Abstract

This Cambridge "little book" takes up residence in the influential aerie of psychoanalytic studies in Latin poetry, whose best-known members are the Lacanianists Paul Allen Miller and Micaela Janan. Oliensis' contribution is to introduce the father of psychoanalysis to the club. She rightly insists that "the 'Freud' of Freud's Rome is not just a synecdoche for psychoanalysis", and she carefully distinguishes Freud from Lacan. She focuses on mourning, motherhood, and sexual difference, and she studies what she calls the "textual unconscious," looking at issues of sexuality in Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil, an approach she describes as "psychotextual criticism".