An Epiphany on the Acropolis: An Open Letter to Nikos Kazantzakis on the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of Report to Greco

Abstract

The impact of Nikos Kazantzakis's memoir Report to Greco on the author is explored. Writing a “letter” to Kazantzakis in a style that mimics Freud's 1936 public letter, A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis: An Open Letter to Romain Rolland on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, the author muses on an epiphany while facing the Parthenon. The author's personal sense of aliveness and deadness is presented as a measure of the interpenetration of psychoanalysis and the humanities.

Keywords:

• aliveness
• dance
• death
• epiphany
• polydialectical palimpsest
• vitality

Notes

¹ William Stekel was a member of Freud's Wednesday group, but became one of the first-generation outcasts due to dissident views (i.e., active techniques). Kazantzakis seems to have held the work with Stekel in high esteem.

² There is an interesting exploration addressing the fundamental differences between the two men in Herman (2013), The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization. The word “logos” as used by neo-Platonists (not Ancient Greek Platonists) came to represent a theological application as a designation for Jesus Christ.

³ The Greeks, as we have seen earlier, did place the human being at the center of the cosmos. But they also understood about fallibility. For example, there never was an Athenian constitution, only a “constitution of the Athenians.” This meant that the laws could and should be changed over time by the people and are not rules to be upheld forever. The laws were “not carved in stone.”

⁴ The word palimpsest is typically used to describe a parchment manuscript in which original text has been effaced and then overwritten by another. Sometimes the word is used in geology to characterize superimposed features produced at two or more distinct periods. Kazantzakis first coined the term polydialectical palimpsest as a way of describing Greek history and its ambiguities. Full linguistic disclosure: I found his use of the word “palimpsest” without the adjective polydialectical in a 1965 English translation of his travel writings, but my memory tells me that he used the term polydialectical palimpsest in the original Greek version. But my memory often outmaneuvers me. It is possible that I may be imagining the term in order to make a stronger point about the multiple tensions between layered historical networks, self, and culture.

⁵ Gay (1988) writes that Freud's sister, Anna, reported that the name “Alexander” was chosen at a family council, and was suggested by the 10-year-old Freud in recall of Alexander the Great. Rumor has it that Freud wrote his first childhood diaries in Greek and, on that day he climbed to the Acropolis, he wore his best white shirt for the occasion. Remarkably, there is very little about Alexander in the letter by Sigmund, nothing about sibling dynamics and such.

⁶ The classicist Theodor Herzl did, however, visit Greece and the Parthenon atop the Acropolis in 1898. He was on his way to Palestine. His enthusiasm was great, but then he became disappointed because he had imagined the home of the gods. Instead, he saw dust, filth, and decay. Where he had expected to find the descendants of Perikles, he instead found impoverished peasants (Fleming, 2013).

⁷ See the YouTube clip of the film at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6K7OC-IKnA

⁸ The Greek title of the novel is The Life and Times of Aléxis Zorbás.

⁹ Nietzsche was ambivalent about Socrates. He identified with him as a fellow philosophical gadfly.

¹⁰ Theodorakis mistakenly speaks of the Boss as an American. He was British in the novel. In real life, of course, he was Kazantzakis. And Aléxis Zorbás was one George Zorbás from Olympus, the workman engaged in business schemes with the author in 1915 and 1917. In 1919, Kazantzakis and Zorbás worked together to repatriate 150,000 Greeks who were being persecuted by the Bolsheviks in the Caucasus.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Spyros D. Orfanos

Spyros D. Orfanos, Ph.D., A.B.P.P., is clinic director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; senior research fellow, Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Queens College, CUNY; former president of the Division of Psychoanalysis, APA; and past president of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He maintains an independent practice in New York City and Upper Montclair, New Jersey.