Sublime

The legend of Theseus and the Minotaur is full of imagery and incident that lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretation: the minotaur - half man, half animal - embodies the essential conflict between ego and id; the labyrinth, which coincidentally resembles the sulci of the cortex, suggests the complexities of the mind. In 1927, Freud told an int

For it was really shown that these memories correspond to traumas which were not sufficiently 'ab-reacted,' and on closer investigation of the reasons for this hindrance, we can find at least two series of determinants through which the reaction to the trauma was omitted.

But man finds a substitute for this action in speech through which help the affect can well-nigh be ab-reacted

Freud was a modern alchemist who reformulated medieval demons as complexes and Darwinian imperatives. He translated all things devilish - lust, violence, cruelty - into terms that were compatible with twentieth-century thinking.