Very brief prelude in lieu of an introduction, surveying the two main scholarly approaches to the collection: one focused Ovid’s literary artistry, allusive complexity, etc., the other on his exposé (whether serious or simply amusing) of the morally problematic character of the lover; proposes to resist the temptation of intertextuality along with the distancing strategy of moral critique.

Chapter focuses on Naso’s self-canonizing claims to immortality and his allusive, self-reflexive elegy for Corinna’s parrot, showing how these poems are not just authorial pronouncements coming to us direct from Ovid, but moves in a game Naso is playing with (against) his girlfriend. It emerges that the poet’s grand claims have a contrastive emphasis, whereby Naso’s high pursuits are set off against his girlfriend’s mundane arts. Chapter ends with a discussion of rivalry, focusing on the figures of Dipsas, Tibullus, and the personified Elegy. Key poems: Amores 1.14 and 1.15; 2.5, 2.6, 2.8; 3.14 and 3.15; 1.8 and 3.9.

Chapter launches project of taking Naso’s desire seriously. Reads Naso’s desire alongside Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, focusing on Naso’s desire to script scenes in which he is at the mercy of his girlfriend; his fascination with the blurred boundary between art-objects and flesh, especially visible in simile-clusters; his interest in castration; and the recurrrence, starting with the poems on Corinna’s abortion, of a “maternal fantasy” in which he plays alternately the mother and the baby. Key poems: Amores 1.7, 2.19, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.13, 2.14, 2.15

Chapter takes up masochism at the level of literary form, focusing on Naso’s resistance to closure and desire for perpetually renewed agitation , as manifested in 1) his beloved verse form, the elegiac couplet (in which the cadence of the hexameter is twice suspended); 2) his finessing of possible endpoints within the book, especially at book junctures; and 3) his self-defeating deployment of rhetorical persuasion (a failure that ensures the need for more rhetoric). Key poems: Amores 1.1, 3.1, 1.4, 1.5, 3.7, 1.11

Main task of this chapter is to distinguish Ovid from the poet-lover of the collection, drawing a sharp line between the poet in the collection and the author of the collection. Offers theoretical reflections on Ovid’s deployment of proper names (fictional names, pseudonyms, “real” Roman names); reads the elegy for Tibullu, as a model for the fictional reduction of Ovid to Naso; and addresses poems that challenge this argument (e.g. the poem featuring Ovid’s wife), showing that even these can be seen to serve the interests of Naso, the fictional character inside the collection. Key poems: Amores 1.1, 2.18, 3.9, 3.13.

When it came to mothers, as Nicole Loraux has remarked, the oedipally minded Freud had his own blind spot. The relation of mother to son appeared to Freud as the least fraught of human associations. The mother might cherish the son whose arrival supplied her want of a penis, and the son might take the mother as his first object of desire, one never entirely abandoned, but these fond emotions are relatively unproblematic; it is the intrusion of the father that makes the really interesting difference. It would be left to Melanie Klein and others working with the very young to uncover the exciting world of infantile fantasy, in which the mother, or the mother's breast, internalized in both “good” and “bad” forms, plays so signal a role, most notoriously negative: devoured and devouring, eviscerated and eviscerating. Whereas the Freudian father provides (if not in his own person, then in the function he more or less successfully represents) the structure and telos of action, this mother is simply embarrassing: she is what the reader and the hero are normally hastening to get past. This chapter is my attempt to slow down and bring the mother into better focus.

If psychoanalysts of Roman literature and culture have tended to pay more attention to the father, it is out of deference not just to the Freudian bias but to the overwhelmingly paternal cast of Roman ideology. After all, the Roman father appears to be a truly formidable figure.

The previous chapter brought me to the verge; now I close my eyes and step right over, taking the plunge into one of the most embarrassing and rebarbative of psychoanalytic obsessions: the Freudian penis, the Lacanian phallus.

There is no way around the fact that this is a pivotal topic in classical psychoanalytic theory. For Freud, it is the penis that signposts the devious journey that arrives, with surprising frequency, and as if by design, at normative heterosexuality. Fear of losing it (“castration anxiety”) spurs the son to relinquish the mother; wanting it (“penis envy”) sets the girl on the winding path toward motherhood, which alone can abate her sense of privation. In one of Freud's everyday myths, the differentiating crisis is triggered by the sight of a different body, perceived as fearfully deficient or enviably furnished. Whereas the boy's reaction has to be activated by a threat of castration (it is only in tandem with this threat that the girl's body appears castrated, thereby furnishing ghastly proof that such threats are not always empty), the girl's is instantaneous: “she has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.” Though sometimes refusing the evidence of his eyes, the Freudian boy typically has the good sense to relinquish his mother in order to keep his penis. By contrast, the Freudian girl scarcely ever succeeds in recovering fully from her initial disappointment. And the consequences of this difference ramify far beyond individual sexual destinies.