Psychoanalysis and Euripides' Suppliant Women

A Tragic Reading of Politics

Sotiris Manolopoulos

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000624175
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psicologia
• Categoría: Psicoanalisi

Psychoanalysis and Euripides' Suppliant Women applies the "tragic" reading of politics, presented by Euripides in his play, The Suppliant Women, to the contemporary world.

Manolopoulos presents a psychoanalytic assessment of the key themes of the play, considering the phenomenon of hubris in public life indirectly, through its transformation in tragic poetry. Psychoanalysis and Euripides' Suppliant Women goes on to consider how the foundations of the polis are linked to the integration of the work of mourning and the feminine core of existence, and how the aims of scholars who study the play correspond to psychoanalysis' work towards understanding the psychic and social reality of politics.

This book allows for a deeper understanding of the pathological modes of mental functioning that manifest in politics. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training and academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, politics, and classical studies.

1 The plot

Sotiris Manolopoulos

DOI: 10.4324/9781003252184-2

Aithra, the mother of the young King of Athens, Theseus, stands silent at the centre of the orchestra in front of the altar of the two goddesses, Demeter and her daughter Persephone (Kore). She has left the secure privacy of her home and come to Eleusis to offer sacrifice and burn gifts at the public ritual of Proerosia, the Panhellenic festival of fertility in late October, for the first fruits of the year’s harvest. Suddenly a chorus of grieving women appear, bearing boughs of supplication, which they place on the ground encircling Aithra.

As the aged woman honours peacefully and silently the fertility rite in this land of mysteries, she is confronted by the uncanny entreaty. Aithra finally speaks and utters her prologue. She positions herself as the subject of her words and deeds. She is placed within time and space. This is what she says: The Suppliants are the grey-haired mothers of the Seven Generals from Argos who had marched against Thebes. They were all defeated and killed before its gates. They fought alongside Polyneikes against his brother Eteokles. Both brothers were killed in battle, fulfilling the curse of their father Oedipus. Creon their uncle, the new King of Thebes, banned the burial of the Seven.

The mothers together with the sons of the Seven and the old King Adrastos of Argos, have come to Eleusis to find Aithra and beg her to intercede with her son Theseus, King of Athens, in persuading Creon to give them their perished sons to bury. It is a matter of necessity, an existential need.

Not reverent, I come, but driven

by need (64–66)¹

We are situated at Eleusis, the holy place where Demeter is the guardian of the hearth. Eleusis is the place where Demeter lost her daughter, Kore, abducted by the death-god Hades, thus causing the mother to wander incessantly in a mournful search for her. This is the place where Kore every year returns for some months to live with her earth-mother and generate newborn life. Demeter is the goddess of the earth from where life springs forth and in the dark depths of which the dead and their secrets are buried. Her name means earth-mother (De-meter, Δη-μήτηρ). Demeter is a mother. The Athenians believed themselves to be autochthonous (αὐτόχθονες), indigenous, who were born of the land itself.

At the land of Eleusis arrive the Suppliants, childless mothers like Demeter. The verb ikneomai (ἱκνέομαι), means to arrive at, make one’s way, reach, supplicate, plead, beg, come upon (a state of grief, longing, anger, fatigue, hunger) come about, and appropriate. From the same root are also derived the words able (ikanos, ἱκανός), trace (ichnos, ἴχνος), attainable (efiktos, ἐφικτός), and fitting (The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, 2021:707).²

When the Suppliants arrive at Eleusis their tragic plot begins to unfold. It brings to the present the traces of the past and the seeds of the actions that anticipate the future. A story begins from a position that the hero has achieved; a place to stand and make his way, to create and find his objects. We can think of a tragic position which is achieved when one separates from the primary union, he lives the shock of the loss of omnipotence and creates an internal space where he integrates his experiences he lives and becomes their subject.

The first innovation of Euripides’ tragic plot is the role of Aithra

The Eleusinian holy “nursery” of newborn life is now filled with “ghosts”, unburied war dead. With their branches of supplication and beating their breasts, the lamenting mothers surround Aithra. “Bound, but not bound, by boughs” she then waits there by the altars of the goddesses [30–32]. She calls for her son to come and free her and the city from the boughs of supplication. One of Euripides’ greatest visionary characters, Aithra, is deeply moved. She takes pity on the Suppliants and she responds with a sense of religious urgency (Scully, 1995:7).

We are in the middle of a crisis. The supplication has suddenly disturbed the religious settings of the sacred institutions, making them acutely perceived as real. Already, mysterious wild “supernatural” elements are released. We can think that these are untranslated elements of a personal and shared past. They cannot be eradicated or remembered in words. They can only be experienced, suffered and countered with actions or become split-off, denied and evacuated.

discharge our obligation through some deed

the gods approve

[37–38].

Aithra invites her son to appear in public, to “be born” alive on stage. She expects him to enter a path that has already been initiated, to become a leader.

The political supplication asks of him to make (constrained by his own and the city’s true character) a free and critical decision of vital importance for himself and for the state for which he is responsible (Zuntz, 1955:6).

In response to his fear that the supplication is a threat to his city, Theseus’ first reaction is a harsh criticism against the older King of Argos. He forcefully refuses to help Adrastos, because he had without prudence sent his army to destruction. He had shown no respect for the divine omens. He had discarded reason and married his two daughters off to foreigners, two beasts, Polyneikes and Tydeus.

Theseus’ argument is conclusive but incomplete (Zuntz, 1955:7). Timing is crucial. Aithra intervenes. She tells Theseus that he must above all keep in mind the gods and the Panhellenic laws – an order of the larger world. Heroic courage is required in order to take civil action and gain personal honour and civil glory. He has the future to think of; the pride for the future integration of himself and his city. He has to identify himself with his polis. He is to become who he is, the son of Aithra, a man.

My son, first, and foremost, it’s the will of gods

you have to consider

[298–299].

…

you wouldn’t want it said that you hung back,

afraid, when you could have wrested the crown

of fame for your city

[311–13].

…

My son, if you are indeed

my son, don’t shame yourself

[316–317]

Aithra persuades Theseus to change his mind. A mother urges her son to identify with his father and become a man. The key words here are “courage” and “shame”. The bold youth, who hunts wild beasts and wins contests all over Greece, is helped by his mother to enter a path of identification and transformation, embark on a struggle to mature and become a leader, defender of the divine and human law.

Storey (2008:38) observes: “Aithra occupies the central dramatic focus of the theatre. … Theseus has been in the wrong dramatic space, talking to the wrong dramatic character. Pity, rather than self-righteous condemnation is his proper response”. The Seven had been severely punished by their deaths for the wrong they did. They do not have to be deprived of their burial. By not burying the dead, Creon deprives them of the right to belong to the human canon.

We sense the awe and the fear on stage leading to sympathy towards the suffering mothers and anger against the reckless men of Argos. Theseus tells Adrastos with contempt: “And am I to become your ally?”

At first Theseus ignores the respect and shame (aidos, α δώς) owed to others and to justice (dike, δίκη) according to the human and divine law that ordains the dead should be buried. He embarrasses us. In his Hippolytos Crowned, Euripides distinguishes between good and bad shame. Good shame (aidos, αἰδώς) guides one to respect justice; it stems from the gaze of the others that makes one a subject of one’s community. The bad shame (aishyne, αἰσχύνη) carries with it the heavy burden of devaluation; it ostracises one from one’s house and community (Manolopoulos, 1999:187).

Williams (1993:146) studied shame and necessity both in Homer and tragic poets along with Thucydides. Tragedies contain the idea of necessity that stems from supernatural processes, which lie beyond the logical conception of nature and beyond the meaning which humans construct, and the culture they share. Eteokles, in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, is the first tragic subject. He knows what will happen when next morning he goes to face his brother Polyneikes at the seventh gate of Thebes. And yet he has to personally take over – be the subject of – his fate. The tragic subject is a hero who personally accepts not to escape but to suffer his fate, which has been ordained by divine mysterious forces since long ago.

Theseus finally makes his decision based on justice. He neither supports the reckless Argives’ war nor opposes the tyranny of Thebes. He acts according to shame. He thinks: What will those who hate him say if his own mother asks him to undertake this labour and he refuses?

Here begins Theseus’ adventure of discovering and inventing the world. Initially he enjoys the logical face-to-face confrontation, whereby a mirror of reality is held up to him that makes him see through the eyes of the other. Gradually, he learns to respect the invisible forces that are active out of his control, plunge the political order into chaos and turn the mirror upside down.

Nothing good in human affairs lasts forever; God overturns things. No one can ignore the unknown. No one escapes the supernatural divine forces and limits.

We now watch Theseus, the tragic hero, put himself under the yoke of necessity, under a regime of integration. He moves off stage into the orchestra to join hands with his mother and take the lead. He frees her from the supplication and leaves for Athens, a place of politics. He starts his campaign by addressing the citizens of Athens, convincing them democratically to embrace the cause of the Argives. He then prepares an army in order to seize the dead by force if the Thebans are not persuaded to surrender them peacefully.

The labours of the heroic subject like those of the city become one in Theseus’ transforma...