For those of you who enjoyed earlier installments of Cannongate’s “The Myths” series, which retells ancient myths and stories for a modern audience (including Margaret Atwood’s brilliant “The Penelopiad”, and Jeanette Winterson’s moving “Weight”), a new installment, “Where Three Roads Meet”, has been released that focuses on the story of Oedipus. But author and former Jungian psychotherapist Salley Vickers approaches the story from a very unique angle.

“Where Three Roads Meet takes the form of a dialogue between the dying Freud, sitting in his Hampstead study, and a mysterious guest who has wandered in from the heath, who doesn’t seem to be visible to anyone else, and who is eventually revealed to be Tiresias, the blind seer who witnessed the original tragedy. Or is Freud’s mind wandering? Thoughout the dialogue, the sunshine of civilised conversation is undercut by the darkest shadows of the mind. Freud has just narrowly escaped the clutches of the Nazis and the mouth cancer for which he takes morphine is to kill him in a matter of months. Tiresias, the ancient spirit who talks to the birds on the heath, and who seems to appear when his auditor most needs distraction from pain, nevertheless evokes all the horror of an ancient crime, and of those dark, irrational forces known as the gods. It’s a thoroughly creepy story.”

According to Vickers, part of her inspiration is her long-time frustration with Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of Oedipus (which formed the basis of his Oedipus complex), a reading that she believes is incomplete.

“Oedipus is a central myth for psychoanalysts. When I came to train, obviously we talked about it and I thought, Freud’s not read it correctly! Oedipus is an adult man when he falls in love with Jocasta, he’s not a child. Secondly, Freud didn’t take any account of the actions of the parents, Laios and Jocasta. They set out to murder their child. That seems to be a very interesting feature of this myth. So I think it was inevitable that in doing this book I would try and explain it to Freud. I’ve been dying to do that for years.”

The author intends “Where Three Roads Meet” to be a Socratic dialogue in which two very different views of reality are explored. The rationalistic atheism of Freud, and the advocate for unseen forces Tiresias, who was both cursed and gifted by the gods. “Where the Three Roads Meet” sounds like an interesting read for lovers of myth, and for those interested in exploring an exchange between atheism and polytheism.

Tags: atheism, books, Cannongate, Freud, Myth, Polytheism, Salley Vickers, Where Three Roads Meet