Psychoanalysis, entering its second century, is a vital yet divided discipline. A confusing array of mutually contradictory theories compete for the loyalty of clinicians and for the attention of all those interested in understanding human experience.

In the classic Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, Jay Greenberg and his coauthor Stephen Mitchell brought clarity to the confusion surrounding psychoanalytic disputes. They defined two competing models: the drive model, which addresses the private dimensions of experience; and the relational model, which reveals the relentlessly social aspect of our lives. Oedipus and Beyond builds on Greenberg’s earlier contribution. Beginning with a brilliant critique of the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis, he provides fresh insight into Freud’s theory, demonstrating how attempts to resolve some of its shortcomings have generated their own theoretical and clinical dilemmas. In the process he illuminates the roles of the Oedipus complex, the drives, the unconscious, and psychic structure in shaping the sensibilities of alternative psychoanalytic approaches.

Greenberg does not attempt to synthesize the two models, because he believes that diversity is essential if psychoanalysis is to remain strong. Instead, he proposes a compelling and practical clinical theory in which Freud’s insistence on the importance of inner motivation, psychic conflict, and personal agency effectively informs a relational emphasis on the fundamental influence of social living.

The book concludes with some apt illustrations of how the “representational model” can enrich clinical work. Greenberg rethinks the process of making the unconscious conscious, and arrives at new approaches to the analyst’s neutrality, to transference analysis, and to countertransference. The result reflects the author’s profound insight into the structure of psychoanalytic theory and his mastery of the contributions of diverse psychoanalytic schools. Perhaps most important, Greenberg’s argument never loses touch with his clinical experience; ultimately, this is the deeply personal statement of a skilled practitioner.

Marie Delcourt’s brilliant study of the Oedipus legend, an unjustly neglected monument of twentieth-century classical scholarship published in 1944 and issued here for the first time in English translation, bridges the gap between Carl Robert’s influential Oidipus (1915) and the work of Lowell Edmunds seventy years later. Delcourt studies the legend in its various aspects, six episodes that have equal weight and that stress the same themes: greatness, conquest, domination, the right to rule—all of them bound up with the idea of kingship. Together they form the biography of a Theban hero, the fullest account that has come down to us about the prehistory of sovereign power among the ancient Greeks. Delcourt does not suppose that Oedipus, or indeed any other Greek hero, was a historical figure. The personality familiar to us from the plays of the tragedians of the fifth century—our oldest source, and a very late one—was the result of their extraordinary artistry in linking together themes rooted in very ancient social and religious rites that in the interval had come to describe the feats of Oedipus, then his life, and finally his character. It was in order to explain these rites, whose meaning had ceased to be understood, that myths and legends were invented in the first place. Oedipus, Delcourt argues, is the archetype of all heroes of essentially (if not exclusively) ritual origin, whose acts were prior to their person. This is a very different— and far more complex—Oedipus than the one rather implausibly imagined by Freud. More generally, the origin and transmission of the Oedipus legend tells us a great deal about the strength and persistence of public memories in prehistoric societies.