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Michiko Mitsunaga-Whitten 04/12/13
1
A Failure to Atone
Object Relations Theory in Orestes’ Sacrifice of Sanity
Michiko Mitsunaga-Whitten Psychoanalysis Capstone Project
04/12/13
Michiko Mitsunaga-Whitten 04/12/13
2
As he feels the inescapable brunt of duty bound with crime, Orestes, son
of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, declares:
If the serpent came from the same place as I, and slept in the bands that swaddled, me, and its jaws spread wide for the breast that nursed me into life and clots stained the milk, mother’s milk, and she cried in fear and agony- so be it. Aesch. Ag. 1
Spurred by Apollo, Electra, responsibility, and omens, Orestes is coerced to
commit revengeful matricide. What seems an ancient family feud in The Oresteia
is a timeless and modern issue, that yields itself to fruitful analysis when seen
through the lens of infantile developmental stages in Melanie Klein’s object
relations theory. Klein herself reflected upon The Oresteia and its correspondence
to object relations in her book, Envy and Gratitude (1984). As if Aeschylus held a
modern understanding of the depth and development of the unconscious, his
characters are paradigmatic of the object relationships Klein describes. The
cardinal conclusion Klein arrives at in her psychoanalytic criticism of Aeschylus’
trilogy is that Orestes’ acquittal in the third book, The Eumenides, heals and
restores his mental state after intense familial trauma. I, on the other hand,
propose that there is an essential feature of Orestes’ trial that forbids a healthy
psychic recovery to occur for the unfortunate prince.
What Freud managed to do for sex and D.W. Winnicott for attachment,
Klein did for guilt. In her articles, Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive
States and Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms, Klein introduces the concept of ‘the
good mother’ and the ‘bad mother.’ Her explanation of the dichotomy of the
gratifying versus frustrating mother sheds light on Orestes’ reasoning for the
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murder of his mother and the emotions embedded in the consequence of his
decision in the Oresteia. The positions Klein illustrates in Orestes’ attempted
climb towards mature reparation of the self are clearly portrayed through his
interaction with the Furies, Apollo, and Athena. While Klein believes that
Aeschylus achieves an evolution not only in civic life, but also within the psychic
health of the young and persuadable Orestes, I attest that at the end of The
Oresteia he is still in dire mental straits. I believe that Orestes becomes Western
civilization’s sacrifice when humanity seizes his sanity in exchange for a system
of justice.
Of course, Aeschylus was not writing with psychic cohesion and infantile
developmental stages in mind. It is therefore important to recognize that
although a Kleinian suit can be fitted to this text, Aeschylus expresses it in his
way, not ours. That is, he understands Orestes’ madness in an external and
physical way, rather than a metaphoric and internal way. Apollo, Athena, and
the Furies all appear to be representative of psychic structures, but Aeschylus
obviously does not describe them like this. The Furies are literally there, the boils
and ragged hair are physically present on Orestes, Athena and Apollo stand in
the court amongst humans. The most paradigmatic example of our
transformation from an external understanding of the human experience to the
modern and internal conception is the word αἴτιος. Repeatedly this word is
translated as “guilt,” in Robert Fagles translation of The Oresteia. For example the
chorus of Furies say to Apollo, “You did it all, all the guilt is yours,” according to
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our translation, but the Greek says, “ἀλλ᾽ εἷς τὸ πᾶν ἔπραξας ὢν παναίτιος,”
(3.198). παναίτιος loosely translates to “entirely guilty,” but has a much deeper
meaning as well. αίτιος can mean guilt, blame, censure, cause, or charge. To us,
guilt is something internal. For Aeschylus, αίτιος is the holding of guilt with a
charge of something. It is thoroughly external, a blame or a charge place onto
someone, rather than a feeling from within. The Oresteia suggests that Aeschylus
understood the intrinsic workings of the unconscious, but uses his own language
as his primary means of expression. Understanding this distinction throughout
this paper will help to open up the text as Aeschylus wrote it, while recognizing
its value to an individualistic, modern society cognizant of the internal workings
of the human psyche.
To begin, however, a description of early ego defenses according to Klein
is necessary in understanding the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive
position, which Orestes is caught in the midst of working through. A human’s
primary ideal-shattering moment in life is when “the first object, being the
mother’s breast, is split into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast; this
splitting results in a division between love and hate” (Klein, 98). An infant
internalizes their perfect and ideal mother, but when the mother is not instantly
available to satisfy a need they have, like hunger, for the first time, there becomes
a ‘bad’ breast. When a mother is present and caring, Michael Rustin explains, “A
mental picture of the mother as a whole person is gradually put together in the
infant’s mind, through the mother’s capacity to contain the anxieties of the infant
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and to mitigate its frustrations through both physical care and emotional
understanding” (Rustin, 181). But of course, Clytemnestra did no such
mitigation. In The Libation Bearers, Cilissa, a nurse, says, “Red from your mother’s
womb I took you, reared you…/ nights, the endless nights I paced, your
wailing/ kept me moving- led me a life of labour,/ all for what?” to show how
absent Clytemnestra was in the rearing of Orestes (2. 750). While Cilissa fostered
Orestes, Clytemnestra played little to no part in caring for her son. Not only did
Clytemnestra accidentally permit small sufferings here and there, which Klein
would argue is normal, but she literally exiles Orestes from her kingdom. At this
point, the pain of losing the perfect, loved mother is too overwhelming for such a
frail ego to handle, so Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position arises in Orestes. The
paranoid-schizoid position is the protection of complete separation of the
gratifying mother from the frustrating mother. In other words, the baby does not
recognize the mother as the same person, capable of bringing about both loving
and hateful emotions. Hanna Segal explains, “Melanie Klein saw that little
children, under the spur of anxiety, were constantly trying to split their objects
and their feelings and trying to retain good feelings and introject good objects,
whilst expelling bad objects and projecting bad feelings” (Segal, 3). This splitting
mechanism is a defense sheltering the baby from pain. Feeling this pain,
however, is the first step of moving past the paranoid-schizoid position, and
entering the cathartic, depressive position. When the infant ceases to split the
good from the bad mother, it is able to integrate both parts into a coherent, whole
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mother. The baby then experiences depressive feelings, and mourns the pure
goodness and security of the gratifying mother. This accepting of both parts of
the mother as one being leads to the feeling of ambivalence, which is tragic, but
healthy. The outcome of the trial of Orestes’ absolution in The Oresteia can be
seen as symbolic of his process of almost reaching the depressive position, but
conclusively regressing back to the paranoid-schizoid position.
Klein also asserts that pain or loss caused by unhappy experiences
“reactivates the infantile depressive position, and encountering and overcoming
adversity of any kind entails mental work similar to mourning” (Klein, 142).
Orestes loses his father, a man he cherished and idealized. The need to
demonstrate schizoid splitting could be triggered through this obvious trauma,
especially when the hands of his own mother bring about his father’s murder.
Klein proposes that surpassing the paranoid-schizoid position does not mean
that it is impossible to regress back to this primitive mechanism as a defense in
adult life. She writes, “The fluctuations between the depressive and the manic
position are an essential part of normal development” (Klein, 130). So, even if
Orestes had at one point worked through the splitting mode at one point in his
adult life, his father’s murder reveals Clytemnestra to Orestes as the purely ‘bad’
mother, and he is unable to integrate the ‘good.’ Thus, the loving impulse and
the destructive impulse cease to clash. The internalized badness of his mother is
all consuming for Orestes. He declares, “Shamed for all the world, you mean-/
dear god, my father degraded so!/ Oh she’ll pay,/ she’ll pay, by the gods and
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these bare hands-/ just let me take her life and die!” (2.423). His inability to hold
normal ambivalence towards his mother causes his killing instinct takes over.
Like most protagonists in tragedy, Orestes’ advancement in the Oresteia
through his ὕβρις, ἁµαρτία, περιπετεία, and ἀναγνώρισις echoes Klein’s
framework for development. The developmental stage that Orestes represents in
the Eumenides is the transitional phase in between the paranoid-schizoid position
and the depressive position. A person transitioning between these two stages
must have a tragic flaw, a turning point, and recognition in order to successfully
develop. The decisive περιπετεία for Orestes is the moment Clytemnestra kills
Agamemnon. Orestes’ ἀναγνώρισις is the instance he comes to understand his
obligation to kill his mother. The essential phenomenon for Orestes, however, is
the guilt he feels, which appears to stem from his inescapable fate. While Orestes
exemplifies a psyche in the midst of working through infantile developing
positions, the Furies represent his guilt. Klein writes about “the feeling of being
persecuted and watched by internal ‘bad’ objects,” that can reinforce manic
defenses (Klein, 143). This internal persecution is the inherent guilt Orestes feels,
manifested in Aeschylus, as the judgmental, relentless, Furies. They are the
superego, the forces that induce the pain of the whole, un-split mother. They
remind him of the ‘good’ mother that Clytemnestra once was, who birthed
Orestes saying, “one act links all mankind, hand to desperate hand in bloody
license” (3.508). Even Apollo says to Orestes, “Deep in the endless heartlands
they will drive you,/striding horizons, feet pounding the earth for ever,/ on, on
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over seas and cities swept by tides!” (3.78-80). Although Apollo and Athena plan
to free Orestes from his torment, they seem to know that the presence of the
Furies is inescapable. The Furies do not let Orestes see his mother as a power-
mongering murderer, as Apollo might insist, but as the caring entity that brought
Orestes into the world. They are responsible for the upheaval of guilt in Orestes.
Accordingly, Clytemnestra is not consistently depicted as a bad mother
throughout the Oresteia, as her mourning of Orestes’ sister, Iphigenia, is intense
and lasting. Orestes recognizes that Clytemnestra did once care for him and
claims, “I embrace you…you, my victory, my guilt, my curse,” and continues,
“You can’t see them. I can, they drive me on! I must move on,” referring to his
tormenting Furies (2.1052-1060). The fact that only Orestes can see the Furies
reinforces the individual and internal type of madness that Orestes exhibits.
Orestes holds an inner psychic insanity rather than an externally caused
disturbance. It would seem that Aeschylus knew that initial family relationships
and primary caretakers are essential in the individual development of the psyche
and self. For example, Klein explains how guilt arises when either parent dies
because their “death, however shattering for other reasons, is to some extent also
felt as a victory, and gives rise to triumph, and therefore all the more to guilt”
(Klein, 136).
Guilt, for Klein, is a pivotal part of the depressive position, along with
persecutory anxiety. She writes, “Orestes is subject to the feelings of guilt as soon
as he has committed the murder of his mother. This is the reason why I believe
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that in the end Athena is able to help him” (283). Although the Furies are
horrifyingly demonic and seemingly evil, they are the commanding force that
strives to propel him towards reparation and overcoming his primitive splitting.
Unlike Athena or Apollo, they do not belong in a courtroom. The Furies do not
want Orestes to forget the fact that he killed his mother. In other words, they do
not want him to repress the guilt he feels for his negative feelings towards
Clytemnestra. The Furies want him to acknowledge and pay for his crime
literally with his life in the play, and symbolically with ambivalence. Segal
writes, “the beginning of the depressive position is marked by the recognition as
the mother as a whole persona and is characterized by a relationship to whole
objects and by a prevalence of integration, ambivalence, depressive anxiety, and
guilt” (Segal, ix). The Furies want Orestes to recognize his mother as a loving
entity, as Klein’s “good breast,” while the younger gods, Athena and Apollo
allow him to solely understand her as the bad.
In addition to the Furies’ representation of guilt, Apollo can also be seen
as a Kleinian symbol. Klein explains, “From the beginning the destructive
impulse is turned against the object and is first expressed in phantasied oral-
sadistic attacks on the mother’s breast which soon develop into onslaughts on
her body by all sadistic means” (Klein, 1). The Olympian god of order in the
Eumenides ironically parallels the destructive impulse that Klein attests to.
Orestes protests, “Apollo shares the guilt- he spurred me on, he warned of the
pains I’d feel unless I acted, brought the guilty down” (3.479). Even the Furies
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agree, “Lord Apollo, now it is your turn to listen. You are no mere accomplice in
this crime. You did it all” (3.196). Klein deems the destructive impulse as one of
the “persecutory fears,” that exists during the paranoid position (Klein, 98). If
these violent impulses are too strong, “the infant cannot work through the
paranoid position, then the working through of the depressive position is in turn
impeded” (Klein, 99). Apollo obviously succeeds in motivating Orestes to
commit the matricide, so he, as a hating impulse, wins out over the loving one.
Although theorists usually understand Klein’s reference to the good breast and
the bad breast as metaphors, or simply jargon, several images from Aeschylus
are strikingly paralleled. Clytemnestra’s dream of a serpent that bites her breast
and causes blood and milk to flow together, Apollo’s reference to his bow as a
serpent in The Eumenides, as well as Clytemnestra’s exposure of her breast to
Orestes and description of it as the breast that nursed him, all bring literalness to
Klein’s terminology and ideas.
One other symbolically Kleinian character in The Oresteia is the goddess
and judge, Athena. Clearly, she is the force working against the Furies’ appeal
and for the acquittal of Orestes. Athena demonstrates a kind of magic persuasion
with her rhetoric and certainly exhibits empathy for the accused. In an attempt to
hold the respect she has from the Furies, while judging them misguided, she says
“if you have any reverence for Persuasion, the majesty of Persuasion, the spell of
my voice that would appease your fury- Oh please stay… and if you refuse to
stay, it would be wrong, unjust to afflict this city with wrath, hatred, populations
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routed. Look, it is all yours, a royal share of our land- justly entitled, glorified
forever” (3.892). Aeschylus’ Athena vividly relaxes the Furies, or Orestes’ guilt,
and appraises them as joyful, compassionate guests of Athens.
Athena’s accommodation and resolution may sound satisfying and
justified, but were not the Furies a necessary presence for Orestes in order for
him to achieve cohesive integration of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ mother?
Presumably, the Furies’ transformation could bring about Orestes’ healing, but it
does not turn out this way. During the trial two opposing arguments hold
Orestes, through a Kleinian lens, in the paranoid-schizoid position. Athena’s
decision to sweep the Furies and their decree under the rug, so to speak, does not
advance Orestes to the depressive position. Instead, Orestes is set even more
firmly in the paranoid-schizoid position because he did not have the opportunity
to integrate both views of his mother.
In a great many depictions of Orestes, he is pictured as an insane man. For
example, Euripides’ Orestes depicts Orestes driven mad by the matricidal blood
on his hands. Hallucinations, amnesia, physical derangement, uncontrollable
crying, and disorientation all pervade Orestes throughout the play. With his first
appearance in the drama he wakes from a seizure saying, “Great queen of
forgetting, wise power/ the afflicted wisely pray to…/ But where have I been?
How did I get here? Nothing/ of that comes back to me, it’s been swept away”
(Euripides, 210-216). He dissociates because his psyche is unable to tolerate the
fact that he murdered his mother. When Electra tries to help Orestes back into his
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bed, with his crust, filth, and boils, he yells, “They are there, there, leaping at
me!/ They’ll kill me, Apollo-those bitch-hound faces/ and gorgon eyes, those
priestesses of the dead! The goddesses!/ Let go! You’re one of them, you’re one
of my Furies/ grabbing me, wrestling me down to hell!” (256-262). Because
Orestes was never able to face the Furies and accept their decree, they haunt him
forever more, driving him into madness. Orestes even says, “And what of
Apollo, isn’t he there,/ enthroned at Delphi, center of the world, giving/ sure
oracles to us all? When I killed/ my mother, I was obeying him./ Treat him as an
outcast, all of you, kill him!/ I’m not at fault, he is” (613-617). He is still unable to
embrace or work through his guilt and utterly blames Apollo for his actions. This
argues for Orestes’ projection of his persecutory impulses onto Apollo. Mark
Griffith even says, “It is as if he has reverted to the status of a baby,” referring to
his vulnerability and incompetency in Orestes (Griffith, 290).
His underdeveloped psyche is also traceable in art even before Euripides.
Orestes is often shown leaning on Electra or Pylades, or holding onto the
ὀµφαλός of Apollo for support. He is the epitomy of dependent and immature.
William Bouguereau’s painting, Orestes Pursued by the Furies1, pictured below, is
another fascinating portrait of Orestes and his psychic struggle:
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Here, Orestes grips his ears, unsuccessfully trying to block out the screaming
judgment of the Furies, who point towards Orestes’ victim. While only Orestes
can see or hear the Furies, his horrified and wild stare would indeed mark him as
insane even to a contemporary viewer.
Although Athena stops the blood trail in the house of Atreus, her solution
for Orestes does not bring about his ability to hold the ambivalence that the
court’s tie vote, broken by Athena’s vote, represents. She is not conducive to the
vital feelings of guilt and therefore, reparation. By sending the Furies down
below, she seems, from a contemporary point of view, to have repressed Orestes’
hatred, rather than bringing him into an ambivalence that could lead to mental
recovery. She appears to be able to persuade or ‘empathically mirror’ both the
Furies and Apollo, so she is undeniably convincing. After the initial exchange
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between the Furies and Athena, they say to her, “We respect you. You show us
respect,” (3.449). Athena goes on to tell them, “Let me persuade you./ The lethal
spell of your voice, never cast it/ down on the land and blight its harvest home./
Lull asleep that salt black wave of anger-/ awesome, proud with reverence, live
with me,” calming the Furies (3.839). She disregards the importance of the Furies’
mandate and persuades them to relinquish their mission. Furthermore, she
disregards any love or goodness of a mother saying, “No mother gave me birth./
I honour the male, in all things but marriage./ Yes, with all my heart I am my
Father’s child./ I cannot set more store by the woman’s death” (3.753). In other
words, Athena covertly stifles Orestes’ guilt thus allowing him to remain in the
paranoid-schizoid position. Refusing to acknowledge that the mother even exists
as the one who gave him birth, simply denies the issue. This may reveal why
Orestes’ later portrait throughout myth as an insane man corresponds with the
conclusion of the Eumenides.
Therefore, it seems as though a Kleinian reading of The Oresteia would see
Orestes as failing to resolve the psychic war he undergoes. But, in her article
Envy and Gratitude, Klein argues that Athena helps Orestes conquer the paranoid-
schizoid position. She writes:
The play suggests to me that Orestes can overcome his persecutory anxieties and work through the depressive position because he never gives up the urge to cleanse himself of his crime and return to his people whom presumably he wishes to govern in a benevolent way. (Klein, 286)
The resolution of the trauma of incomplete fulfillment of foundational
developmental stages requires more than desires or urges to return, however.
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What is more, Orestes does manage to give up this urge when both Apollo and
Athena tell him that he need not feel the guilt any longer, by warding off the
Furies and acquitting him completely.
In object relations theory, ambivalence towards their primary caretaker is
absolutely necessary for an infant to psychically progress. Klein explains,
“Ambivalence, carried out in a splitting of the imagos, enables the small child to
gain more trust and belief in its real objects and thus in its internalized ones- to
love them more and to carry out in an increasing degree its phantasies of
restoration on the loved object” to demonstrate how ambivalence is vital to avoid
disorders of depressive, manic, or paranoid states (Psychogenesis of Manic-
Depressive States, 69). The vote for Orestes’ acquittal in The Eumenides almost
concludes with a tie. Athena decides, “The man goes free,/ cleared of the charge
of blood. The lots are equal,” enforcing her sway on the outcome towards
Orestes’ pardon (3.777). A tie symbolizes an ambivalent outcome, which Athena
does not allow. By repressing the persecutory anxieties, the Furies, Orestes is not
able to integrate both the good and bad breasted mother. In her commentary on
The Oresteia, Klein writes, “I would conclude that the opposing votes show that
the self is not easily united, that destructive impulses drive one way, love and the
capacity for reparation and compassion in other ways. Internal peace is not easily
established” (Klein, 298). This, I would argue, is exactly true, but finding a
healthy balance does not involve absolute repression and sublimation of the
hateful feelings and guilt they generate. In order to progress from the paranoid-
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schizoid position to the depressive position, the subsequent position more in
tune with reality, the child must come to terms with both good and bad
perceptions of their primary objects. To show the significance of the integration
of the loved and hated object in a healthy psyche and future object relations,
Klein explains:
In the earliest phase the persecuting and good objects (breasts) are kept wide apart in the child’s mind. When, along with the introjection of the whole and real object, they come closer together, the ego has over and over again recourse to that mechanism- so important for the development of the relations to objects- namely, a splitting of its imagos into loved and hated, that is to say, into good and dangerous ones. (Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States, 68)
Klein’s argument that Orestes’ amnesty in the court parallels his psychic
restoration is weakly arguable, however she seems to avoid how the Eumenides
actually ends. Athena declares, “These blessings I bestow on you, my people,
gladly./ I enthrone these strong, implacable spirits here/ and root them in our
soil” (3.939). Although Athena’s logical voice seems generous and reasonable,
she displaces the Furies, burying them underground again. She roots them in our
soil or, in other words, says that guilt of bad feelings towards the mother are an
unavoidable intrinsic feature of our foundational psychic selves that must be
worked through for a healthy experience of existence. In response, the Furies cry,
“all those who dwell in Athens,/spirits and mortals, come,/govern Athena’s city
well,/revere us well, we are your guests;/you will learn to praise your
Furies,/you will praise the fortunes of your lives,” almost as a warning of what
will happen if one does not learn to revere them (3. 1023). The Furies are the
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fortune of our lives because we are destined to have feelings of guilt. No matter
how much Athena tries to transform the Furies into good objects, they need to
remain as they are in order to house our inevitable persecutory feelings.
Transforming the Furies into good spirits does not maintain healthy
ambivalence, it merely avoids it.
On the surface, the trilogy has a happy ending. The Furies become guests
of Athens, Athena’s followers, promising to never fail the city. But at what cost?
In the National Theatre of Great Britain production of The Eumenides2, the Furies,
after rejoicing the triumph of Athena’s stop to the chain of murders, leave the
stage and disperse amongst the audience. Of course, this is the choice of the
director, but it is still telling. They remain clothed in blood-red robes, wearing
the same horrifying white masks and snake-like wigs they have been dawning
throughout the play. Athena attempts to repress the Furies’ motives, while in
reality they do not disappear and they do not change. Orestes, at the end of this
production, exits by backing away as soon as Athena tips the scales. Seemingly
with cowardice and immaturity, he refuses to turn his back to the Furies as he
exits, or more like, runs away at the first chance he gets. At the end of the play,
Orestes is still very much stuck in an infantile stage of emotional development,
the paranoid-schizoid position.
Accordingly, Orestes’ stilted development aligns with the writings of
Classical scholars, such as John J. Winkler. In his article, The Ephebes’ Song,
Winkler writes, “features of the original presentation and social occasion show
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us that the audience’s experience of tragedy was built on a profoundly political
core, and that Athens’ youngest citizen-soldiers occupied a central (though in
various ways masked) role in this festival of self-representation” (Winkler, 62).
Both a political core and young citizens are blatantly represented in The Oresteia,
Orestes himself being what Winkler calls, “Tragoidoi,” or a “billy goat-singer”
(58). Tragedians were intertwined with goats for many reasons. Not only were
goats sacrificed to Dionysus, but goats also had to do with the physical and social
puberty of young men. For example, Winkler explains the word “tragizein” to
mean “bleat,” as well as, “to go through puberty” (61). As a young man in
tragedy, Orestes is an ideal representation of a burgeoning initiate into manhood.
However, his initiation was a failed one, and like the goat is sacrificed to
Dionysus, Orestes was sacrificed for the development of civilization. By looking
at Orestes’ attempted maturation through a Kleinian lens, Winkler’s
interpretation would show that Orestes is a failed, rather than a successful,
initiate.
PostScript
Athena’s avowal may have advanced the city to a system of law, but for
Orestes, the outcome was perhaps worse than fatal. Therefore, The Oresteia, in
this account, in demonstrative of how the individual is often sacrificed in
modern society for the sake of civilization. It is difficult to see how Aeschylus
could ever be more relevant to today’s society. With a horrendous prison system
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and the ubiquitous argument of gun control and its relation to mental health in
America today, Orestes and his suffering seem universally prevalent. The
evolution from an individualistic world to a code of justice and civilization was
not quite a failure, but made many sacrifices along the way, including that of
Orestes’ individual psyche. Klein proposes, “Denial, which is always bound up
with persecutory anxiety, may stifle feelings of love and guilt, undermine
sympathy and consideration both with the internal and external objects, and
disturb the capacity for judgment and the sense of reality” (Klein, 293). Orestes’
dismissal symbolizes psychic denial of the persecutory feelings towards his
mother, leading to a distorted sense of reality.
The Oresteia therefore, can be understood in one light as a commentary on
the way that western civilization has the put the needs of the individual beneath
that of a community as a whole. Perhaps a contemporary example of this
ordering is war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. Having been flung
into horrific battle and trauma, veterans are often treated with indifference and
not given adequate therapy to cope with what they experienced in war. Like
Orestes, soldiers can sacrifice their mental health for a ‘greater’ cause. Although
Aeschylus was not thinking in these terms as he wrote The Oresteia, the trilogy is
still emblematic of an individual psyche without the chance to recuperate after
an incredible trauma. Athena denies Orestes’ feelings of love for his mother and
guilt for his matricide, leading to his descent into madness. What is more,
ambivalence is crucial in both object relations theory and for Orestes to restore
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his mental sanctity. Aeschylus might have chosen a resolution for The Oresteia
that defined justice and instituted the jury trial, but left for Orestes and
uncomfortable and messier end. In essence, Orestes is unable to achieve a
cohesive integration of his destructive action, guilt, and love, and therefore does
not resolve his psychic conflict.
Michiko Mitsunaga-Whitten 04/12/13
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Works Cited:
Aeschylus, Robert Fagles, and William Bedell. Stanford. The Oresteia. New York,
NY: Penguin, 1984.
1 Bouguereau, William. The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the
Furies. 1862. Oil on canvas, 227 x 278 cm. Chrysler Collection. Norfolk, Virginia.
Buxton, R. G. A. Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A Study of Peitho. Cambridge,
Cambridgeshire: Cambridge UP, 1982.
Euben, J. Peter. Greek Tragedy and Political Theory. Berkeley: University of
California, 1986.
Euripides, John Peck, and Frank Nisetich. Orestes. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
2 Hall, Peter. Aeschylus: The Oresteia, Eumenides (The Furies). National Theatre
of Great Britain. Films for the Humanities. Video Home System. 1986.
Klein, Melanie. "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive
States.” Essential Papers on Object Relations. Peter Buckley. New York:
New York UP, 1986.
Klein, Melanie, and Hanna Segal. Envy and Gratitude: and Other Works 1946-1963.
London: Vintage, 1997.
McCoskey, Denise Eileen, and Emily Zakin. Bound by the City: Greek Tragedy,
Sexual Difference, and the Formation of the Polis. Albany: State University of
New York, 2009.
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Rustin, Michael. The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and
Culture. London: Verso, 1991.
Segal, Hanna. Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. New York: Basic, 1974.