“Your cunning has proved to be that of Cain. I grant you power over the Hellmouth. May Samael take my revenge." The thing said with a bitter look and a voice that seemed to be many.”

“Psychoanalysis and Greek mythology are two sides of the same medallion. To put it differently: without classical mythology, there would be no psychoanalysis. If that seems like too bold a statement, this chapter aims to show that it is not. It will look at the dynamic relationship forged between psychoanalysis and classical myth, and the impacts, positive and negative, that each has made upon the other.There are numerous psychoanalytic theorists, but Freud necessarily takes centre stage. Like many in 19th-century Germany, Freud was passionate about ancientGreece and its myths. He was both an analyst of the psyche, or mind (using Greek myth) and of Greek myth (using the psyche). As a result, he initiated a radical new method of enquiry, psychoanalysis, and wrote a momentous chapter in the history of classical mythology.”

“What does it matter who a person is or who they have been? Let them think what they like. We're all so many people, aren't we, nowadays? So confusing it is, I don't know how anyone keeps track. There are the people we are inside, then the people we used to be, then there are the people other people think we are.”

“The thing about denial is that it doesn't feel like denial when it's going on.”

“Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their head, The wind is passing by.”

“However, I have also argued for allegory’s positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.”

“If ‘myth’ is a slippery term, so is ‘classical’. It is common shorthand for ‘ancient Greek and Roman’. But this shorthand has a history, and a bias.”