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The myth of Medea from the point of view of

psychoanalysis
Riitta Sirola

Bulevard 15 D 43, 00120, Helsinki, Finland E-mail:

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To cite this article: Riitta Sirola (2004): The myth of Medea from the point of view of psychoanalysis, The
Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 27:2, 94-104
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Scand. Psychoanal. Rev. (2004) 21, 94-104

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The myth of Medea from the point of view of psychoanalysis

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Riitta Sirola

In this article, the myth of Medea is approached from a psychoanalytic perspective. It is based on two key ideas. The first is Freud's statement to Ernest
Jones that fairy tales and myths may tell us about man 's unconcious just as
dreams do. The second is Philip Arlow 's conclusion - shared by many other
psychoanalysts - that myths are externalizations of unconcious childhood
wishes and give them a concrete shape. These ideas cast a new light on myths
as well as on Euripides' tragedy of Medea and add a completely new and
deep dimension. Similar to a dream, a myth is viewed as an enigma; it may
contain hidden wishes; its magic circle may turn events into their opposites
and it can change its' object by wrapping it in disguise. At the same time,
the myth becomes clearly different from a story and a legend, or anything
concrete for that matter. My interpretation of the myth of Medea is that of
a girl's normal development, which essentially takes place in a two-person
relationship before three-dimentionality is reached and understood. It is
originally a description, which was sung collectively, of the achievements
and difficulties of the development of a pre-oedipal girl, motivated by strong
libidinal attempts to unite with her mother on the one side, wanting to separate from her on the other. An essential quality in this development is the
pendulum movement towards and away from the mother, a swing that to a
certain extent continues throughout a woman's life.

Key words: myths - Euripides ' Medea - preoedipal female development

In 1913, Freud writes to Ernest Jones:" ... it seems quite

possible to apply the psychoanalytic views derived from
dreams to products of ethnic imagination such as myths
and fairy tales" (p. 185). Inspired by this, I am inclined
to think that myths have the power, motive and structure
of dreams. Like the dream in its veiled form, or in the
disguises of its characters, the myth attempts to tell us
what we do not want to know. I do not think, however,
that there is a correct interpretation of a myth. Interpretations of myths are endless, and the many layers keep
the core of the myth a mystery.
Along the same lines as Freud, Arlow (1982) concludes - as do most psychoanalysts who have studied

myths - that myths externalise the unconscious wishes

of childhood and give them a concrete form. Phantasy
derivatives are projected onto historical figures of the
past, and they live in the myth according to a person's
wishes or symbolically by carrying out unconscious
representations shared by all the members of a community. The community keeps the myth alive, saves it
and ensures its continuity.
This article tries to study the thousands-years-old
myth of Medea. Greek mythology has survived in tragedies and fragments, as well as quotations in Greek epic
works, drama, poetry and literature. Greek mythology
has also been saved in the writings of historians, mytho-

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graphs and Christian Church Fathers. The knowledge

has been conserved in private homes, libraries - particularly in monasteries - and in the library of Alexandria
(Simonsuuri, 1996). Euripides (485-406 BC) wrote his
tragedy of Medea in about 430 BC (Simonsuuri, 1999).
The play partly corresponds to the myth that exists in
several versions. Medea is a drama of passion, and writing it for the stage was considered improper at the time.
Within psychoanalysis, Medea has been studied rather
little. Like Sophocles, Euripides delves into psychological drama, but differs from the other playwrites of his
time in that his most profoundly drawn characters are
women. Euripides was the first dramatist to dare to put
a woman's interior world on stage with all her wishes,
anxieties, joys and adversities. He evokes love as a
great, powerful and fatal source of passion.
MYTH, METAPHOR AND TRAGEDY
Myth or mythos means word or story. The word's etymology goes back to the concept "~J.Uero", which is more
than a story and includes meanings associated with mysteries. Originally, myths were an essential part of religious life. Today, they no longer have their original
meaning, but their "... interpretation receives other,
important forms." (Simonsuuri, 1996, p. 24).
Myths can be approached from three angles, as
Friedrich Muller (1956) suggests: comparative linguistics, analogy or comparative history, and psychology.
Muller's argument is that the myth is a symbolic way
of expression which does not actually aim at explaining
anything, but contains an explanation in itself.
Myths appeared at the dawn of our civilisation. They
tell us how everything began, how what was unknown
became known, how chaos was built into cosmos and
the illusion of control and knowledge was gained. "The
Greek word khaos means the first state of the universe,
chaos, abysm and infinity, while cosmos is order, the
world and beauty." (Simonsuuri, 1996, p. 64). Many
mythologists (Graves, 1980; Lilja, 1990; Kairnio, 1982;
Muller, 1956; Simonsuuri, 1996) understand the essential meaning of myths to be that they tell the primal
story. This has also been my point of departure in studying the myth of Medea.
Myths are part of our culture. Acting in many ways,
they create continuity. They teach us, warn us and give
us normative and ethical models. Myths draw the borders of culture. Many cultural scientists speak of the
crisis of western civilisation, meaning in fact western
man's broken relationship with the mythical basis of
his culture. In my work, I strive to pursue the line in
the tradition of our psychoanalytical thinking which
has its beginning in the mythical basis of ancient Greek

tragedies; their survived fragments are the foundation of

my work. Might it be that Medea tells one significant,
collective mythical dream related to women, on the basis
of which we may be able to understand a girl's development from early childhood to adult womanhood?
The language and image terrain of dreams are metaphorical. Myths are difficult to understand without a
metaphor such as the dream: after all, the language of
dreams is also metaphorical and symbolic. It is also
important to notice that, in psychoanalytical work,
metaphors can act as mediators between the unfolding,
multi-layered experience (H. Enckell, 2002) and help
us understand the contents of the experience. In psychoanalysis, myths can be understood as a conglomeration of metaphors, although in linguistics, a metaphor
is defined as a whole created by two or three words.
According to Gyllenberg's (1939) Greek-Finnish dictionary, one of the many meanings of meta is a 'link
with change'. Linked with their non-Christian mythical
background, metaphors are related to passion and the
new object of a transfer. Object transfer is central to the
myth of Medea.
Tragedies are based on myths. M. Enckell ( 1992,
1994, 1997) points out in several connections that it is
at the occurrence of something tragic that the unconscious comes closest to man's conscious self. We may
say that in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, the murder of the
father, the marriage with the mother and the blinding of
one's own eyes, are the tragic points through which the
unconscious comes close to the conscious -the unconscious that can only be reached through derivatives. In
Medea, these points are blind infatuation, a passionate
clinging to a man, the breakdown caused by the man's
rejection, and the murder of children. "Art, religion and
psychoanalysis make it possible for us to open the way
towards the great unknown which we face at all times.
A psychoanalyst calls this unknown the subconscious, a
priest calls it God, and art- inspiration?" (M. Enckell,
2003).
THE MYTHICAL STORY OF MEDEA
The ancient story of Medea is based on five different
mythical bases: the mythologies of Colchis, lolchos,
Corinth, Athens and Media, all of which emphasise
slightly different parts of the story. My work focuses
on the Corinthian mythology on which Euripides (431
BC.), too, based his tragedy. Medea was born outside the
area of Ancient Greece in the realm of Co!chis north of
the Caspian Sea, as the oldest daughter of Queen Hecate
and King Aietes. Hecate was widely known even within
Greek culture as an oracle and sorceress, a hunting witch
and a dreadful killer of men. She was a goddess of the

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full moon, and was said to have demanded children as

sacrifice. Medea's father Aietes was the son of the Sun
God, a cruel and warlike king. Medea's sister was Circe
- a sorceress and a witch like Medea herself. Medea had
one brother of whom it is known that he was his father's
trusted and reliable companion. In Ancient Greece, a
person who did not understand the Greek language,
and who was therefore not part of Greek culture, was
in the eyes of the Greeks a barbarian. A Greek and a
barbarian were also separated by the taboo of incest
which in the days of Euripides was assumed only to be
practised outside the Greek-speaking world. In other
words, Medea was one of the primitive barbarians and
belonged to an inferior race in the eyes of the Greeks
(Flaceliere, 1959; Simonsuuri, 1996).
Medea's story is related to the myth of the Golden
Fleece, the skin of a Theban flying ram. The ram flew
to a region by the Caspian Sea, where it was killed and
its skin became a famous magic charm believed to bring
luck. Medea's father Aietes owned the Golden Fleece,
and it was protected by a fearsome dragon.
While Aietes ruled in Colchis, Iolchos, the centre of
Greek trade, was ruled by Jason's uncle King Pelias.
Pelias had become king by seizing the throne from his
weak brother, the ruling King Aeos. Jason, the eldest son
of Aeos was the rightful heir and should have become
king after his father. When Jason began to demand
his rightful position, Pelias accepted with one condition: bring me the Golden Fleece, and I will cede you
the throne. Jason decided to go to Colchis and get the
Fleece.
Jason owned the famous ship Argo, a great vessel
with fifty pairs of oars. He shipped a crew of fifty
great heroes of his time. After many adventures, the
Argonauts arrived in Colchis along the river Phasis.
Once in Colchis, Jason immediately gained access
to King Aietes who promised him the Fleece, but
set difficult heroic feats as a condition, such that he
knew would be impossible for a mortal man to perform. Jason despaired, but was saved by the divinely
beautiful princess Medea. As Medea was approaching him, the goddess of love Aphrodite, commanded
by the supreme goddess Hera, shot an arrow through
her heart. Medea fell passionately and blindly in love
with Jason. Medea was aware of the conditions his
father had set to Jason and promised to help Jason
win the Golden Fleece. Her own condition, however, was that Jason should marry her and take her to
Greece. As Jason's wife, Medea would be the queen
of Iolchos. Jason who was also in love with Medea
promised everything to her. Using witchcraft, Medea
helped Jason win the Golden Fleece. As they were
hurrying back to the ship, Aietes woke up and noticed

96

that the Fleece was gone. He sent his son to prevent

their escape. Medea cruelly killed her own brother, cut
him in pieces and threw the pieces into the sea. When
the stunned Aietes stayed to collect the pieces of his
dead son from the sea, Jason and Medea managed to
escape towards Iolchos. They were married on the way
with Greek rituals, swearing lifelong fidelity and an
unbreakable companionship to each other. At the same
time, Medea became a Greek. It is noteworthy that the
marriage ceremony took place in the temple of Hecate,
the centre of power in the realm of Medea's mother. In
lolchos, they were received in triumph. Medea gained
the favour of the people by her wisdom and magic
skills: she became a healer. But Pelias, although he
did get his Golden Fleece, wanted to prolong the transfer of power. Medea gave Aeos some powerful herb
which made him young and strong. This aroused awe
of Medea, helping her become a god-like creature in
people's eyes.
Pelias refused to cede power to Jason, and Medea
killed him through a ruse. The people of Iolchos were
shocked and banished Jason and Medea from their
island. The couple arrived in Corinth, where they lived
happily and had at least two sons. Creon, king of Corinth, took a liking to Jason who was brave, loyal and
submissive. Creon decided to marry his anaemic daughter Glauce to Jason, so that he would continue to rule
over Corinth. After losing the throne of Iolchos, Jason
was thrilled and accepted the deal, proposing to Glauce,
who answered yes.
THE TRAGEDY OF MEDEA
At the opening scene of Euripides' Medea, Jason has
decided to accept King Creon's proposal, and Medea has
found out about her spouse's treacherous plan.
Medea's nurse laments:
But now all is enmity, and love's bonds are diseased. For Jason, abandoning his own children and
my mistress, is bedding down in a royal match ....
Poor Medea, finding herself thus cast aside, calls
loudly on his oaths, invokes the mighty assurance
of his sworn right hand, and calls the gods to witness the unjust return she is getting from Jason.
She lies fasting, giving her body up to pain, wasting away in tears .... (Euripides, 431 BC, p. 7).
Medea has also found out that Creon aims to have her
and her children killed, unless they accept that they
have to leave Corinth immediately. Jason's promises
that he will never abandon Medea but keep her as his
secret, unofficial but real spouse, and that their children

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will thus obtain the title of a Greek prince, prove nothing but lies. Jason was aware of Creon's plan and does
nothing to stop him from carrying it out. He wants to
become a King.
What would have happened to Medea, if she had
become an exile? According to Flaceliere (1959), the
fate of an exiled woman in Ancient Greece would have
been either prostitution or beggar or both. The children
suffered the same fate, becoming slaves, beggars or
child prostitutes. Medea could not go back home to
her family as she had betrayed her father and killed her
brother. Medea was left with nothing and nowhere to
go.
King Creon himself goes to see Medea to tell her
about her fate to be:

In time, Medea bears Aigeus a son. They begin to act

together. But Medea's pain over her own plan starts to
come out:

But I warn you, if tomorrow's sun sees you and

your children within the borders of this land, you
will be put to death. I mean what I have said.
(Euripides, 431 BC, p.l7).

Zeus on Olympus has many things in his treasurehouse, and many are the things the gods accomplish against our expectations. What men expect
is not brought to pass, but a god finds a way to
achieve the unexpected. Such is the outcome of
this story." (Euripides, 431 BC, p. 50).

Medea is petrified, but rises from her bed and decides

to strike back. Creon accepts the condition of giving
her another twenty-four hours to arrange her own and
her children's flight, but uses the time to plot a cunning plan. She summons Jason to her, acts nicely and
submissively, pretending that she knows nothing about
Creon's decision over her and their children's future.
Medea says that she accepts Jason's wish to keep her in
Corinth in the uncertain position of an abandoned wife.
Jason cannot hide his enthusiasm.
I approve this, woman. Nor do I blame your earlier resentment. For it is natural for a woman
to get angry when a marriage of a different sort
presents itself to the husband. But your thoughts
have changed for the better .... (Euripides, 431
BC, p.l7).

Medea sends her children to the bride-to-be Glauce with

flowers and gifts, including a magnificent scarf which
the unsuspecting Glauce happily accepts and puts on.
But it turns out to be poisoned. It bums Glauce's skin
and flesh, and when the terrified Creon rushes to help his
daughter, he is wrapped in the same veil and they both
bum to death in an embrace. The fire spreads throughout
the palace, and all members and intimates of the royal
family are killed.
In the meantime, Aigeus, the king of Athens and a
friend ofMedea's has arrived in Corinth and promises to
help Medea get away. Aigeus cannot have children and
he knows that Medea can help him with his problem.
Medea and Aigeus develop an intensive relationship.

My friends, my resolve is fixed on the deed, to

kill my children with all speed and to flee from
this land: I must not, by lingering, deliver my
children for murder to a less kindly hand. They
must die at all events, and since they must, I
who gave them birth shall kill them . . . . Do not
weaken, do not remember that you love the children, that you gave them life .... (Euripides, 431
BC, p. 30-31).
Medea commits the atrocious deed.
The Choir ends the play with the words:

Now the Gods interfere with the events again. Earlier

Aphrodite had obeyed Hera's order to shoot an arrow
oflove through Medea's heart at the moment she met
Jason; now Medea's grandfather the Sun sends her a carriage of dragons which she boards together with Aigeus
and the dead bodies of her children. They fly to Athens.
In Athens, Medea marries Aigeus and becomes queen
of Athens. But Aigeus' son from a previous marriage
becomes an obstacle to the happy union; Medea's jealousy is without end and she begins to plot the murder
of the son. Aigeus finds out about this, is horrified and
expels Medea from Athens. Medea ends up in the mountains of Caucasus. In the mythologies of both Athens
and Media, the account of Medea's fate is fragmentary.
In one version, Medea meets her death in the mountains,
in another she once more becomes the mother of a great
flock of children and the queen of a realm.
A PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF THE MYTH
Different interpretations
Freud was convinced - though this conviction later
changed (Clark, 1982; Gay, 1990; Jones, 1964; Sjogren,
1989; Stone 1990) -that the most significant challenge
in a child's development takes place at the age of 4 to 5
years, when the child becomes aware of a three-dimensional phenomenon, i.e., the oedipal triangle. The child
is shocked to realise that he or she is completely exterior
to what may be the most significant thing in the relationship between his or her mother and father. The complete

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and completely satisfying dream in the child's world

of being only two is broken. There is something utterly
unattainable between two people the child loves, mother
and father, and the child has no part in it. It is a universe
that the child has no chance of entering. Later on, Freud
in his forever elastic thinking, began to give room to the
idea that the period before the oedipal configuration may
have been more important than he had thought.
The myths of Oedipus and Narcissus as a kind of
collective concepts have given name to our psychoanalytical thinking and language, describing important
borderlines in the continuous development of an individual's life towards new and more desirable levels.
Many analysts of today seem to think that the oedipal
myth is not applicable, or that some of its aspects are
not applicable, to a girl's triad. Jung suggested an Electra complex to describe the girl's Oedipus complex,
but Freud hesitated and did not like the idea ( 1931 ).
Much later, Halberstadt-Freud (1998) again defended
the inclusion of the Electra concept in psychoanalysis,
and Kulish and Holzman (1998) suggested a Persephone
(Core) complex as the name for a girl's triadic relationship. Simon Bennett (1988) came to the conclusion and
suggestion that a boy's triangular relationship should be
named after Oedipus, a girl's after Medea.
The myth of Medea has been studied rather little
within psychoanalysis. I have often wondered why. Is
it because it is difficult for us to understand myths like
dreams? If we do not accept this point of departure,
the concrete story of a woman who kills, and kills her
own children, is so terrifying, shocking and disgusting
that no one feels inclined to deal with it. The idea of
a loving, tender mother, the image of our wishes who
"bears all things", is shattered to pieces. Then, instead
of following the most important and rewarding perspective of psychoanalysis, we stop at the superficial
layer of the myth. Is there a profound anxiety-provoking
obstacle which makes us identify with the children of
the story quite concretely? Is it so that a woman, as one
who gives birth and nurses and protects, is an obstinate
and necessary creation of our wishes, but a woman as
someone who destroys life, the chain of generations and
culture, is intolerable? If this is so- and this is the story
of Medea - then the story is such that both men and
women deeply shun from it and are struck by terror. In
that case, it would be impossible to integrate to the idea
of maternity as a forever self-sacrificing figure, absolute
good and endless in its love - as the Christian myth of
Mary also tells it - such features that can in the power
oftheir impulsiveness overpass the needs of a child to be
nurtured. If this is so, I would say that this is the reason
why it is so incredibly difficult to approach the dreamlike and unconscious core essence and message of the

98

myth. Another explanation, given by many analysts, is

that Medea awakens in us a world of impulses that we
most strongly reject.
The important question to be followed is this: does
the myth of Medea have something to offer us specifically from the point of view of the unconscious and its
dream-like nature that can help us understand a woman's
mind, her longings and fears, the nature of her neediness, the way she binds herself to a man, which are different from a man's? Could the myth of Medea, like a
dream, give us the opportunity to peep into a womans
unconscious?
Edward Stem (1949) suggests that the Medea complex should be admitted into the psychoanalytical literature as a concept that describes a mother's possible
hostile impulses towards her child, regardless of the
child's sex. This suggestion was immediately criticised by claims that the mythical story of Medea covers a highly specific reaction that motivates a desire for
revenge in women who have gone through a difficult
oedipal trauma. Stem argues for his idea by pointing
out that various oedipal solutions include hostility and
death wishes aimed at children and that this is only one
side of the appearance of the oedipal triangle and not
necessarily the most important one. In this way, Stern
links Medea's triangular drama with the oedipal situation. Even in the myth of Oedipus, children are killed,
be it indirectly.
Phyllis Greenacre (1950) uses the concept of the
Medea complex. Her thinking starts from the fact that
the myth can help us understand a girl's pre-genital
development. Too much mutual clinging to the motherdyad relationship is a prison, which can lead to various
compensatory efforts to brake loose on the one hand,
and to remain clinging on the other. This can be represented by an exaggerated femininity that is narcissistically heavily charged and can be related to an extreme
desire for revenge, if the spouse dies or particularly if
the woman feels that her spouse rejects her. On the basis
of his clinical knowledge, Greenacre assumes that these
women suffer from a highly specific breast and penis
envy complex. This, again, tends to lead to a severe
castration complex. My understanding of this is that the
penis becomes associated with something bad because
of a strong dependence on the mother-dyad and because
the phallus is apt to separate and break the dyad. The
penis as a phantasy phallus competes with the daughter's longing for the mother. In the girl's mind, the bad
phallus destroys and tears apart. Thus, the penis does
not develop into an object of envy that the girl would
like for herself. As Chassegue-Smirgel (1999) puts it,
the penis does not develop "from envy to desire", it does
not become desirable or something one is willing to take

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inside oneself. If I understand Greenacre correctly, she

sees an even more severe inner space anxiety beneath
the castration complex, a fear of one's fertility and the
creativity of one's inner space being destroyed. The girl
may weave a phantasy that either her or her mother's
creativity or ability to create something new and good
and to enjoy hersel sexually, will be destroyed.
Simon Bennett (1988) begins his study of Medea
from the point of view of autonomy and dependence.
He emphasises in Euripides' tragedy the fact that Medea
is in a situation where she must make a choice. Medea
must choose between the sufficient autonomy made possible for a woman in Greek culture and the suppressed
status and strong family ties of her own culture. In Bennet's interpretation, man in Euripides' tragedy laments
the uselessness of his chagrins, warns people of the
dangers of intimacy, describes the hostility between
man and woman, praises the advantages of childlessness
and indirectly expresses the unpredictability of physical union, the transient nature of passion and the capriciousness of love. He sees Medea as Euripides' own
creation and says that Euripides himself remains aside
as a unique, external observer and is as such omnipotent, untouched by the cultural continuum and nurturing
tradition.
Simone Becache (1991) thinks that the myth of
Medea represents a woman's unconscious Oedipus
complex. According to her, the myth reveals the power
and meaning of the father behind Medea's acts. Medea's
own children are the obstacle and competitors of her
libidinal pursuits. According to Becache, the myth of
Medea describes a daughter's hatred of her father. This
hatred is based on a disappointment and narcissistic
breakdown, when the girls realises that she cannot get
her father at her side and away from her mother. Envy
and jealousy characterise her emotional relationship with
her mother. Becache argues that the myth is rejected,
because Medea's passions, as told by the myth, awaken
in a person the entire terrain of childhood experiences
that a person most vehemently rejects. Becache sees
the myths of Oedipus and Medea as commensurate:
they represent the boy's and the girl's triad in relation
to their parents, respectively.
Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber (200 1) speaks of the
concept "Medea phantasy". She understands the myth as
a story of a woman's sterility caused by psychological
reasons. She explains that hatred against the opposite
sex derives from a little girl's helplessness and tragedy
of being left in the shadow of her father. Leuzinger-Bohleber points out that myths have always been powerful
expressions of forever-present unconscious phantasies.
According to her, the myth illustrates an unconscious
certainty hiding behind sterility and frigidity, and she

suggests that Medea should be given the same status in

psychoanalysis as the concepts of Oedipus and Narcissus.
Leuzinger-Bohleber detects similarities in her female
patients who tell her about their Medea phantasy in analysis, pointing out how their relationship with femininity
means power over life and death. This is again linked
with early anxieties about one's own destructivenessalso including the potential impulse ofkilling one's own
child. The female body is experienced in an extremely
ambiguous way, not as something productive and capable of bringing pleasure, but as embarrassing, unreliable and latently destructive. The female sexual organ
indicates the result of a "bloody destruction" which can
harm the penetrating penis and potential babies. Unconsciously, one's own body does not belong to oneself but
to the mother, and being a woman is experienced as a
deep dependence on the man, the potential father of
common children. This arouses an intense penis envy,
which may appear in form of panic attacks and a continuous fear of becoming abandoned or let down. Both
sexuality and motherhood are experienced as highly
contradictory, with a related fear of the dissolution of
one's own borders and the leaking out of both aggressive and libidinal impulses. Sexuality and motherhood
are associated with death and depression. In analysis,
these patients are completely convinced that only one
can survive birth, either mother or baby but not both.
This Leuzinger-Bohleber calls a Medea phantasy.
A yet unpublished article by Stanislav Matacic (2002)
associates Medea with the father, so that the sacrificed
sons represent the father with a strong pre-genital background behind him. Matacic also sees that Medea's life
is controlled by her mother, and she acts according to
the laws of her mother's world. Glauce he interprets as
representing the mother and Medea as an adolescent
girl competing against her mother's power. His most
important idea of the myth is that blows to her sense
of self-worth lead Medea to severe castration anxieties
which is why she nurses a poisoned hatred of men.
Rustin & Rustin (2002) discuss Euripides' interest in
a woman's world of experience. They approach Medea
as a real, living woman in contrast to my own approach
or way of understanding the myth. They search in the
play for what is central in Medea's world of experience
such as commitment to a man and to motherhood. They
also ponder on what might be universal in the play,
common to both man and woman. They follow Medea's
state of mind, how she faces a humiliating rejection,
which can only lead to either death or banishment with
the consequences described earlier. Her fury is in inverse
relation to the passionate love she feels towards Jason.
Different from other contemporary authors, Euripides

99

writes a completely new kind of tragedy, describing

how Medea will not submit to her fate but rises in defiance, fury and fight. Nothing can stop her from fighting
for love, life and death. We, in our times, can never
grasp the depth of her vulnerability, the writers say,
asking what the life of an abandoned barbarian woman
in Ancient Greece would have been like. They point out
how Euripides, in a strange and tragic way, manages to
turn Medea into a heroine despite her awfulness and the
atrocity of her acts.

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A DYAD OR THE TRIAD?

The play, as we know, starts at the point when Jason
abandons Medea. Medea suffers a narcissistic breakdown and at first her destructiveness is directed to herself. She has above all been humiliated and feels terrible shame and envy. The adjustment of her pride and
sense of self-worth become her most important goal. She
regresses into a state where her children are an extension
of herself. Medea cannot stand being shut outside the
oedipal relationship- represented by Jason's wish to
marry Glauce - she does not possess sufficiently stable
inner objects to be able to grieve for the loss of a love
object, which would enable her to protect her children
as a symbol of the next generation. Medea cannot integrate the decreasing sexual attractiveness of her changing and ageing body, and she regresses. She then tries
to survive in order to maintain herself by destroying
the bad object, i.e., by murdering people significantly
related to Jason, including her own children. This is
where we need to ask the question: Why does Medea
not kill Jason himself?
In my view, the myth can be seen as a dramatisation of a little girl's dependence on her mother. Like
Greenacre, I tend to interpret the myth from the point of
view of impulses both enabling and preventing a girl's
pre-oedipal development. The myth represents a journey
of a girl's desire (libido) from the beginning of her life
towards the oedipal configuration. The choices of the
myth's Medea speak of the unconscious conflict forever
alive in a little girl's and later a woman's development:
on the one hand, there is a furious desire to separate oneself and free oneself from the dyad- as Ta.hldi (1996)
repeatedly states, a child tries to break loose from his
or her parents, to separate, differentiate and finally to
establish his or her own individuality. - On the other
hand, in situations of change or crisis, the child may
feel an equally strong opposite urge to get back to the
symbiotic care of his or her parents.
We know how difficult it is for a girl to break loose
from the mother's world and keep her sexual body for
herself. As pointed out by Reenkola (2000), the girl's

100

development is characterised by a cyclic alternation

of similarity and oneness, even physically, with the
mother and efforts to obtain independence; this is a lifelong process. Oneness and separateness alternate ever
since infancy - there is never one without the other, as
Reenkola underlines. The daughter tries to break sufficiently loose from her mother's inner space to be able
to join together with a man, become fertilised and thus
ensure the continuum of fertility jointly created by man
and woman. The main emphasis of Reenkola's thinking seems to be that this longing for symbiosis with the
mother and an equally strong desire to break loose from
her, continues throughout a daughter's life.
Medea's mother Hecate was a witch, hunter and
murderer of men, and she demanded child sacrifices.
Hecate was also an oracle and famous even among the
Greeks. In my view, Medea identifies strongly with
her mother. Although Hecate was not dedicated to her
children, but left them in the care of a nurse, one still
gets the impression that Medea lives in a perpetual hunger for her mother. Hecate was dedicated to something
completely different from her children. And it may be
exactly so in a pre-oedipal girl's mind that everything
in the mother that is not directed at her, is intolerable.
Might this be the other side of the dyadic, ambivalent
relationship: as the opposite of the longing for unity,
the phantasy of a rejecting mother serves the girl's own
demands for separation? Hecate was the goddess of
the full moon, and temples were built in her honour
along the Mediterranean coast all the way to the Black
Sea. In Medea's mind, and in the mind of a pre-oedipal daughter, mother was all-powerful. As Hagglund
(1990) states, a pre-oedipal child lives within the mother's magic. The mother of a pre-oedipal child with her
magic skills takes the side of the child against the child's
deepest fears. An object transfer from the mother to the
father presupposes the creation of a fatherly magic in
the child's mind, which is attractive and apt to help the
child out of the depths of the world of absolute good
and absolute bad towards more neutralised terrains of
mental images. Father's magic manifests itself as phallus, which the child begins to reach for; and as Freud
(1924) points out, the phallus represents to the child a
desirable, desired, positive and superior instrument for
attaining maximal pleasure. Object transfer is made possible by disappointment with the mother - mother does
not give the superior instruments for attaining satisfaction harboured by the phantasy - and the phantasy wish
is transferred to the father almost as such. The father
becomes an object of desire and a potential bringer of
satisfaction.
Hecate represents the phallic mother; in other words,
she is superior in strength to everyone else. She also

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has a magical connection with her daughter, and when

this is studied form the point of view of Medea, it can
be interpreted as Medea's own wish that her mother
would represent a superior power and strength. A preoedipal child's mother is all-powerful. Hecate is present
in Medea's mind at the important moments of her life,
and it is significant that Jason and Medea are wed in
Hecate's temple. It is as if Medea is living in her mother's world and in her mother. Who could- as happens
in reality - pull the girl child out of the magic circle of
her magical mother's realm? Who else but a man- the
father.
Medea's father Aietes is described as a cruel and
fearsome king. If we think very carefully about this,
may it then tell us that it serves the pre-oedepal girl's
fantasy of a sexual father? May it tell us that there is
nothing desirable in the father's physical difference from
the mother, and that he has nothing productive to give?
Aietes owns the Golden Fleece, a magical object that
brings luck and success to its owner. A dragon guards
the Fleece in Aietes' palace. And once again: Is this
Medea's mental image of her father, and if we interpret it as such, does it speak of Medea's need to create
a phantasy of her father as cruel and fearsome? Being
in the risk of concretising the story, we might see the
myth as an image of a pre-oedipal girl's mental image
of a phallic father who has not yet been turned into a
desired, magic father, but who is only perceived as a
threat to the nearly absolute relationship between mother
and daughter. Does the image of the father also tell us of
a phantasy that the girl needs to maintain long enough
for a sufficiently good and sufficiently long mother dyad
to continue? And is that the reason why the father as
an individual representative of his sex has no place for
Medea at this stage, allowing Medea to retreat to her
dyadic mother? Or are we in fact dealing with Hecate's
mental image of her spouse as cruel and fearsome, discovered by Medea in her mother's mind? Does this
phantasy fulfil the wishes of a pre-oedipal girl? And
does it reveal the nature of the wishes as protective of
the development? If so, we can talk about it as a dream
that is dreamt by every pre-oedipal girl. The myth gives
characters to this dream.
When the goddess Aphrodite, under Hera's orders,
shoots the fatal arrow oflove through Medea's heart at
the moment of her meeting Jason, is this a description
of the transferential nature of falling in love at first
sight? Who does Medea meet in Jason? I would answer:
her mother, Hecate. Now she will be able to feel as
an all-powerful and extremely important, needed and
longed-for part in a dyad. Exactly what kind of a relationship with Jason does Medea then attempt to build?
In my understanding, transfer from mother Hecate to

Jason takes place. As before, the shock of the oedipal

triangle, the daughter's relationships have a strongly
dyadic emphasis, even though the object changes. This, I
think, is described in the myth. In her mind, Medea creates a strong dyad with Jason, similar to her relationship
with her mother- extremely specific and commensurate
to the smallest detail. The solution that Medea makes by
giving birth to Jason's children, for example, are motivated by her wish to protect and strengthen her relationships with mother-Jason: the fulfilment, maintenance
and possibility for continuation of Medea's desire. This
is the basis on which she commits herself to Jason and
binds him tight to her in her phantasies. She believes that
her children can help her anchor Jason in their relationship. And at the same time, she is able to act as a feared
but also admired, active woman, though only because
she knows that Jason is bound to her. Her solutions
such as fratricide, and even the murder of children, can
be seen as an ardent effort to protect the mother-dyadic
bind. All obstacles to the dyad are removed: brothers,
children, mother tongue, and fatherland. As in a dream,
in the myth the children are not children but the fatal
third element in the triad that strengthens the dyad in
Medea's relationship with Jason. Jason is Medea's.
In other words, Jason does not represent a genital
man to Medea, a different, complementary sex; rather,
I would see Jason as the one who makes it possible for
Medea to continue her relationship with her mother.
But Jason cannot be the extension of Medea's mother:
Jason is a phallic hero, who cannot stand the clinging,
possessive and controlling passion of Medea's need for
a mother forever, but escapes into Glauce's arms. In my
way of thinking, an extremely strong separation anxiety lies behind Medea's fury, which is the reason why
Medea does not murder Jason. Jason is vitally important
to her for the rest of her life and can't be killed just as
her mother can't. What can be detected at the background of her deeds is an obsessive need to restore the
mother-dyad. Medea's story probably tells us that side
of a pre-oedipal girl's ambivalence, or the impossible
and obsessional need to return to the illusory original
unity. In my view, this can also mean that the pre-oedipal girl's father- if he is good-enough- can't yet rescue
and lure his daughter under the power of the pre-oedipal
phallic mother. The girl has to mature before reaching a
three-dimensional world and time is needed before the
father can really represent a different sex that completes
the woman.
The idea of Medea as a concrete and extemalised
description of the pre-oedipal wishful impulses of the
unconscious is also supported by the fact that it never
becomes apparent that Medea should feel an outsider,
insufficient and with no part in her parent's union.

101

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Hecate and Aietes had children together, at least three,

according to the myth. In the landscape of Medea's
mind, she also has a dyadic relationship with her father.
And there is no space for the idea that there might be
something highly significant between her parents that
she has no part in. It is only the oedipal shock, the fact
that two parties in a triangle have a strong and vital
connection with each other, where the third part, the
child, has absolutely no share, that forces the child to
open his or her eyes and ears to see and hear the painful fact of the primal scene. Medea has a long way to
go before realising this fact. In the myth, she never
reaches it. As I see it, the myth of Medea does not
even attempt to describe the step in a three-dimensional
world, but specifically speaks of two-dimensionality,
the huge power of longing for a dyadic relationship,
yet simultaneously desiring to become separated from
it. Even the general atmosphere of obsessive passion,
fury and lack of restraint in the tragedy, refer to a pretriadic time. Thoughts are already deeds, and ideas are
already choices. Feelings lead almost immediately to
impulsive, concrete action.
The idea the myth probably contains of the oscillation
of a woman's longing for both oneness and separateness, is supported by Medea's relationship to Aigeus, the
king of Athens. Aigeus comes to Medea knowing that
she will be able to help him with his sexual impotence.
Medea receives Aigeus in his genital pursuits - what I
understand as Medea's swing towards her own mother
Hecate's phallic sense of power and power structure.
As a woman, Medea is receptive of a man, and she
gives birth to Aigeus' son. But separateness seesaws
back again, and Medea becomes jealous and envious of
everything in Aigeus' world that she has no share in. She
wants Aigeus completely for herself and intends to kill
his son from a previous marriage with the consequence
that the shocked Aigeus banishes Medea from Athens.
Medea's identification with her mother Hecate is
intense. Like her mother, she too is a witch and a sorceress; like her mother, she too kills and demands human
sacrifices in order to reach her goal. Mother magic still
lives on in Medea. She is ensnared by a pre-oedipal,
absolutely good-bad mother and there is no gate to freedom that her father could open for her. Here we also
get to hear how a pre-oedipal child, in fact, does not yet
possess a way out of the closed dyad that dominates his
or her life.
THE MYTH AS A SUPERORDINATE CONCEPT
What is in the myth that makes me think the way I do?
I tend to think that from the dawn of our culture, verbally and literally, we carry our unconscious in myths.

102

In this way, the human's integrated soul is tranferred

from generation to generation. Mothers and daughters
know the secret of maturing. In the myth of Medea, I
hear how people thousands of years ago symbolically
have known the achievements and dangers of a little
girl. And to me, it describes the dyadic story of the state
between mother and girl. The boy's story would be different. Maybe like the myth of Odysseus?
When we talk about the Oedipus complex, we mean
the stage in the libidinal development where desire has
a phallic nature. The object relationship trauma we call
a triad. It develops into an Oedipus drama, when the
child realises his or her lack of share and significance
and his or her exteriority to the secret union between
the parents. Thus, the oedipal stage is the general name
for a very specific stage of development, which at the
level of an individual may take a wide variety of configurations. According to Hagglund (1990), the oedipal
triangle itself never gets solved, but is rejected until it
again and repeatedly steps forth later in life in various
junctions of change and borderlines. Each one of us
has a very specific oedipal situation inside, created in
childhood and activated again during adolescence, midlife crisis and old age. Whichever point in the oedipal
situation is a fatal spot of possible fixation or distortion
in the individual, is beyond the reach of myths. Thus, a
myth, such as Oedipus, acts as a superordinate concept
under which countless individual stories are hidden.
Psychoanalysis has accumulated clinical knowledge
which is a great deal more exact than can be told by
a myth. Tlihka (1993) discusses the oedipal situation
from an individual and more specific angle. He divides
the oedipal situation into three parts. At first, a girl
recognises the share of her father's love object in her
mother's world. She challenges her father to compete
over mother's love by sending her mother the message:
"Love only me!" Tlihka calls this the first, feminine,
lesbian, oedipal stage. The next, called the masculine,
lesbian, oedipal triad, is characterised by a change in
the girl's attitude in relation to her mother. Now the
message is: "Love only me! I am like the father, but
better than he in every respect!" The third stage Tlihka
describes as a classic heterosexual Oedipus situation,
and the object of the message is now the father: "Love
only me! I would be in every respect a better wife for
you than the mother!" (pp. 413-417).
When we consider the myth of Medea, it also, as the
myth of Oedipus, acts as a superordinate concept and
tells of a girl's pre-oedipal stage which is dominated
by the mother-daughter dyad. The destructive acts of
Medea can be understood as an illustration of how the
direction and goal of the libido at the same time move
towards and away from the object, towards union and

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towards separation. It brings up points where a girl

might be fixed at this stage of her development: desires
and needs directed at the mother may be transferred as
such to a man. A pre-oedipal girl has a passionate control over every interest or urge from her mother that is
not directed to her, seen in the bight of envy towards,
e.g., penis or sisters or brothers. If the dyadic attachment becomes obscured, it exposes the girl to fury with
the ultimate goal of restoration of the dyad at all costs.
Then all third elements that threaten the dyad will be
eliminated. These general lines of direction told by the
myth provide a frame for the incredible variety of a
girl's pre-oedipal development, and give a picture of
how many stumbling blocks it may contain. It may also
reveal the fact that, though a girl may have survived her
pre-oedipal journey towards a triad sufficiently well to
enter the triad, the interchange of a girl's and a woman's
oneness and separateness in relation to the mother or the
representatives of the mother, the internalised mother in
particular, i.e., the objects of transfer, continues throughout her life.
A CLINICAL EXAMPLE
This clinical example is from an analysis which at the
time of the dialogue had lasted six and a half years. The
analysand is called Maarit. She has three children and
her own mother has eight. Maarit' s father had died when
Maarit was 11. The mother strongly supported Maarit' s
studies, motherhood and divorce. But when Maarit's
wish to get a house of her own became actualised, her
mother was vehemently against the project. Her mother
refused to talk on the telephone and she didn't answer
Maarit's letters.
M: I've been terribly anxious and paralysed, I wake
up after midnight and keep chewing it over and over in
my mind, why I shouldn't buy the house, and on the
other hand, of course, I must buy it now that I have the
chance, and I know that I have to do it anyway sooner or
later. The children need to have rooms of their own. The
one-bedroom flat we now live in is intolerable. The location of the house, its price and its layout are more than
I dared ever dream. And my own dreams would come
true, too: I'd have a patio, and a garden with climbing
plants, a rowan tree and a birch; but when I let myself
dream freely, a black thunder cloud or a black paw or
mouth starts approaching me, as if something horrible
is going to happen if I buy the house.
A: Something horrible will happen if you dare think
that you might make perhaps the first real dream of your
own come true?
M: Yes .... I can feel the anxiety mounting again right
now.

A moment of silence.
A: Wauld you like to describe your anxiety in more
detail?
M: (In a torrent of words). Suddenly I start to think
that mother will come and rip my stomach open and
rip off my ovaries and womb and throw them away!
Or that I will go and open mother's stomach and take
out dead embryos, no they are babies, out, all of them,
and they are terribly many. Now you probably think
that I've gone totally bonkers and I'm completely out
of my mind and crazy but I'm not.
A: Do you mean that now when you are about to
acquire something that you really want and have always
dreamt of, your mother will hurt you deeply or you will
hurt your mother? In the worst case, one of you will be
destroyed, so you shouldn't buy the house.
M: Yes, and it makes me anxious and afraid.
Maarit lived strongly in her mother's world, following her inner command - at first completely unconsciously- to fulfil her mother's wishes and avoid her
antipathies. A house of her own was the first manifestation of her own desire, and her mother did not accept
it or "gave it her blessing; she always wanted a house
of her own and never got it. Simply wanting the house
aroused in Maarit a sudden, intensive anxiety reaction,
and we worked hard to uncover the reasons for this in
analysis for several weeks. At its core, emerged her
terror that if she does something her mother does not
approve of, something terrible will happen either to her
or to her mother. To my great surprise, we found behind
this anxiety powerful destructive events directed at the
body, either in Maarit herself or in her mother. I interpreted the situation so that by carrying out something of
her own, independently of her mother, Maarit was overwhelmed by anxiety and fear over the destructiveness
of her own state and its decision-making power; or that
something terrible would happen to her mother; that her
mother's body would be mutilated. In spite of her apparent independence, Maarit had retained a strictly dyadic
and symbiotic relationship with her mother, which came
out as soon as her aspirations were against her mother's
will, separate from her mother and as such, autonomous.
It was at about this time that she had a dream which
had been repeated several times during her life. There
was an island just off the continent, a rich, flourishing
place. Two bridges led to the island: one was fragile
and treacherous, the other solid and made of stone. Different from the way the dream usually went, this time
Maarit started to slowly walk across the stone bridge.
After this dream, she came to the analysis and told me
that she had signed the deeds and bought the house.
Maarit herself interpreted the dream as an indication of
her readinesss to tell her mother about something that

103

she assumed would make her angry. Now she realised

that she was no longer afraid of a catastrophe, and that
she would be all right even if her mother rejected her.
Her mother has not been in touch with her since the
purchase of the house. She knows, however, that her
mother is the same as always, because her sisters bring
her news of her.
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Signe and Ane Gylleberg

Foundation and the Student Health Service for financial support.

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Riitta Sirola
Bulevard 15 D 43
00120 Helsinki
Finland
e-mail: riitta.sirola@saunalahti.fi

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