ABSTRACT
For as long as there has been literate civilization, human beings have puzzled over human being. ‘I am not to blame!’ says King Agamemnon in the Iliad. ‘Zeus and Fate and the Fury stalking through the night, they are the ones who drove the savage madness in my heart.’ This is Agamemnon’s account of his catastrophic decision to seize Achilles’ prize, the slave-girl Briseis; and though it may now look quaint, it is a mistake to dismiss it. At the moment he acted, Agamemnon – ‘blazing with anger’ – had no doubt he was justified. He needed to protect his honor and avoid disgrace. But, looking back in the light of the military devastation his decision caused, it seems to him to have been a ‘savage madness’: his reason was distorted, the act was not entirely his, another agency was involved, another mind; one whose purposes he cannot fully understand, but which nevertheless acts through him.1 These are the forces Sigmund Freud tries to explain – without invoking Zeus. Freud wanted to understand human beings – their culture, art, science and religion – as part of nature but, unlike so many psychologists today, he did not want to ignore the mysteries of the human condition.2
