It was a normal day. I sat in my office, windows open, reading the news to avoid work I didn’t want to do, when I learned that Anne Carson had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This was surprising.

Not because Carson’s writing is undeserving of the prize. It’s just that Carson is so… irreverent, bold, funny, and honest. (Perhaps she’s too good for the prize?) Her winning, it seems to me, would be like Freud winning the Nobel Prize for being funny or Lacan winning the Nobel Prize for sticking to your guns. In both cases, the prize would be well deserved! Be that as it may, certainly not something I would have predicted.

This got me thinking about how Carson, like Freud and Lacan, used Greek tragedy to reveal something about human suffering.

Freud uses the story of Oedipus to show us that the story we are telling ourselves about why we are doing what we are doing is not the whole story, and that we have repressed sexual and aggressive desires that we are not aware of influencing us to do things that we don’t consciously intend to do. Through Oedipus as a metaphor, Freud showed how the story we consciously tell hides (i.e., represses) something about us, and that hiding it doesn’t get rid of it. He spent years building psychoanalysis as a method and a space. It was a method for helping people find (remember, repeat, and work through) what they had hidden, and it was also a space within which a person could do this safely.

Later, Lacan uses the Greek tragedy of Antigone to show us how we have commitments and desires that will wreck our everything: our bodies, our finances, our careers, our relationships with the people we love, everything! Lacan reveals that these very self-destructive commitments and desires—the ones that wreck us—are the ones we’re most bound to. We can’t relinquish them. We can try. We might succeed in “being good” for a bit, but given enough time, we can’t help ourselves. We will wreck something.

My point is that lots of people today are willing to believe that what Freud and Lacan used the Oedipus and Antigone to reveal is interesting and fun to talk about at holiday parties and faculty meetings; it doesn’t apply to them, because they’ve somehow moved past all that.

This is where Carson’s work comes in.

In her preface to the book Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (2006), Carson writes,

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. […] Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother’s funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look.

I love what Carson does here. She directly addresses those who believe that what Freud showed us about ourselves with Oedipus and what Lacan reveals about us via Antigone does not apply to them. She says this directly, “perhaps you think this does not apply to you,” and then, as Freud does in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, she shows us that we are not as advanced, not as far out of the reach of what makes our lives tragic as we might want to believe we are.

Oedipus does not merely accidentally murder his father in a fit of road rage, and then marry his mother, have sex with her, and get her pregnant four times. (People sometimes forget about the pregnancies, but those are a rather important detail!) He does all of this while telling himself a story, while believing the story, that he is really a good guy. When the truth is revealed, he doesn’t take it well. Anyone who has tried hard to do the right thing, only to find out later that what they did actually made things worse, might see something of Oedipus’s story in what they have done.

Antigone literally buries herself alive to make her point. A bit extreme? Yeah, you could say that. Sure. But anyone who has ever done some self-destructive “for the principle of it” is reenacting what went down in Antigone.

Perhaps we would all do well to read Carson alongside Freud and Lacan and ask ourselves. Where do I see myself here?

* Psychoanalyst member of the WAP and NLS. Practices psychoanalysis in Chicago