Breaking Apart Like the World: Seneca and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

"reading the tragedies alongside psychoanalysis as separate but intersecting, mutually-implicative, discourses offers ways of thinking ‘otherwise’ about the dialectical problems posed by both, including Senecan drama’s reception in later tragedy and tragedy’s reception within psychoanalytic discourse. To this end I touch upon aspects of Senecan tragedy that have seemed to some scholars to demand a psychoanalytically informed reading - aspects that echo Freudian theories of the unconscious - while also suggesting ways in which the plays resist straightforward ‘proof’ of psychoanalysis as an effective critical mechanism. With these dynamics in mind, this essay will posit Senecan drama as a repressed, Roman, term in psychoanalysis’ much-discussed originary relationship with Greek drama."