Resurrecting Oedipus: Poussin’s Birth of Bacchus.

Abstract

The controversial canvas, Nicolas Poussin's Birth of Bacchus, is fundamentally reconstrued as representing not only Ovid's serial narration of the myths of Bacchus and of Narcissus and Echo in The Metamorphoses, but also the history of this text. In particular, Poussin alludes to the intertextual relationship between Ovid's Narcissus and Sophocles' Oedipus. Poussin's interpretation of classical myth points to a more complex interrelationship between dyadic and triadic dynamics in development. An interdisciplinary approach to the aesthetic interpretation of myth underscores the reciprocal value of the arts to psychoanalytic theory.

The Erotics of Knowing: A Neglected Contribution to Analytic Erotism

“…But it is also possible that it points to a more general preoedipal retreat from the oedipal. This defense is as old as myth: Ovid enacts a textual—indeed, a literal —version of preoedipal regression in his replacement of the story of Oedipus with that of Narcissus in his poeticized narration of the Theban cycle of myths in Books III and IV of the Metamorphoses , excising the entire House of Laius from Thebes as neatly as erotism was excised from “analytic love” (Tutter 2014, 2016). Indeed, the relocation of analytic erotism from the hot province of the erotic transference to the ostensibly benign maternal transference can be analogized to the redemption of mankind from original sin via the Virgin birth of the Christ child.…”

“…Splitting undermines knowledge, blinds us to the connections that turn individual components into more complete wholes. As much as we desire knowledge, our apparent need to break connections subverts our attempts to acquire it, which Bion (1959) demonstrates so well in his seminal essay “Attacks on Linking.” The fragmentation of scholarship into encapsulated, isolated disciplines enacts this on a collective level (Tutter 2016), resulting in what José Ortega y Gasset (1930) calls “the barbarism of specialization” (p. 94). No doubt this intellectual siloing has facilitated our field’s lack of engagement with the erotics of knowing.…”

Psychoanalysis, time and the crisis of truth.

“…However, if it follows upon such metadisciplinary strivings and pursues a position of mastery without assuming the “historic burden of self-reflection” (Nelson, 1990, p. 20), it would run the risk of disregarding the particular context in which it operates and the very crisis of legitimacy by which it is plagued: In current systems of knowledge, which rely heavily on accumulation of information and specialization, psychoanalysis is itself doubted, questioned, and disqualified by the master discourse of science and the structures of formal education in which the sciences reign. As Tutter (in press) acknowledged, the problem of specialization besets all fields of knowledge and forecloses a dialogue among the humanities and a synthesis of the knowledge arising within each one. Specialization becomes even more problematic once one considers the rift between the sciences and the humanities, where the latter have been largely rendered irrelevant to the aspirations of the former, which no longer focus on producing knowledge for the benefit of humanity but for the benefit of production.…”

“…Only by knowing both can Oedipus come to truly understand himself” (p. 56). If the story of Oedipus may be said to function as the specimen story of psychoanalysis, then it is only by acknowledging both of these realities that psychoanalysis can succeed in producing a “vertiginous self-knowledge” and an insight into the “psychodynamics of culture.” As Tutter (in press) cleverly pointed out, Oedipus’s difficulty of knowing himself is mirrored by our own difficulty of knowing Oedipus. Tutter implied that there is a danger in seeing and knowing Oedipus that leads to his constant death and resurrection in the way he is being treated by the humanistic disciplines.…”