Dreams and desires in ancient and early Christian thought

Freud considered the ancient Greeks to have been a relatively unrepressed people. In their literature, art and mythology the Greeks, he thought, could directly contemplate the fulfilment of the ‘primeval wishes of our childhood’.1 After classical antiquity, however, a ‘secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind’ led Western civilization into its current predicament.2 Whereas childhood fantasy could be expressed in the Oedipus Rex, by the time of Shakespeare’s Hamlet the same fantasy had to be repressed. Oedipus was tragic, whereas Hamlet was neurotic.