a failure to atone object relations theory in orestes

Michiko Mitsunaga-Whitten 04/12/13

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A Failure to Atone

Object Relations Theory in Orestes’ Sacrifice of Sanity

Michiko Mitsunaga-Whitten Psychoanalysis Capstone Project

04/12/13


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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.


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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.

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