jap a
Melvin R. Lansky
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THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF
FORGIVENESS: SHAME
FANTASIES AS INSTIGATORS OF
VENGEFULNESS IN EURIPIDES’
MEDEA
Unforgivability in Euripides’ Medea is explored in the context of intrapsychic forces favoring disruption and narcissistic withdrawal and precluding the influence of forces favoring repair of bonds, not necessarily
to the betrayer, but to the social and moral order. The forces underlying
disruption and withdrawal operate to such an extent that forgiveness
and cooperation with the social order become impossible. Euripides’
literary insights are explored with the purpose of deepening and extending
the psychoanalytic understanding of shame, shame fantasies, projective
identification, and vengefulness as they bear on the problem of forgiveness. Three types of shame fantasy are pertinent to the transformation
of Medea’s mental state from one of anguished and disjointed shame
to diabolical vengefulness: anticipatory paranoid shame, the projective
identification of shame, and withdrawal as a defense against shame.
T
Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge
To cure this deadly grief.
—M ACBETH , IV.iii.214–215
he problem of unforgivability in Euripides’ Medea can profitably
be explored in the context of the struggle between, on the one
hand, intrapsychic forces favoring disruption and narcissistic withdrawal
and, on the other, forces favoring the repair of bonds to the social and
moral order such that forgiveness and some cooperation become possible. The problem of disruption and repair has been a continuing theme
Training and Supervising Analyst, Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and
Institute; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, UCLA Medical School.
Submitted for publication May 25, 2004.
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in my studies on suicide, envy, forgiveness, and related phenomena.
Here I will consider the struggle between disruption (as figured in
Medea’s rejection by Jason and her banishment from Corinth) and
repair (in this case, its psychological impossibility) as the struggle
between unconscious forces pushing toward cooperation and binding
to the social order and those pushing toward disconnection, unbinding,
withdrawal, or destruction.1
In a series of writings (Lansky 1996, 1997, 2001, 2003a) I have
explored the struggles between forces of binding and of unbinding
of relationships to the social order as favoring disconnection and
narcissistic withdrawal if the shame felt consciously or anticipated in
cooperating with betrayers is experienced as unbearable (Lansky 1997;
Morrison and Lansky 1999) and favoring reattachment and repair if
shame can become bearable (Lansky 2001, 2003a).
The plot of Euripides’ play reveals Medea’s unfolding humiliation
and helplessness in the face of her circumstances. Her disorganization
and anguish propel her toward vengefulness that results in her murdering
the king and princess of Corinth, and finally her own two sons. Ten
years before the play begins, Medea had helped the Greek hero Jason
escape from Colchis, even though that had meant killing her own
brother. Jason and Medea escaped together and eventually settled
in Corinth, married, and had two sons. The play opens shortly after
Medea has learned that Jason intends to leave her and marry the daughter
of Creon, the Corinthian king,. Medea’s devastation and rage are such that
Creon, frightened for his and his daughter’s safety, orders Medea and
her sons into immediate exile. Medea successfully pleads for a one-day
stay of the order. Though she and her children have been promised
asylum in Athens by the Athenian king, Aegeus, she sends the children
to the princess bearing a gift of poisoned garments. Both the princess
and Creon die from the deadly poison. Medea then murders her two
sons and, as the play closes, taunts the devastated Jason, refusing him
the right to bury his children. She leaves in a dragon-drawn chariot
sent by her grandfather, the sun god Helios. She is headed to Athens,
where asylum has been guaranteed her by Aegeus in exchange for potions
that will help him have children.
1
Of these two forces, Freud (1940) wrote, “We have decided to assume the existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct. . . . The aim of the
first of these basic instincts is to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them
thus—in short to bind together; the aim of the second is, on the contrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things” (p.148).
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THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FORGIVENESS
I draw upon the Medea to discuss the phenomenology of shame
predicaments and unconscious shame conf licts that escalate to the
point of generating a prepossessing vengefulness. That vengefulness
defends against Medea’s awareness of her unbearable powerlessness
and shame, and also avoids the emotional burden of mourning for what
is lost when she is rejected by Jason. My argument depends on inferences about shame that often is not consciously felt. Shame therefore
refers here not simply to the overt affect but also to compromise formations and defenses against the awareness of future shame arising
from the circumstances of her betrayal by Jason, her diminishment
in social status and security, her helplessness, and the loss of her
husband to a rival. It is Medea’s judgment in fantasy that her shame is
unbearable that drives her down the vengeful path to filicide and
murder of the king and his daughter.
In Euripides’ play, the unbearableness of Medea’s shame is seen to
arise not simply from her humiliating circumstances, however overwhelming. Only under the sway of her unconscious shame fantasies
is her anticipated shame felt to be unbearable. It is unbearable
because it cannot achieve resolution, as can less overpowering experiences of betrayal, by mourning and carrying on with life in the context
of secure bonds with intimates.
By unbearable shame I refer not simply to the experience of painful
affect, but to a more complex dynamic involving signal anxiety and
processing through unconscious shame fantasies. In later sections I
will argue that the complex of associations and fantasies instigated by
the affect of shame, or by the prospect of experiencing that affect
(signal anxiety anticipating shame, or signal shame), is unbearable
in large part because it is felt be the result of deliberate attempts
by others to humiliate her (paranoid shame) and to signal something
like social annihilation and irreversible disgrace. I contend that this
paranoid shame fantasy instigates the projective identification whereby
Medea’s vengeful murders function to inject her helplessness, powerlessness, and despair into Jason. This deployment of projective identification occurs within the workings of a second shame fantasy, that of
being within a fused dyad with her husband: Medea is convinced that
by vengefully relocating her unbearable anguish to Jason, she has actually solved the problem posed by her shame. This is an important dimension of shame dynamics in addition to the usual Kleinian formulation
of the mechanism of projective identification, which more often than is
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usually realized is instigated unconsciously by actual or anticipated
shame and serves to rid the self in fantasy of that shame by relocating
it to its presumed source. A third shame fantasy, one involving omnipotence, is symbolized at the conclusion of the play.
These shame dynamics shed light on the problem of forgiveness,
the letting go of resentment, grudge, and hatred to the extent that the
betrayed person can mourn what has been lost and carry on with life.
The topic of forgiveness, ignored completely in the psychoanalytic
literature until recently, has in the last few years received noticeable
attention (Lansky 2001, 2003a; Akhtar 2002; Smith 2002; Cavell 2002;
Siassi 2004). The Medea is not concerned directly with forgiveness, but
Euripides’ explication of Jason’s absolute unforgivability in Medea’s
mind allows me to use the text to further my exploration of forgiveness
in the context of disruption and repair.
In studies of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Sophocles’ Philoctetes
(Lansky 2001, 2003a), in both of which forgiveness is achievable, I have
stressed that unbearable shame must be rendered bearable before forgiveness can take place. I have considered the dynamics of forgiveness as
involving first the letting go of mental states of “unforgiveness” (resentment, hatred, spite, vengefulness, narcissistic rage, blame, withdrawal,
and bearing grudges) and then the gaining of a capacity to tolerate
the psychic burdens that attend that letting go: shame, mourning, loss of
omnipotence and of a sense of self-sufficiency, and the task of revising
one’s assumptions about the nature of relationships.
In both The Tempest and Philoctetes, high-ranking people are
betrayed by intimates from their own social class: in The Tempest,
Prospero is betrayed by his brother; in Philoctetes, the eponymous
hero is marooned by leaders of the Greek army. In each of these dramas,
the play begins years after the protagonist has been stranded on a lonely
island. This isolation signifies the narcissistic withdrawal that follows
rejection and betrayal. As the plot of each play develops, the protagonist is to overcome a grudge sufficiently to cooperate with the social
order as he rejoins it. In neither case, however, are affectionate bonds
with the betrayer restored. Nor do we see in either case the kind of
sublime forgiveness exemplified by Jesus on the cross or Joseph with
his brothers. In these plays, the protagonist attains the capacity for cooperation, but not the restoration of a loving bond. Nonetheless, a transformation is effected from a state of withdrawal to rapprochement with
the social order.
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THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FORGIVENESS
By contrast, in the Medea the inability to forgive is pushed to its
extreme. Medea’s state of unforgiveness takes the form of vengefulness
and spite. The impediment to letting go—the working through of her
deep hurt and shame, we would say if the context were clinical—of those
states of mind in favor of some sort of cooperation—is her anticipation
of unbearable shame. I do not presume that Medea’s goal should be to
forgive, in the usual sense of the word, or to reestablish a loving bond
with Jason after his betrayal; I say only that her tragedy consists of her
inability to let go of her state of humiliated vengefulness, the cost of
which is her children’s lives and her connection to society. Here Euripides
affords us insights into the dynamics underlying an utter incapacity to
put aside grudges and resentfulness and to cooperate in the interests of
one’s children—a process akin to forgiveness in its weakest sense.
By inability to forgive, then, I am referring to the intrapsychic
underpinnings of Medea’s inability to establish not a loving bond with
the betraying Jason, but simply a cooperative enough bond with him
to ensure the well-being of her children and preserve a connection to
the Corinthian community. But Medea’s shame and vengefulness preclude this option that would save herself and her children. Her relationships with every member of the social order—Jason, the princess,
the King, the entire Corinthian community—are so tinged with anticipatory fantasies of unbearable shame that she is relentlessly propelled
toward her course of diabolical vengefulness, spite, and murder. The
relevance of my consideration of the play to the overall problem of
unforgivability is distinctly limited. It concerns only the context of felt
unforgivability of a husband who has rejected and abandoned his
wife—a context resonating with the situation surrounding many
marital breakups, especially when children are involved.
My intent here is twofold: first, to provide an exegesis of the play
through an understanding of the unconscious mechanisms involved in
the transformation from Medea’s initial state of mind to her eventual
state of relentless vengefulness; second, to use Euripides’ insights to
provide a picture of the phenomenology of vengefulness that takes
into account shame conflict, paranoid shame fantasies, the escalation
of conflict, and the instigation of projective identification. Following
Edmund Wilson (1929) in his discussion of Philoctetes, I am considering
the poet to be naturalist. I am using a literary, not a clinical, example.
Though my exposition illustrates a thesis concerning the centrality of
shame dynamics and fantasies in the dynamics of vengefulness, the use
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Melvin R. Lansky
of the play to explore that thesis is not intended to demonstrate its
clinical validity. One is always at risk in discussing the unconscious dynamics of a fictional character. I do not regard Euripides’ insights as
supplying the equivalent of clinical evidence, but rather as offering a
profound explication of the conscious and unconscious phenomenology
of vengefulness. This is as useful to the psychoanalytic clinician as
are the observations of one type of naturalist to another. Another limitation of this study is that I am using a translation of the text, not the
original, and am abstracting from the context of the play, perhaps with
unwarranted assumptions about ancient Greek conceptions of revenge,
shame, and forgiveness.
CRITICAL RESPONSES TO THE PLAY
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Since ancient times, a striking discrepancy has existed between the
theatrical impact of the Medea and the serious questions and doubts
that critics have had about it. The play is one of the most overpowering
theatrical experiences in all of dramatic literature. What we know of
the mythological sources of the story seems to suggest that Medea’s
murder of her sons is an element added by Euripides (Simon 1988;
Nugent 1993; cf. Michelini 1989).
Criticism of the dramaturgy of the play begins with Aristotle
(c. 330 B.C.E.), who severely criticizes both the coincidental arrival of
Aegeus (chap. 25 p. 73) and the conclusion, in which Medea departs,
magically taken up from the scene of action in a chariot drawn by two
dragons (chap. 15, p. 52). Kitto (1939) points out that Aristotle is presupposing a dramaturgy of the Sophoclean type, one very different
from that of Euripides. Aristotle’s criticisms will be dealt with later;
suff ice it to say here that I disagree that Euripides’ dramaturgy is
flawed. Modern critics, for their part, have questioned the dramatic and
literary credibility of Medea’s filicide, some regarding it as simple
melodrama, with the implication that it is both dramatically and psychologically not credible (see, e.g., Easterling 1977; Galis 1992).
It is important to clarify what sort of being Euripides’ Medea is.
Her grandfather, as I have mentioned, was the sun god Helios. In many
versions of the Medea legend, she is a sorceress, and even in Euripides’
version she retains powers of sorcery. Yet Knox (1977) argues convincingly that in that version, despite those powers and despite her
grandfather’s intervention deus ex machina at the denoument, Medea
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THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FORGIVENESS
is fundamentally a human being. She is not, however, Greek. She is a
foreign woman, one who betrayed her father and killed her brother to
assist Jason. Her psychological makeup, therefore, is that of an exile.
Nugent (1993) has pointed out that the designation of Medea as an
exiled woman is actually a redundancy, since married women in the
Greece of Euripides were basically exiles from society, in that they were
isolated from contact outside their husband’s home and denied access
to political activity.
In other plays, Euripides uses a deity to personify a force of human
nature, a force which if denied results in the downfall of the tragic protagonist at the hands of the offended god. Examples include the denial
of Aphrodite (the force of erotic love) by Hippolytus in the play of the
same name, and the denial of Dionysus (the force of Dionysian frenzy—
perhaps, we would now say, of the unconscious) by Pentheus in The
Bacchae. Knox (1977) makes the fascinating point that Medea, in her
vengeful state, embodies a virtually godlike force, that of vengefulness, and becomes, dramaturgically, akin to an offended deity, denial
of whose force is tragically disastrous. Medea qua force of humiliated
vengefulness is a force of human nature akin to that of a deity. Although I agree with the point, it appears to apply to how other characters
experience Medea’s vengeful fury, not to the intrapsychic psychodynamics of that vengefulness, which is my subject here.
A great deal has been made of the transformation of Medea’s agonized mental state at the beginning of the play to her diabolically
vengeful state after her encounter with Aegeus, but none of the criticism by classicists that I have read takes her depth psychology into
consideration. Many critics (e.g., Rehm 1989; Gabriel 1992; Foley 1989)
following Knox have seen Medea as transformed basically into a
Homeric hero, one not unlike Sophocles’ Ajax, who relentlessly pursues vengeance in obedience to a code of valor that obliges her to help
friends and harm enemies. Gabriel has stressed that Jason, in forsaking
Medea for the princess, has broken not simply a personal vow, but the
formal bond of honor before the gods to remain loyal to a spouse.
Medea, as her mental state changes, evolves from an anguished and
helpless female supplicant before Creon and Jason into a masculinized
avenger likened to such epic heroes as Ajax. Feminist critics (Foley
1988, 1989; Gabriel 1992) have pointed to this phenomenon as the defeminization of Medea, who, lacking the societally mandated protection
of a male kinsman, became her own masculine, or at least defeminized,
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champion. The pronounced tendency of criticism by classicists is to
emphasize either the context of the times or issues involving gender, but
not the enduring psychological insights conveyed by the playwright.
Much of this criticism seems to share the assumption that vengefulness
and revenge are masculine attributes alone and to overlook the seemingly obvious consideration that vengefulness in both men and women can
be understood as a psychological phenomenon with its own dynamics. In
all of these writings on Medea’s change of mental state from anguish and
helplessness to diabolical vengefulness, one notes the striking absence of
any consideration of the extent to which the play captures, in its horrifying extreme, enduring aspects of human nature, that is to say, the psychodynamics of shame, spite, and vengefulness.
Nor to my knowledge have psychoanalytic writings on the
Medea treated the play in terms of shame, vengefulness, and spite. Balter
(1969), in studying the myths of Oedipus, Perseus, and Jason, draws
from the work of Arlow to highlight the mother as the source of power.
He discusses the Medea myth in general, not Euripides’ Medea in particular, and discusses her as essentially a mother figure for Jason, one
who is offended when he leaves her to marry the Corinthian princess.
Shengold (1999) has taken up the malignant and deadly giving of gifts
in the larger context of “soul murder.” Simon (1988), perhaps the most
significant psychoanalytic writer on Greek tragedy in English, notes
relatively greater complexity of relationships between parents and children in Euripides as compared to those in Aeschylus and Sophocles.
Simon notes Euripides’ use of essentially epic narration to assail
epic poetry and epic values. He also notes the transformation by
which Medea, the one who has been traumatized, identif ies with the
aggressor and turns the tables by traumatizing her children and her
husband. Wurmser (1981, p. 263), the preeminent psychoanalytic writer
on the dynamics of shame, who also writes extensively on literary
topics, sees Medea’s shame as greatly amplified by Jason’s shamelessness—his scurrilous treatment of her—and his utter disregard for
her self-respect.
THE PAIN OF ATTACHMENT: CIRCUMSTANTIAL
SOURCES OF MEDEA’S SHAME
Medea’s shame escalates rapidly, episode by episode, as she endures
rejection, loss of status, and pity. As the play begins, we learn of
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THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FORGIVENESS
Medea’s plight from the nurse, who describes her mistress’s agony,
desolation, and wish for death, and who fears she will take desperate
action. Medea is heard weeping from the house, disconsolate and
abject, hidden.
When finally she emerges from the house, she encounters the
chorus of Corinthian women, to whom she herself declares her desolation, sense of betrayal, and wish for death. Because she regards her
marriage as her entire existence, she is devastated, her identity dissolved. Jason’s betrayal has left her absolutely homeless.
When Medea is the house, she feels harmed; when she emerges
and encounters other people, she feels wronged and humiliated (Herbert
Morris, personal communication). To some extent her plight is understandable because it is women’s plight in general, and she can talk
to the chorus of women in the belief that she is the way they are and
can be understood by them:
A man, when he’s tired of the company in his home,
Goes out of the house and puts an end to his boredom
And turns to a friend or companion of his own age.
But we are forced to keep our eye on one alone.
What they say of us is that we have a peaceful time
Living at home while they do the fighting in war.
How wrong they are! I would much rather stand
Three times in front of battle than bear one child.
[Euripides 431 B.C.E., ll. 244–251]
But her more specif ic circumstances lend themselves particularly
to shame and helplessness. She is a foreigner unwelcome in her
native land:
Yet, what applies to me does not apply to you.
You have a country. Your family home is here.
You enjoy life and the company of your friends.
But I am deserted, a refugee, thought nothing of
By my husband—something he won in a foreign land.
I have no mother or brother, nor any relation
With whom I can take refuge in this sea of woe.
[ll. 252–258]
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Creon then arrives. He fears her anger and vengefulness and
resolves to banish her, thereby severing her ties to the social order.
When she pleads not to be exiled, he relents to the extent of giving her
one last day in Corinth. Medea’s already great humiliation is increased
when she perceives that Creon, rather than feeling any compassion for
her, dehumanizes her in fearing her anger and vengefulness:
I am afraid of you—why should I dissemble it?—
Afraid you may injure my daughter mortally.
Many things accumulate to support my feeling
You are a clever woman, versed in evil arts,
And are angry at having lost your husband’s love.
I hear that you are threatening, so they tell me,
To do something against my daughter and Jason
And me too. I shall take my precautions first.
[ll. 282–289]
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Creon, like Jason, fears an upset woman. He seems to have no concern for the fact that, banished, Medea will have no meaningful social
bonds and no power. Unlike Prospero and Philoctetes, who retain a
degree of power (Prospero his staff and book, Philoctetes, Heracles’
bow and arrows), Medea is left powerless, helpless, and bereft of a
sense of self. Creon’s banishment of her has deepened her sense of
humiliation and propelled her toward a vengefulness that serves to
restore a sense of herself:
By exiling me, he has given me this one day
To stay here, and in this I will make dead bodies
Of three of my enemies—father, the girl, and my husband.
[ll. 373–375]
In part, Medea is so helpless because she is the betrayer betrayed.
She has destroyed ties to her native Colchis because she has betrayed
her own family and country for Jason’s sake. The text gives us no sense
of whether Medea suffers guilt for her betrayals or whether this guilt,
if present, enters the dynamics of her anguish.
She next encounters Jason, who berates her for her rage and her
threats. He is a thoroughly unsympathetic character, admitting no fault
or basis for hurt or anger in his abandonment of her. The forthcoming
marriage, he proclaims, is to the advantage of her and the children, since
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THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FORGIVENESS
it promotes an alliance with Creon. Medea, further humiliated by Jason’s
failure to acknowledge his betrayal, and by his contempt for her upset
state of mind, protests:
Where am I to go? To my father’s?
Him I betrayed and his land when I came with you?
To Pelias’ wretched daughters? What a fine welcome
They would prepare for me who murdered their father!
For this is my position—hated by my friends
At home, I have, in kindness to you, made enemies
Of others whom there was no need to have injured.
And how happy among Greek women you have made me
On your side for all this! A distinguished husband
I have—for breaking promises. When in misery
I am cast out of the land and go into exile,
Quite without friends and all alone with my children,
That will be a fine shame for the new-wedded groom,
For his children to wander as beggars and she who saved him.
[ll. 501–515]
After these encounters with Creon and Jason, she is left with a
sense both of being feared and of being the object of pity and contempt,
which further amplifies her shame.
THE UNBEARABLE SHAME OF
ATTACHMENT TO ONE’S BETRAYER
The next encounter, a coincidental occurrence criticized by Aristotle for
precisely that reason, introduces the hope that Medea will be offered a
way out of her predicament. Aegeus, King of Athens, visits her. He is
married, but childless. Medea offers to help his marriage become fertile,
using her knowledge of potions, and asks for his protection; Aegeus
offers her asylum in Athens, but only if she can get there on her own:
. . . if you reach my land
I, being in my rights, will try to befriend you,
But this much I must warn you of beforehand.
I shall not agree to take you out of this country;
But if you by yourself can reach my house, then you
Shall stay there in safety. To none will I give you up
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But from this land you must make your escape yourself,
For I do not wish to incur blame from my friends.
[ll. 723–730]
Aegeus stresses that he will give her protection, but not in such a
way as to make him appear complicit in her leaving Corinth. These
lines contain a significant ambiguity that is not resolved in the text.
They are usually understood to be a guarantee of safety for Medea only
(see, e.g., Nugent 1993). That is, Medea would be offered asylum
without her children and would have to leave them with Jason, or at
least in Corinth. However, the children too have been banished. Creon
says to Medea at the outset of his interaction with her:
You, with that angry look, so set against your husband,
Medea, I order you to leave my territories
An exile, and take along with you your two children.
[ll. 271–274]
448
The text does not seem to me to point to any imperative by Aegeus
that Medea leave her children, but only to his need to avoid complicity
in her relocation itself (see Simon 1988, p. 92). Medea’s later deliberations make clear that she is given the opportunity to take her children
with her:
Do not, O my heart, you must not do these things!
Poor heart, let them go, have pity upon the children.
If they live with you in Athens they will cheer you.
[ll. 1056–1058]
If we presume that the offer of asylum to Medea includes asylum
for her children, a much darker view of Medea’s nature and of her
enduring attachment to Jason emerges, one much more congruent with
the overall psychological thrust of the play. With the presumption of
asylum, we as audience breathe a sigh of relief: there is a way out for
her and the children. All of the principal characters can be bound to
their progeny and the next generation can continue. Medea can use her
craft to help Aegeus have offspring, Medea will have her sons, and
Jason, children by his new bride. But, dashing our hopes, Medea will
instead choose a diabolically vengeful course. The full extent of this
course, which will cut her off from the social and moral order, emerges.
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First she will kill Creon and his daughter with poisoned gifts. Then,
instead of killing Jason:
I weep to think of what a deed I have to do
Next after that; for I shall kill my own children.
And when I have ruined the whole of Jason’s house,
I shall leave the land and flee from the murder of my
Dear children.
[ll. 791–795]
If we are to assume, then, that Medea is offered asylum with her
children, we are faced with another problem that requires explanation.
We knew very early in the play that she had thoughts of such vengeful
murder, since she told the chorus part of her plan to kill Jason, Creon,
and Creon’s daughter. But the idea of killing her children emerges only
now as an explicit part of her plan, where earlier she had expressed it
only in a disorganized, emotional manner. We must wonder: was it in fact
planned from the start? If so, what is the dramaturgic and psychological
point of the encounters with Jason, Creon, and Aegeus? These episodes
may simply reflect subterfuges used by Medea to disarm her enemies
and further her implementation of a set plan. Although her purpose is
stated before the episodes in question, I see them as depicting more
than simple stratagems. I see them as reflecting Medea’s not yet expired
hopes of repairing her situation of unbearable shame by eliciting compassion from Jason and pardon from her sentence of banishment. These
hopes of ameliorating her shame all fail, adding substance to a fantasy
that then summates into a murderous plan of action. The Aegeus episode
and its promise of escape for mother and children cause a previously
concealed source of shame to emerge: Medea is faced with the fact that
she cannot, in her state of mind at the moment, emotionally separate
from Jason. I will turn to that source of shame in the next section.
I am arguing that, though Medea’s vengeful thoughts and intentions precede the encounters in the first part of the play, her mounting
shame, disconnection from the social order, and attendant shame fantasies, together with her already devalued status, serve to coalesce these
revenge fantasies into a distinct plan of action. Her mental state changes.
Now under the sway of the forces disrupting her bonds to the social and
moral order, her state of mind is transformed: she is diabolically vengeful and absolutely sure of herself. Although states of uncertainty, shame,
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Melvin R. Lansky
and agony break through on occasion, her vengeful state steadfastly
defends against the experience of those disorganized and agonized
states of mind.
This line of thinking—that her more or less indistinct plans for
revenge are transformed into a specific plan of action—requires that
we consider the instigation of such a transformation and the processes
by which it is accomplished.
UNCONSCIOUS SHAME CONFLICTS: INSTIGATORS
OF MEDEA’S TRANSFORMATION
TO THE DIABOLICAL
450
Vengefulness is so intuitive to all of us as spectators or readers of
the Medea that, however horrified, we are likely to be so empathically
gripped by Medea’s vengeful state of mind as to lose sight of the underlying shame dynamics that shape the fundamental insanity—the irreducible horror of the play—that fuels her vengeful project. I want in
particular to draw attention to the fulcrum of the turn to vengefulness
from a disorganized and humiliated state; here is the essence of a
shame-rage cycle, the instigation of rage by conscious or unconscious
shame. Such shame-rage cycles (Lewis 1971; Scheff 1987, 1990; Lansky
1992) are found in some of the greatest masterpieces of world literature: the Iliad, Moby Dick, Richard III, Paradise Lost, and Balzac’s
Cousin Bette are but a few.
After the encounter with Aegeus offers hope that Medea will
choose to separate from Jason and Corinth, will take her sons and leave
in safety, her truly dark side emerges. Why just now? In response to
what? It is important to pose the question: Is the vengeful destructiveness that ensues a mere unfolding of Medea’s basic nature that was
there all the time, or has it been crystallized somehow by something
specific in the Aegeus episode? Even though Medea has clearly entertained these thoughts previously, I opt for the latter. She changes after
the episode from a woman devastated and desperately clinging to what
is left of her attachments to the social and familial order, to one determined to destroy the princess, the king, and her own children.
I speculate that at this moment, just when everything seems to point
to Medea’s relocation to Athens, she is faced with a final shame-producing realization that plunges her into the diabolical pursuit of
destruction and revenge: she is too attached to Jason to separate. She is
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not able to take the children and leave for Athens. She still loves him,
and is ashamed of it. (Fiona Shaw’s portrayal of this aspect of Medea
in a recent production dramatized this point magnif icently.) Absent
this line of thinking, the dramatic progression of the play makes no
psychological sense.
This understanding—that she now finds herself so fused with
Jason, so attached to him, that no matter the extent of his arrogance and
indignities toward her, she cannot take the opportunity to leave—leads
us to the realization that her humiliation has become utterly unbearable.
Medea’s shocking turn to vengefulness, despite the fact that she has just
been given the opportunity to take her children and leave Corinth, is the
dramatic fulcrum of the play, and is instigated by Medea’s awareness of
her deep intrapsychic fusion with Jason. Now she faces an impossibly
humiliating predicament: she cannot separate from Jason or the social
order, nor can she cooperate with either without experiencing truly
unbearable shame.
For this reason I disagree with Aristotle’s criticism (c. 330 B.C.E.) of
the Aegeus episode: “Irrationality . . . [is] rightly censured when there
is no need for [it] and [it] is not properly used, as no good use is made
of the irrationality of Euripides’ introduction of Aegeus in Medea . . . ”
(p. 73). Ironically, the episode, by providing the possibility of escape
for Medea and her children, brings forward the hitherto concealed
impossibility of her leaving.
At Corinth, we must presume, she would have had to endure the
comparison of her new status with her previous one: rejected older
woman rather than cherished wife; unwelcome foreigner rather than
honored citizen by marriage. The acceptance of this diminution is status would require mourning involving not simply painful emotion, but
also deep shame. Her anticipation of these emotional burdens (signal
anxiety) works against her capacity to connect to the social order and
propels her further toward diabolical vengeance.
Euripides’ sense of the unconscious pathways involved in the
crystallization of her vengefulness, put forward explicitly in the text,
is astonishing. Vengefulness and spite are the cardinal features of the
Medea. To understand this fully, it is necessary to consider the instigation of rage by shame, and to distinguish various types of shame experience in the play: signal shame, shame predicaments, shaming
transactions, and shame fantasies. Medea’s revenge, which involves
the completion of plans revealed early in the play, is in fact instigated
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by the cumulative shock and escalating impact of the actual experiences
as they combine with her shame fantasies.
There is in the psychoanalytic literature a dearth of attention to the
problem of instigation. Instigators are discussed frequently, but, with
the exception of Freud’s very brief discussion of dream instigation
in chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, pp. 651–653), very
little on the intrapsychic process of instigation per se appears in our
literature (Lansky 2003b, 2004).
Instigation marks the articulation of the intrapsychic with the external world. Failure to take the dynamics of instigation into account
leaves us with an impoverished and constricted understanding of conflict and its escalation. Medea’s narcissistic equilibrium is disrupted
by her general circumstances, by the shaming transactions we see in
the play, and by her processing of shame through paranoid fantasies.
I have taken up the circumstances in Medea’s predicament that give rise
to her shame and have pointed to various shaming transactions early in
the play. At this point, I will turn to the shame fantasies that summate
into the unbearable shame that triggers Medea’s relentless vengefulness.
THREE TYPES OF SHAME FANTASY
I use the term shame fantasy to stress that Medea’s shame dynamics,
like those of vengeful persons generally, involve not simply an experience of affect (shame as emotion), but a regression and an unconscious
anticipation or interpretation of that shame experience in relation to
significant persons with whom they are intrapsychically bonded. In
the Medea, three distinct types of fantasy are operative: anticipatory
paranoid shame; shame relocated in fantasy into the other by projective
identification; and shame defended against by omnipotent withdrawal
from the social order.
Anticipatory Paranoid Shame
Medea’s f irst shame fantasy is that her shame is evidence of
the deliberate intention of others to humiliate her. What begins as
Medea’s situational shame becomes her anticipatory paranoid shame.
She is convinced she will be mocked by the community, and the shame
accompanying this conviction makes the prospect of staying in Corinth
with her children and cooperating with Jason unbearable. After Creon’s
visit she declares:
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I have many ways of death which I might suit to them,
And do not know, friends, which one to take in hand;
Whether to set fire underneath their bridal mansion,
Or sharpen a sword and thrust it into the heart,
Stealing into the palace where the bed is made.
There is just one obstacle to this. If I am caught
Breaking into the house and scheming against it,
I shall die, and give my enemies cause for laughter.
[ll. 376–384; emphasis added]
And again she urges herself onward to revenge:
Go forward to the dreadful act. The test has come
For resolution. You see how you are treated. Never
Shall you be mocked by Jason’s Corinthian wedding.
[ll. 403–405; emphasis added]
The first of Medea’s shame fantasies to unfold in the play, then, is
that her shame, because it results from the deliberate, ongoing intent
of the Corinthian community to mock her, is unbearable (see Kitto 1939,
p. 195; Simon 1988, p. 82). Elsewhere I have pointed to similar paranoid
shame fantasies in Sophocles’ Ajax (Lansky 1996) and Philoctetes
(Lansky 2003a). Knox (1966), writing of the fifth-century Athenian view
of the heroic culture of yet earlier times, notes that fear of the mockery
of others was a hallmark of the heroic ethos and that it was therefore
natural for Euripides to impute to his protagonist this general cultural
trait of the period in which his play is set. I would go further, though,
and make the intrapsychic point that Medea has, in response to the burden of her overwhelming shame, regressed to a paranoid state in which
she imagines not simply that her enemies, Jason and Creon, will mock
her, but that the entire Corinthian community—not, in actuality, her
enemies—will do so as well. This fantasy is, of course, buttressed by
the fact that she is foreign and a woman.
The first fantasy, then, transforms her felt or anticipated shame, the
emotion, into paranoid shame, which is her interpretation of that emotion as resulting from the deliberate intention of her betrayers and the
entire community to shame her, to mock her, to humiliate her. It is this
paranoid transformation of her initial shame that makes it unbearable
and that makes the amelioration of her situation through cooperation
with the Corinthian community a prospect that cannot be borne.
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Medea agrees, then, to leave with Aegeus, only to discover that
at some fundamental level she cannot. She is fused with Jason and cannot separate. At this point she announces her intent to kill the children
after slaying the princess and Creon:
I weep to think of what a deed I have to do
Next after that; for I shall kill my own children.
My children, there is none who can give them safety.
And when I have ruined the whole of Jason’s house,
I shall leave the land and flee from the murder of my
Dear children, and I shall have done a dreadful deed.
For it is not bearable to be mocked by enemies.
So it must happen.
[ll. 791–798; emphasis added]
454
For those children he had from me he will never
See alive again, nor will he on his new bride
Beget another child, for she is to be forced
To die a most terrible death by these, my poisons.
Let no one think me a weak one, or feeble-spirited,
A stay-at-home, but rather just the opposite,
One who can hurt my enemies and help my friends;
For the lives of such persons are most remembered.
[ll. 804–810; emphasis added]
Because of the unbearability of her paranoid shame, she cannot do
otherwise than kill her children.
After sending Jason off with the children, who are bearing the poisoned garments for Creon’s daughter, she starts to relent, but her paranoid shame fantasies drive her back to her vengeful resolve:
I cannot bear to do it. I renounce my plans
I had before. I’ll take my children away from
This land. Why should I hurt their father with the pain
They feel and suffer twice as much of pain myself?
No, no, I will not do it. I renounce my plans.
Ah, what is wrong with me? Do I want to let go
My enemies unhurt and be laughed at for it?
I must face this thing. Oh, but what a weak woman
Even to admit to my mind these soft arguments.
[ll. 1044–1052; emphasis added]
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If they live with you in Athens they will cheer you.
No! By Hell’s avenging furies it shall not be—
This shall never be, that I should suffer my children
To be the prey of my enemies’ insolence.
[ll. 1058–1061; emphasis added]
One might, considering this phenomenology from the Kleinian
point of view, look upon Medea as having regressed to the paranoidschizoid position. Doing so would point to the usefulness of an expansion
of that concept to include the relationship between instigatory shame
dynamics and what in this case is the specifically humiliating nature of
the fantasied persecution: mockery and humiliation, not annihilation.
Projective Identification of Shame
Medea fantasizes that she can escape her overwhelming shame
by vengefully putting her state of mind into Jason, with whom she is
psychologically fused. Shame can be transformed by projective identification and felt to reside in the shamer.
It is of note that although murdering Jason would be an intelligible
and, to many, a justifiable act of revenge, certainly when compared to
killing her children, Medea has, with the exception of one fleeting
remark—“I will make dead bodies / Of . . . father, the girl, and my husband” (ll. 375–375)—voiced no interest in killing him. She is only able,
in her vengeful shame fantasy, to fuse with Jason and relocate her helplessness and desolation into him in a regressed, vengeful dyad. Simon
(1988) notes that “it is as if the two are intertwined in some murderous
wrestling match, not entwined as husband and wife in procreative sex
or in complementary efforts on behalf of children” (p. 93). Such fantasies of fusion are involved in fantasies of revenge generally. The realization that she cannot separate from Jason triggers her destructiveness
and the diabolical need to take revenge on him by destroying his brideto-be, the king to whom he was to be allied by marriage, and his
sons. These acts of vengeance work not by destroying or injuring his
person, but by relocating from herself to Jason, in fantasy, the helplessness, humiliation, disconnection from the social and familial, and
utter despair that have been Medea’s state of mind.
This fantasy of relocation and induction of her desperate, humiliated,
and hopeless mental state into Jason is an instance of projective identification. I use the term fantasy because, though she does in actuality
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induce this state of mind in Jason, she is at some level convinced that
its induction effects a riddance of that state in herself. It is not simply
an induction of her state of mind into Jason, but a turning of the tables
on the relationship of shamer to shamed. Only when she regresses to
the point of thinking that the entire emotional content of her mind exists
within the fused dyad with Jason can she feel with conviction that if she
can induce in him her humiliation and helplessness she will be rid of
them. Imagining herself without connection to the social or the familial, she can indeed, by killing princess, king, and her own children,
impart those feelings and states of mind to Jason, but it is only in her
regressed and paranoid shame fantasy that she can imagine that by
doing so she rids herself of them.
Preparatory to arguing for a widened perspective on the concept of
projective identification, one that takes shame fantasies and shame
dynamics into account, I want to underscore the curious fact that shame
and its dynamics are overlooked in virtually the entire Kleinian canon.
They receive no mention, for example, in the works of Klein (1975),
Bion (1977), Segal (1964), Rosenfeld (1965), or Joseph (1989). But the
phenomenology of Medea’s revenge in the Euripidean text points us
to an expansion of the concept, one verifiable in countless clinical situations. The Kleinian notion, which allows no part for shame dynamics,
is summarized by Hinshelwood (1989):
Projective identification was defined by Klein in 1946 as the prototype of the aggressive object-relationship, representing an anal attack
on an object by means of forcing parts of the ego into it in order to take
over its contents or to control it and occurring in the paranoid-schizoid
position from birth. It is a ‘phantasy remote from consciousness’ that
entails a belief in certain aspects of the self being located elsewhere,
with a consequent depletion and weakened sense of self and identity,
to the extent of depersonalization; profound feelings of being lost or a
sense of imprisonment may result.
In 1957, Klein suggested that envy was deeply implicated in
projective identification, which then represents the forced entry into
another person in order to destroy their best attributes. Shortly
afterwards Bion . . . distinguished a normal form of projective identification from a pathological one, and others have elaborated this group
of ‘many distinct yet related processes.’ The further understanding of
projective identification has been the major area subsequently
developed by Kleinians [p. 179].
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The Kleinian school seem consistently to ignore the role of shame
dynamics in the instigation of many of the phenomena their central concepts capture and to treat humiliation as though it was simply a phenomenon consequent on aggressivity in a persecutory other, rather than
also a source of shame in the self. I have discussed this omission in my
work on the instigation of envy (Lansky 1997; Morrison and Lansky
1999). Yet the clinical examples presented by Kleinian writers often
show how the dynamics of shame trigger projective identification.
What is missing in Kleinian writings on envy is the realization that
shame consequent on self-conscious comparison instigates envy, which
in turn instigates maneuvers to deal, however pathologically and
destructively, with that shame.
Envy, the attack on the other for possessing attributes more lovable
and overflowing (and hence, on comparison, more shame-producing)
than are felt to exist in the self, is a case in point. Thus, shameful comparison instigates envy. I propose extending that line of thinking to
include projective identification as a mechanism often, though not
exclusively, deployed to reverse the circumstances generating shame. I
will argue in future publications that Kleinians have become trapped in
their theoretical view of aggression as a bedrock manifestation of the
destructive instinct; despite numerous clinical vignettes in Kleinian
writings suggesting the role of shame dynamics, they have overlooked
those dynamics entirely. Their emphasis on aggressivity, and consequent guilt or feelings of persecution, glosses over significant features
of the phenomenology of projective identification related to the dynamics of shame. Kleinian formulations regarding envy, projective
identification, and the paranoid-schizoid position are not so much
incorrect as incomplete; they neglect shame conflicts as instigators of
the aggressive components of the clinical phenomenology.
My expanded use of the term projective identification is more
attuned than is the Kleinian usage to the function of that mechanism as
a method for handling the burden of anticipated unbearable shame.
Projective identification is instigated by the awareness, conscious or
unconscious, of imminent or actual shame. An important function of
projective identification, though by no means the only one, is that it is
a mechanism that can in fantasy relocate one’s shame and pain to the
other, in the conscious or unconscious conviction that this will rid one
of the problem. This aspect of projective identification consists, then,
of a reversal, a turning of the tables, a reversal instigated by an incipient
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or actual experience of shame. Putting shame into the shamer is a common defensive maneuver and a significant component of vengefulness.
The awareness of one’s deployment of projective identification is
itself a source of shame. By the very fact that the other is felt to be so
exalted, the other becomes a consummately significant person. That
turning the tables on Jason through an overpowering act of spite will
leave him helpless and humiliated is of paramount importance to
Medea, more important than her freedom and the lives of her sons. At
some level of consciousness, this is a source of added shame. Envy is
very difficult to interpret (Etchegoyan, Benito, and Rabih 1987). This
is so, I believe, because exposure, to oneself or to others, of one’s use
of envy to adjust one’s narcissistic equilibrium (with or without projective identification) is itself a source of shame.
Medea’s deployment of projective identification marks a departure
from the unbearable pain of continued humiliated attachment to the
social order; forces favoring disattachment now hold sway, prompting
her triumphant, vengeful, and murderous attacks on the princess and
Creon, and on her two sons. In the final scene she evokes shame fantasies that reveal the injection of desolation into Jason as more important than her children’s lives. Medea admonishes Jason from her chariot
above the stage:
. . . it was not to be that you should scorn my love,
And pleasantly live your life through, laughing at me;
Nor would the princess, nor he who offered the match,
Creon, drive me away without paying for it.
[ll. 1354–1358]
A bitter dialogue ensues that reveals the relationship between
her feeling of being mocked and her vengefulness.
Jason: You feel the pain myself. You share my sorrow.
Medea: Yes, and my grief is gain when you cannot mock it.
Jason: O children, what a wicked mother she was to you!
Medea: But it was your insolence and your virgin wedding.
Jason: And just for the sake of that you chose to kill them.
Medea: Is love so small a pain, do you think, for a woman?
Jason: For a wise one, certainly. But you are wholly evil.
Medea: The children are dead, I say this to make you suffer.
[ll. 1361–1370]
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He is left desolate. The state of mind that Medea cannot tolerate—
grieving, helpless, humiliated, hopeless—has been relocated to Jason:
Jason: Oh, I hate you, murderess of children.
Medea: Go to your palace. Bury your bride.
Jason: I go, with two children to mourn for.
Medea: Not yet do you feel it. Wait for the future.
Jason: Oh, children I loved!
Medea: I loved them, you did not.
Jason: You loved them, and killed them.
Medea: To make you feel pain.
[ll. 1393–1398; emphasis added]
Omnipotent Withdrawal from the Social Order
Euripides concludes the play with Medea departing Corinth in her
chariot with the corpses of her sons, while a helpless Jason pleads for
the opportunity to bury them. All of the half-dozen or so productions of
the play I have seen have deleted this ending. One might consider the
magical aspects of the ending a deus ex machina resolution that allows
the play to come to an end, but such an interpretation does not ring true
thematically with the body of the play. Aristotle (c. 330 B.C.E.) holds
that “the unraveling of the plot should arise from the circumstances of
the plot itself, and not be brought about ex machina, as is done in the
Medea. . . . The deus ex machina should be used only for matters outside the play proper, either for things that happened before it and that
cannot be known by the human characters, or for things that are yet to
come and that require to be foretold prophetically” (p. 52). I take strong
issue with such a reading of the play’s ending.
What superficially appears to be no more than a deus ex machina
ending is, in terms of the psychological unity of the play, far more than an
ad hoc resolution of the play’s action. I see the final scene as a profound
and precise representation of Medea’s state of mental omnipotence, her
belief in fantasy that she can place herself “above it all,” simply leave
Jason desolate, and thereby solve the problem posed by her shame. What
some see as unsatisfactory and sloppy dramaturgy, an exit “from above”
in a chariot pulled by dragons, is in my view an omnipotent severing of
all ties to Jason and the community. Through the vehicle of her defenses
against unbearable shame, Medea herself “stages” a circumstance in which
she feels liberated from painful attachment and unbearable mental anguish.
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This dramatic conclusion exemplifies the third shame fantasy I
wish to address: having projected her shame, helplessness, and desolation into Jason, Medea is able to depart easily from the social order
and from Jason in a state of self-sufficient omnipotent completeness,
leaving her distressing mental states with him.
She can, in this fantasy expressed metaphorically by her departure
in the chariot, solve the problem of her unbearable shame before Jason
and the Corinthian community. This is an omnipotent fantasy, going
beyond the second shame fantasy, that of fusion with Jason, operative
while she is in his presence. In this third fantasy, she can leave chaos,
humiliation, and despair with him and depart in a triumphant state of
mind. Her departure and the omnipotent state it signifies leaves us in a
state of horror. This is so, even though we have little compassion for
Jason. We are horrif ied at the vengeful regicide and the f ilicide, at
the overpowering triumph of psychic forces and mental states favoring
detachment over those pressing for reconnection and repair of bonds,
at her omnipotence in her fantasy of separation from all bonds. One
might speculate that this fantasy—that one can sidestep shame,
mourning, desolation, and diminishment of one’s sense of a secure
interpersonal world by exacting vengeance and then leaving—is a part
of all vengeful fantasies. The Medea captures our attention because it
embodies such a fantasy. In the penultimate speech in the play, Jason,
utterly desolate, laments:
O God, do you hear it, this persecution,
These my sufferings from the hateful
Woman, this monster, murderess of children?
Still what I can do that I will do;
I will lament and cry upon heaven,
Calling the gods to bear me witness
How you have killed my boys and prevent me from
Touching their bodies or giving them burial.
I wish I had never begot them to see them
Afterward slaughtered by you.
[ll. 1405–1414]
The chariot drawn by dragons symbolizes Medea’s total narcissistic withdrawal into the mental states of omnipotence and triumph
that replace her previous humiliation and desolation. This omnipotent
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fantasy obviates any need for forgiveness or cooperation with the social
order. The final scene is a portrayal, metaphorically, of a triumphant
and omnipotent mental state, akin to the one symbolized by the deserted
island on which The Tempest takes place, a way of expressing a state of
omnipotent retreat in response to the overpowering shame that accompanies betrayal by an intimate. The Tempest, which portrays forgiveness
as the triumph of the forces of attachment over those of narcissistic
withdrawal, moves toward cooperation and restoration of ties to the
social order. The Medea, culminating in the metaphor of omnipotent
withdrawal, moves in the opposite direction—from involvement to
complete disattachment, triumph over Jason, and filicidal and regicidal
vengeance. Medea, in fantasy, has obviated any need to go through a
process of facing and bearing her shame sufficiently to mourn and continue life with her children, in Corinth or in Athens. She has done so
because, in fantasy, the processes of mourning and continuing her life
with her children would be tantamount to forgiveness and complicity
with the world of her betrayers. Such complicity would in her mind
give rise to unbearable shame.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
We are left horrified by this play, not only because the mother’s vengeful and spiteful slaughter of her children is fundamentally horrifying,
but also because we realize, at some level, the frightening message that
the children’s well-being and even their lives depend so intimately on
their mother’s narcissistic equilibrium and her tolerance of shame.
What is put to the test, with a horrifying resolution in the play, is
whether Medea’s current and past circumstances, as well as the paranoid shame fantasies so innate to her, make it impossible for her to
overcome her tendencies toward vengeful destruction and complete
narcissistic withdrawal. Ultimately, she cannot overcome the powerful,
shame-evoking forces and assume a degree of cooperation with the
social order for her children’s sake and her own. Cooperation of this
kind is a sort of forgiveness in the weakest sense of the word: forgiving
as in letting go of a debt, for no sake other than of her own psychic
equilibrium and the preservation of her ties to her children and the community. That Medea cannot do this, despite her magical exit, the
omnipotently triumphant state of mind with which the play ends, makes
the tragedy truly her own.
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Euripides’ literary insights point the way to clinical hypotheses
that may guide our thinking in situations in which unbearable shame,
with no apparent possibility of external or internal resolution or repair
drives a hardened vengefulness. In such pictures, we look not simply
for the external circumstances that generate shame, but for the workings
of paranoid shame, of projective identification as a method of relocating
helplessness and shame into the shamer, and of omnipotent withdrawal
from the moral and social order.
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