The Psychoanalytic Theory of Greek Tragedy.

Alford looks to Greek tragedy to support his plea for a therapy and mode of living based on pity, reparation, and shared suffering. Himself a follower of Melanie Klein, he believes that the Attic poets were her precursors and that their dramas embodied a single "theory" not unlike hers since they sought "to confront the power of the uncivilizing emotions with the strength of the civilizing ones" (164). The book is addressed ostensibly to the psychoanalytic community in the hope that it will be enriched, and a reader of classical interests must remember that he is, in a sense, eavesdropping on a conversation not meant for him. He will hear blanket statements about "the Greeks" that may surprise him (e.g., "The Greeks raged against death," 91), but he will also partake in a centrifugal discussion that moves out from tragedy and into contemporary psychology and philosophy. The promise seems high, but unfortunately it is not fulfilled because the tragedy that provides the point of departure is handbook drama read in haste and distorted to suit the author's (quite sympathetic) bias.

Like Philip Slater (whose book he admires), Alford thinks it possible to describe the psychic state of a culture. He finds the Greeks at the end of the fifth century caught in what he calls "the Dionysian crisis" because they perceived their gods much as the subject of a Kleinian analysis might the mother, as "Bad" when they …