Medea Psychoanalytical Look Into Medea

Medea

Psychoanalytical Look into Medea

They died from a disease they caught from their father," (Euripides 44); the tragic events in Euripides' Medea are the consequence of a love story taken a tragic turn. The psychosis experienced by Medea in the context of the play can be attributed to several different theories about the making of both the community and the human mind. Medea's actions after Jason betrays her coincide with Freudian theories of psychoanalysis. During the time of the ancient Greeks, Medea is plagued with the consequences of extreme xenophobia after forsaking her own land for her love. Her treatment as a foreigner and a traitor to her family along with the pain inflicted by Jason's betrayal forced her to release her innate aggression in an act of self-preservation. She murdered her children both to spare them from pain, but also to ensure Jason's eternal misery. The work is also a healthy release for other women in the audience who have been betrayed and feel sympathy for the character of Medea.

According to Sigmund Freud and others throughout time, communities all share the distrust and prejudice against outsiders. Ancient Greek society exhibits this xenophobia and is part of Medea's sufferings. She is of a different race and religion; she was born far away from the Greek mainland. This makes her different than all the other Greeks around her. In his Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud describes this xenophobia as "the narcissism of minor differences," (Freud 72). In this theory, members of a community band together to provide a comfort for the struggles of taming the individual ego in order to create a common society. Once a community is formed, it shares basic beliefs and mores, even physical characteristics. These common traits are revered as patriotic, while characteristics which denote another culture are looked down upon, "...'cultural frustration dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings," (52). Freud believed that this process helped keep individual communities together, resisting the temptations of all the individual egos which reside within its reach.

Medea also suffered the consequences of breaking one of the most important taboos of ancient culture. She betrayed her family and her homeland for the love of a stranger, "...calling out her father's name, and her land, and her home betrayed when she came away with a man who now is determined to dishonor her," (Euripides 2). Medea murdered her own father in order to save Jason's life. This was the ultimate sacrifice for another person. In one night, she murdered her father, the king, and betrayed her native land. This essentially sets her up for her later tragedies, for she is in essence paying for her previous sins. The land she gave up her home for eventually turns on her and throws her into the abyss, without a home and without a family.

Elements of Freudian theory exploring natural innate aggression also help dissect Medea's psychological state. According to Freud, every individual has a natural aggression towards the external world around us. Civilization requires suppression of that natural Death drive, and so individuals find other ways to distribute that innate aggression from bubbling to the top of one's consciousness. However, when trauma and stress create suffering in an individual's psyche, that individual might seek out ways of using that aggression to relieve their suffering, "The instinct of Destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs with control over nature," (Freud 81).

Medea, no longer constricted by the limitations of a civilization which abandoned her, is allowed to channel her natural aggression in order to ease some of her enormous suffering. The audience is both horrified by her actions, yet also sympathetic for her distorted motivations which led her to act so. Her extreme sufferings provide extenuating circumstances which destroy her relationship with the external world and the moral law which governs it. Freudian theory believes that extreme suffering removes own from the tamed state which each individual resides within civilization, "Just as satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to state our needs," (Freud 28). Medea is so affected by her suffering that she removes herself from everyday life, "She lies without food and gives herself up to suffering," (Euripides 2). In order to deal with her extreme pain, Medea chose to take back the authority which Jason and the King had originally stolen from her. Rather than fade away into exile, she took action in her own life to regain control, an act which is also seen in Freud's theories, "One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one's sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses," (Freud 28). She let loose her aggression and desire for destruction as a way to regain control over her destroyed life.

After she murdered Jason's new bride out of sheer aggression and jealousy, she, in her own mind, was forced to save her children from suffering the consequences of her actions. She knew that they would have suffered just as much, if not greater than her, if they were to live through this disastrous mess. Getting into the psychological reasons for this shows how she did not necessarily hate her children. She loved the very much so. She murdered them to satisfy two concerns she had with the external world. First, she wanted to save them from the suffering she herself could not handle. She also wanted to ensure that Jason would be a ruin man for the rest of his life, "While you, as right, will die without distinction, / Struck on the head by a piece of the Argo's timber, / and you will have seen the bitter end of my love," (Euripides 45). Without children to carry on his lineage, or a wife to bear him more children, Jason's legend would die with him. This was the ultimate disaster for a Greek hero. This theme comes up in various Greek myths, and shows exactly how much importance was placed in Greek culture on the family and future bloodlines.