This unusual book explores the transformative power of liminal experiences in ancient Greek texts, psychoanalytic theory, and the author’s own life, to demonstrate how a contemporary understanding of ancient thought can illuminate modern psychoanalytic theory and practice especially as it relates to trauma, grief, and the development of psyche.

With the understanding that liminal experiencing involves engaging a psychic space outside the boundaries of ego organization, Dobson artfully interweaves autobiography, literary analysis, philosophical ontology, and psychoanalysis, to formulate a new paradigm for how to construct human beings, how to enliven and deepen personal and therapeutic experience, and how poetic language is the gateway to this magical realm of transformation. Alongside richly detailed case analyses, the author uses her dual expertise in psychoanalysis and ancient Greek literature to explore how the maternal and liminal in human life were displaced with the rise of Athens and a new way of being human — the rational citizen — and how this repression has resulted in diminished, constricted experiencing and the suppression of women throughout western history.

With a deep understanding of classical literature and psychoanalysis, and extensive clinical insights, this is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, classicists, and historians wishing to understand how ancient thought and modern psychoanalysis can interact.