Gilgamesh on the Couch. The Mesopotamian Hero and Psychoanalysis

After almost two thousand years of oblivion, his rediscovery at the end of the 19th century led to Gilgamesh’s resurrection, and – as it had been in the ancient Near Eastern world – he quickly once more became part of the collective imagination. That was because epic poetry’s themes are universal, and its imagery is somehow shared by the entire world, so it is not strange that subjects like the complex relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu or the fear of death appealed to the founders of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. The latter in particular found deep inspiration in the figure of Gilgamesh: he used him to explain his idea of the collective unconscious and theory of archetypes and even portrayed him in one of his central works, the socalled Red Book. The paper aims to outline the relationship between Gilgamesh and psychoanalysis.