Back From the Dead

The afterlife of Susan Taubes.

- By Merve Emre

Previously unpublished work casts new light on Taubes, who killed herself in 1969.

In Sigmund Freud’s “Rat Man,” a case history of a neurotic young man, there is a curious footnote about the natural uncertainty of paternity. For a man to believe that his father truly was his father, he had to accept what no evidence could corroborate. Paternity was not a physical relation, Freud explained. It was an idea that sprang, as if already fully formed, from one’s mind. “The prehistoric figures which show a smaller person sitting upon the head of a larger one are representations of patrilineal descent,” he wrote. “Athena had no mother, but sprang from the head of Zeus.”

But Freud was wrong. Athena did have a mother: Metis, whom Zeus swallowed, fearing that the children she bore would be too mighty for him to govern. In some versions of the myth, Metis, while pregnant inside Zeus, made her daughter a breastplate, which Athena eventually adorned with the decapitated head of the gorgon Medusa, whose eyes held the power to turn anyone who looked upon her into stone. “To decapitate = to castrate,” Freud wrote elsewhere. Had he put the two heads together, he might have wondered at the paradox they presented: that the fierce and divine female child could symbolize both the extension of the patriarch’s authority and its undoing.