis and presents convincing arguments for critically examining and re-evaluating the principles on which Freud based his psychoanalysis. First, she objects to Freud's family romance, in which "overwhelmed by feelings of neglect, the child consoles itself with the belief that its 'real' parents are not the harsh, humble folk who foster it, but people who are nobler and its by birthright" (32). The elaboration of this fantasy, Pedrick claims, allows Freud to disregard the reality of physical abandonment. Her second criticism concerns Freud's insistence that the primal scene (a child witnessing its parents having sex) recreates the Oedipal embrace and is at the heart of all neuroses. When Sergei Pankejeff (the Wolf Man) comes to Sigmund Freud for help, Freud authoritatively interprets his dream as the trauma caused by the primal scene, although his patient never remembered such an occurrence, and despite several very traumatic childhood experiences that could have been at the source of Sergei's illness. Victoria Pedrick states, "Freud constructs complementary identities for himself and for his patient that illustrate the scene's fundamental necessity as the master narrative of psychoanalysis, but he cannot resist the temptation to use further constructions of the primal scene rhetorically to buttress his argument as a 'secret weapon' against his adversaries" (10).

Victoria Pedrick's insightful analysis of Freud's case study of the Wolf Man, and her discussion of his disagreement with his former followers, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, shed new lights on the beginnings of psychoanalysis. It is also the perfect platform for the author to propose her own theory of the primary trauma. She examines the harsh reality of child abandonment in ancient Greece, and even in Freud's era, and the violence at the heart of the romance of belonging. The initial choice of embrace or rejection has to take into account the economic value of the infant who is the object of the transaction. The author re-establishes the crucial role of the mother, who is only a passive, neglected figure in Freud's Oedipal constructions. She states: "This image of mother and child...