You Can't Win 'Em All
Monday, September 22, 2025 - 08:00
Because I have two papers in my to-do folder that follow up on this book, I thought I’d take a look at the book first. Alas, It doesn’t appear to be very useful, so I suspect the followup articles will also be covered very briefly.
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Downing, Christine. 1989. Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love. The Continuum Publishing Company, New York. ISBN 0-8264-0445-6
There are some books that have been on my shelves since the earliest years of my interest in the subject without me ever having cracked them open. Indeed, it was the accusatory gaze of those books that helped spur me on to starting the Project. But not all of those books are actually relevant to the study of history. And this is one of them. To be fair, once I skimmed through the first few chapters, it became clear that Downing was not attempting or claiming to do history. She's doing Freudian psychology. The book is also, in many ways, a memoir of her own sexual journey and her experiences as part of the queer community during the AIDS crisis. But even to the extent that myths and images from Classical Greece are discussed, it is in terms of what they mean to 20th century people who are trying to frame their own sexuality in mythic terms (as mediated by Freud's peculiar ideas about same-sex attraction). It's very much "of its time"--the author's previous book was feminist-goddess-imagery explorations. But at least I can tick it off from my list now.
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This is not a book about history. The author’s area of focus is religious studies and psychology and the book primarily concerns itself with interpreting Greek and Roman mythological references to same-sex relations through a Freudian and Jungian lens. (Indeed, half the book is a discussion of Freud’s and Jung’s writings on same-sex relations and the development of their theories.) The conclusions are entirely concerned with modern Freudian understandings of Greek myth and how those might inform the experiences of modern people. Therefore I’m not going to summarize or analyze the book in detail as it doesn’t speak to the experiences or understandings of historic individuals.
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