Dear Esther,
I’m taken with the idea that Freud’s work is a mythical response to Nietzsche – an attempt to create a new myth of man and ward off the rising occultist mud then covering Europe. This is what the surrealists saw in him. Freud as poet and creator. Ποίησις και Μῦθος. The unconscious as great invention.
It’s a mystery why the early 20th century was a time of myth-making. Whole cities built and destroyed by myths. An impossible history. There was no history in the early 20th century. The enormity of the myth making, the frantic pace of it, the number of poets… all defy the historian, who is left talking about forces and peoples and ideologies and circumstances, all of which were for a brief moment almost non-existent (so hidden were they by words). There was no totality of circumstance. (So unlike Kojève’s poem, the EU…)
It ended in the catastrophe, of course.
vale bene,
D