Lansky, M.R. (2005). The Impossibility of Forgiveness: Shame Fantasies as Instigators of Vengefulness in Euripides' Medea. J.

Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 53:437-464.

The Impossibility of Forgiveness: Shame Fantasies as Instigators of

Vengefulness in Euripides' Medea
Melvin R. Lansky
Unforgivability in Euripides' Medea is explored in the context of intrapsychic forces favoring disruption
and narcissistic withdrawal and precluding the influence of forces favoring repair of bonds, not
necessarily to the betrayer, but to the social and moral order. The forces underlying disruption and
withdrawal operate to such an extent that forgiveness and cooperation with the social order become
impossible. Euripides' literary insights are explored with the purpose of deepening and extending the
psychoanalytic understanding of shame, shame fantasies, projective identification, and vengefulness
as they bear on the problem of forgiveness. Three types of shame fantasy are pertinent to
the transformation of Medea's mental state from one of anguished and disjointed shame to diabolical
vengefulness: anticipatory paranoid shame, the projective identification of shame, and withdrawal as
a defense against shame.
Let's make us medicines of our great revenge To cure this deadly grief.
MACBETH, IV.iii.214-215
The problem of unforgivability in Euripides' Medea can profitably be explored in the context of the
struggle between, on the one hand, intrapsychic forces favoring disruption and narcissistic withdrawal
and, on the other, forces favoring the repair of bonds to the social and moral order such that
forgiveness and some cooperation become possible. The problem of disruption and repair has been a
continuing theme

Submitted for publication May 25, 2004.

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in my studies on suicide, envy, forgiveness, and related phenomena. Here I will consider the struggle
between disruption (as figured in Medea's rejection by Jason and her banishment from Corinth) and
repair (in this case, its psychological impossibility) as the struggle between unconscious forces
pushing toward cooperation and binding to the social order and those pushing toward disconnection,
unbinding, withdrawal, or destruction.1
In a series of writings (Lansky 1996, 1997, 2001, 2003a) I have explored the struggles between
forces of binding and of unbinding of relationships to the social order as favoring disconnection and
narcissistic withdrawal if the shame felt consciously or anticipated in cooperating with betrayers is
experienced as unbearable (Lansky 1997; Morrison and Lansky 1999) and favoring reattachment
and repair if shame can become bearable (Lansky 2001, 2003a).
The plot of Euripides' play reveals Medea's unfolding humiliation and helplessness in the face of
her circumstances. Her disorganization and anguish propel her toward vengefulness that results in her
murdering the king and princess of Corinth, and finally her own two sons. Ten years before the play
begins, Medea had helped the Greek hero Jason escape from Colchis, even though that had meant
killing her own brother. Jason and Medea escaped together and eventually settled in Corinth, married,
and had two sons. The play opens shortly after Medea has learned that Jason intends to leave her
and marry the daughter of Creon, the Corinthian king, Medea's devastation and rage are such that
Creon, frightened for his and his daughter's safety, orders Medea and her sons into immediate exile.
Medea successfully pleads for a one-day stay of the order. Though she and her children have been
promised asylum in Athens by the Athenian king, Aegeus, she sends the children to the princess
bearing a gift of poisoned garments. Both the princess and Creon die from the deadly poison. Medea
then murders her two sons and, as the play closes, taunts the devastated Jason, refusing him the right
to bury his children. She leaves in a dragon-drawn chariot sent by her grandfather, the sun god Helios.
She is headed to Athens, where asylum has been guaranteed her by Aegeus in exchange for potions
that will help him have children.

Of these two forces, Freud (1940) wrote, We have decided to assume the existence of only two
basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct. The aim of the first of these basic instincts is to establish ever
1

greater unities and to preserve them thusin short to bind together; the aim of the second is, on the contrary, to
undo connections and so to destroy things (p. 148).
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I draw upon the Medea to discuss the phenomenology of shame predicaments

and unconscious shame conflicts that escalate to the point of generating a prepossessing
vengefulness. That vengefulness defends against Medea's awareness of
her unbearable powerlessness and shame, and also avoids the emotional burden of mourning for
what is lost when she is rejected by Jason. My argument depends on inferences about shame that
often is not consciously felt. Shame therefore refers here not simply to the overt affect but also to
compromise formations and defenses against the awareness of future shame arising from the
circumstances of her betrayal by Jason, her diminishment in social status and security,
her helplessness, and the loss of her husband to a rival. It is Medea's judgment in fantasy that
her shame is unbearable that drives her down the vengeful path to filicide and murder of the king and
his daughter.
In Euripides' play, the unbearableness of Medea's shame is seen to arise not simply from her
humiliating circumstances, however overwhelming. Only under the sway of
her unconscious shame fantasies is her anticipated shame felt to be unbearable. It
is unbearable because it cannot achieve resolution, as can less overpowering experiences of betrayal,
by mourning and carrying on with life in the context of secure bonds with intimates.
By unbearable shame I refer not simply to the experience of painful affect, but to a
more complex dynamic involving signal anxiety and processing through unconscious shame fantasies.
In later sections I will argue that the complex of associations and fantasies instigated by
the affect of shame, or by the prospect of experiencing that affect (signal anxiety anticipating shame,
or signal shame), is unbearable in large part because it is felt be the result of deliberate attempts by
others to humiliate her (paranoid shame) and to signal something like social annihilation and
irreversible disgrace. I contend that this paranoid shame fantasy instigates the
projective identification whereby Medea's vengeful murders function to inject her helplessness,
powerlessness, and despair into Jason. This deployment of projective identification occurs within the
workings of a second shame fantasy, that of being within a fused dyad with her husband: Medea is
convinced that by vengefully relocating her unbearable anguish to Jason, she has actually solved the
problem posed by her shame. This is an important dimension of shame dynamics in addition to the
usual Kleinian formulation of the mechanism of projective identification, which more often than is
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usually realized is instigated unconsciously by actual or anticipated shame and serves to rid the
self in fantasy of that shame by relocating it to its presumed source. A third shame fantasy, one
involving omnipotence, is symbolized at the conclusion of the play.
These shame dynamics shed light on the problem of forgiveness, the letting go of resentment,
grudge, and hatred to the extent that the betrayed person can mourn what has been lost and carry on
with life. The topic of forgiveness, ignored completely in the psychoanalytic literature until recently, has
in the last few years received noticeable attention (Lansky 2001, 2003a; Akhtar 2002; Smith 2002;
Cavell 2002; Siassi 2004). The Medea is not concerned directly with forgiveness, but Euripides'
explication of Jason's absolute unforgivability in Medea's mind allows me to use the text to further my
exploration of forgiveness in the context of disruption and repair.
In studies of Shakespeare's The Tempest and Sophocles' Philoctetes (Lansky 2001, 2003a), in
both of which forgiveness is achievable, I have stressed that unbearable shame must be rendered
bearable before forgiveness can take place. I have considered the dynamics of forgiveness as
involving first the letting go of mental states of unforgiveness (resentment, hatred, spite,
vengefulness, narcissistic rage, blame, withdrawal, and bearing grudges) and then the gaining of a
capacity to tolerate the psychic burdens that attend that letting
go: shame, mourning, loss of omnipotence and of a sense of self-sufficiency, and the task of revising
one's assumptions about the nature of relationships.
In both The Tempest and Philoctetes, high-ranking people are betrayed by intimates from their
own social class: in The Tempest, Prospero is betrayed by his brother; in Philoctetes, the eponymous
hero is marooned by leaders of the Greek army. In each of these dramas, the play begins years after
the protagonist has been stranded on a lonely island. This isolation signifies the narcissistic withdrawal
that follows rejection and betrayal. As the plot of each play develops, the protagonist is to overcome a
grudge sufficiently to cooperate with the social order as he rejoins it. In neither case, however, are
affectionate bonds with the betrayer restored. Nor do we see in either case the kind of sublime
forgiveness exemplified by Jesus on the cross or Joseph with his brothers. In these plays, the

protagonist attains the capacity for cooperation, but not the restoration of a loving bond. Nonetheless,
a transformation is effected from a state of withdrawal to rapprochement with the social order.
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By contrast, in the Medea the inability to forgive is pushed to its extreme. Medea's state of
unforgiveness takes the form of vengefulness and spite. The impediment to letting gothe working
through of her deep hurt and shame, we would say if the context were clinicalof those states of mind
in favor of some sort of cooperationis her anticipation of unbearable shame. I do not presume that
Medea's goal should be to forgive, in the usual sense of the word, or to reestablish a loving bond with
Jason after his betrayal; I say only that her tragedy consists of her inability to let go of her state of
humiliated vengefulness, the cost of which is her children's lives and her connection to society. Here
Euripides affords us insights into the dynamics underlying an utter incapacity to put aside grudges and
resentfulness and to cooperate in the interests of one's childrena process akin to forgiveness in its
weakest sense.
By inability to forgive, then, I am referring to the intrapsychic underpinnings of Medea's inability to
establish not a loving bond with the betraying Jason, but simply a cooperative enough bond with him
to ensure the well-being of her children and preserve a connection to the Corinthian community. But
Medea's shame and vengefulness preclude this option that would save herself and her children. Her
relationships with every member of the social orderJason, the princess, the King, the entire
Corinthian communityare so tinged with anticipatory fantasies of unbearable shame that she is
relentlessly propelled toward her course of diabolical vengefulness, spite, and murder. The relevance
of my consideration of the play to the overall problem of unforgivability is distinctly limited. It concerns
only the context of felt unforgivability of a husband who has rejected and abandoned his wifea
context resonating with the situation surrounding many marital breakups, especially when children are
involved.
My intent here is twofold: first, to provide an exegesis of the play through an understanding of the
unconscious mechanisms involved in the transformation from Medea's initial state of mind to her
eventual state of relentless vengefulness; second, to use Euripides' insights to provide a picture of
the phenomenology of vengefulness that takes into account shame conflict, paranoid shame fantasies,
the escalation of conflict, and the instigation of projective identification. Following Edmund Wilson
(1929) in his discussion of Philoctetes, I am considering the poet to be naturalist. I am using a literary,
not a clinical, example. Though my exposition illustrates a thesis concerning the centrality
of shame dynamics and fantasies in the dynamics of vengefulness, the use
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of the play to explore that thesis is not intended to demonstrate its clinical validity. One is always at
risk in discussing the unconscious dynamics of a fictional character. I do not regard Euripides' insights
as supplying the equivalent of clinical evidence, but rather as offering a profound explication of
the conscious and unconscious phenomenology of vengefulness. This is as useful to the
psychoanalytic clinician as are the observations of one type of naturalist to another. Another limitation
of this study is that I am using a translation of the text, not the original, and am abstracting from the
context of the play, perhaps with unwarranted assumptions about ancient Greek conceptions of
revenge, shame, and forgiveness.

Critical Responses to the Play

Since ancient times, a striking discrepancy has existed between the theatrical impact of
the Medea and the serious questions and doubts that critics have had about it. The play is one of the
most overpowering theatrical experiences in all of dramatic literature. What we know of the
mythological sources of the story seems to suggest that Medea's murder of her sons is an element
added by Euripides (Simon 1988; Nugent 1993; cf. Michelini 1989).
Criticism of the dramaturgy of the play begins with Aristotle (c. 330 B.C.E.), who severely
criticizes both the coincidental arrival of Aegeus (chap. 25 p. 73) and the conclusion, in which Medea
departs, magically taken up from the scene of action in a chariot drawn by two dragons (chap. 15, p.
52). Kitto (1939) points out that Aristotle is presupposing a dramaturgy of the Sophoclean type, one
very different from that of Euripides. Aristotle's criticisms will be dealt with later; suffice it to say here
that I disagree that Euripides' dramaturgy is flawed. Modern critics, for their part, have questioned the
dramatic and literary credibility of Medea's filicide, some regarding it as simple melodrama, with the
implication that it is both dramatically and psychologically not credible (see, e.g., Easterling
1977; Galis 1992).
It is important to clarify what sort of being Euripides' Medea is. Her grandfather, as I have
mentioned, was the sun god Helios. In many versions of the Medea legend, she is a sorceress, and

even in Euripides' version she retains powers of sorcery. Yet Knox (1977) argues convincingly that in
that version, despite those powers and despite her grandfather's intervention deus ex machina at the
denouement, Medea
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is fundamentally a human being. She is not, however, Greek. She is a foreign woman, one who
betrayed her father and killed her brother to assist Jason. Her psychological makeup, therefore, is that
of an exile. Nugent (1993) has pointed out that the designation of Medea as an exiled woman is
actually a redundancy, since married women in the Greece of Euripides were basically exiles
from society, in that they were isolated from contact outside their husband's home and denied access
to political activity.
In other plays, Euripides uses a deity to personify a force of human nature, a force which if denied
results in the downfall of the tragic protagonist at the hands of the offended god. Examples include
the denial of Aphrodite (the force of erotic love) by Hippolytus in the play of the same name, and
the denial of Dionysus (the force of Dionysian frenzy perhaps, we would now say, of the
unconscious) by Pentheus in The Bacchae. Knox (1977) makes the fascinating point that Medea, in
her vengeful state, embodies a virtually godlike force, that of vengefulness, and becomes,
dramaturgically, akin to an offended deity, denial of whose force is tragically disastrous. Medea qua
force of humiliated vengefulness is a force of human nature akin to that of a deity. Although I agree
with the point, it appears to apply to how other characters experience Medea's vengeful fury, not to the
intrapsychic psychodynamics of that vengefulness, which is my subject here.
A great deal has been made of the transformation of Medea's agonized mental state at the
beginning of the play to her diabolically vengeful state after her encounter with Aegeus, but none of the
criticism by classicists that I have read takes her depth psychology into consideration. Many critics
(e.g., Rehm 1989; Gabriel 1992; Foley 1989) following Knox have seen Medea as transformed
basically into a Homeric hero, one not unlike Sophocles' Ajax, who relentlessly pursues vengeance in
obedience to a code of valor that obliges her to help friends and harm enemies. Gabriel has stressed
that Jason, in forsaking Medea for the princess, has broken not simply a personal vow, but the formal
bond of honor before the gods to remain loyal to a spouse. Medea, as her mental state changes,
evolves from an anguished and helpless female supplicant before Creon and Jason into a
masculinized avenger likened to such epic heroes as Ajax. Feminist critics (Foley 1988, 1989; Gabriel
1992) have pointed to this phenomenon as the de-feminization of Medea, who, lacking the societally
mandated protection of a male kinsman, became her own masculine, or at least defeminized,
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champion. The pronounced tendency of criticism by classicists is to emphasize either the context of
the times or issues involving gender, but not the enduring psychological insights conveyed by the
playwright. Much of this criticism seems to share the assumption that vengefulness and revenge are
masculine attributes alone and to overlook the seemingly obvious consideration that vengefulness in
both men and women can be understood as a psychological phenomenon with its own dynamics. In all
of these writings on Medea's change of mental state from anguish and helplessness to diabolical
vengefulness, one notes the striking absence of any consideration of the extent to which the play
captures, in its horrifying extreme, enduring aspects of human nature, that is to say,
the psychodynamics of shame, spite, and vengefulness.
Nor to my knowledge have psychoanalytic writings on the Medea treated the play in terms
of shame, vengefulness, and spite. Balter (1969), in studying the myths of Oedipus, Perseus, and
Jason, draws from the work of Arlow to highlight the mother as the source of power. He discusses the
Medea myth in general, not Euripides' Medea in particular, and discusses her as essentially
a mother figure for Jason, one who is offended when he leaves her to marry the Corinthian
princess. Shengold (1999) has taken up the malignant and deadly giving of gifts in the larger context
of soul murder. Simon (1988), perhaps the most significant psychoanalytic writer on Greek tragedy
in English, notes relatively greater complexity of relationships between parents and children in
Euripides as compared to those in Aeschylus and Sophocles. Simon notes Euripides' use of
essentially epic narration to assail epic poetry and epic values. He also notes the transformation by
which Medea, the one who has been traumatized, identifies with the aggressor and turns the tables by
traumatizing her children and her husband. Wurmser (1981, p. 263), the preeminent psychoanalytic
writer on the dynamics of shame, who also writes extensively on literary topics, sees
Medea's shame as greatly amplified by Jason's shame-lessnesshis scurrilous treatment of herand
his utter disregard for her self-respect.

The Pain of Attachment: Circumstantial Sources of Medea's Shame

Medea's shame escalates rapidly, episode by episode, as she endures rejection, loss of status,
and pity. As the play begins, we learn of
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Medea's plight from the nurse, who describes her mistress's agony, desolation, and wish for death,
and who fears she will take desperate action. Medea is heard weeping from the house, disconsolate
and abject, hidden.
When finally she emerges from the house, she encounters the chorus of Corinthian women, to
whom she herself declares her desolation, sense of betrayal, and wish for death. Because she regards
her marriage as her entire existence, she is devastated, her identity dissolved. Jason's betrayal has
left her absolutely homeless.
When Medea is in the house, she feels harmed; when she emerges and encounters other people,
she feels wronged and humiliated (Herbert Morris, personal communication). To some extent her plight
is understandable because it is women's plight in general, and she can talk to the chorus of women in
the belief that she is the way they are and can be understood by them:
A man, when he's tired of the company in his home,
Goes out of the house and puts an end to his boredom
And turns to a friend or companion of his own age.
But we are forced to keep our eye on one alone.
What they say of us is that we have a peaceful time
Living at home while they do the fighting in war.
How wrong they are! I would much rather stand
Three times in front of battle than bear one child.

[Euripides 431 B.C.E., ll. 244-251]

But her more specific circumstances lend themselves particularly to shame and helplessness. She
is a foreigner unwelcome in her native land:
Yet, what applies to me does not apply to you.
You have a country. Your family home is here.
You enjoy life and the company of your friends.
But I am deserted, a refugee, thought nothing of
By my husbandsomething he won in a foreign land.
I have no mother or brother, nor any relation
With whom I can take refuge in this sea of woe.

[ll. 252-258]
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Creon then arrives. He fears her anger and vengefulness and resolves to banish her, thereby
severing her ties to the social order. When she pleads not to be exiled, he relents to the extent of
giving her one last day in Corinth. Medea's already great humiliation is increased when she perceives
that Creon, rather than feeling any compassion for her, dehumanizes her in fearing her anger and
vengefulness:
I am afraid of youwhy should I dissemble it?
Afraid you may injure my daughter mortally.
Many things accumulate to support my feeling
You are a clever woman, versed in evil arts,
And are angry at having lost your husband's love.
I hear that you are threatening, so they tell me,
To do something against my daughter and Jason
And me too. I shall take my precautions first.

[ll. 282-289]
Creon, like Jason, fears an upset woman. He seems to have no concern for the fact that,
banished, Medea will have no meaningful social bonds and no power. Unlike Prospero and
Philoctetes, who retain a degree of power (Prospero his staff and book, Philoctetes, Heracles bow and
arrows), Medea is left powerless, helpless, and bereft of a sense of self. Creon's banishment of her
has deepened her sense of humiliation and propelled her toward a vengefulness that serves to restore
a sense of herself:
By exiling me, he has given me this one day
To stay here, and in this I will make dead bodies
Of three of my enemiesfather, the girl, and my husband.

[ll. 373-375]
In part, Medea is so helpless because she is the betrayer betrayed. She has destroyed ties to her
native Colchis because she has betrayed her own family and country for Jason's sake. The text gives

us no sense of whether Medea suffers guilt for her betrayals or whether this guilt, if present, enters the
dynamics of her anguish.
She next encounters Jason, who berates her for her rage and her threats. He is a thoroughly
unsympathetic character, admitting no fault or basis for hurt or anger in his abandonment of her. The
forthcoming marriage, he proclaims, is to the advantage of her and the children, since
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it promotes an alliance with Creon. Medea, further humiliated by Jason's failure to acknowledge his
betrayal, and by his contempt for her upset state of mind, protests:
Where am I to go? To my father's?
Him I betrayed and his land when I came with you?
To Pelias' wretched daughters? What a fine welcome
They would prepare for me who murdered their father!
For this is my positionhated by my friends
At home, I have, in kindness to you, made enemies
Of others whom there was no need to have injured.
And how happy among Greek women you have made me
On your side for all this! A distinguished husband
I havefor breaking promises. When in misery
I am cast out of the land and go into exile,
Quite without friends and all alone with my children,
That will be a fine shame for the new-wedded groom,
For his children to wander as beggars and she who saved him.

[ll. 501-515]
After these encounters with Creon and Jason, she is left with a sense both of being feared and
of being the object of pity and contempt, which further amplifies her shame.

The Unbearable Shame of Attachment to One's Betrayer

The next encounter, a coincidental occurrence criticized by Aristotle for precisely that reason,
introduces the hope that Medea will be offered a way out of her predicament. Aegeus, King of Athens,
visits her. He is married, but childless. Medea offers to help his marriage become fertile, using
her knowledge of potions, and asks for his protection; Aegeus offers her asylum in Athens, but only if
she can get there on her own:
if you reach my land
I, being in my rights, will try to befriend you,
But this much I must warn you of beforehand.
I shall not agree to take you out of this country;
But if you by yourself can reach my house, then you
Shall stay there in safety. To none will I give you up
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But from this land you must make your escape yourself,
For I do not wish to incur blame from my friends.

[ll. 723-730]
Aegeus stresses that he will give her protection, but not in such a way as to make him appear
complicit in her leaving Corinth. These lines contain a significant ambiguity that is not resolved in the
text. They are usually understood to be a guarantee of safety for Medea only (see, e.g., Nugent
1993). That is, Medea would be offered asylum without her children and would have to leave them with
Jason, or at least in Corinth. However, the children too have been banished. Creon says to Medea at
the outset of his interaction with her:
You, with that angry look, so set against your husband,
Medea, I order you to leave my territories
An exile, and take along with you your two children.

[ll. 271-274]
The text does not seem to me to point to any imperative by Aegeus that Medea leave her children,
but only to his need to avoid complicity in her relocation itself (see Simon 1988, p. 92). Medea's later
deliberations make clear that she is given the opportunity to take her children with her:
Do not, O my heart, you must not do these things!
Poor heart, let them go, have pity upon the children.
If they live with you in Athens they will cheer you.

[ll. 1056-1058]

If we presume that the offer of asylum to Medea includes asylum for her children, a much darker
view of Medea's nature and of her enduring attachment to Jason emerges, one much more congruent
with the overall psychological thrust of the play. With the presumption of asylum, we as audience
breathe a sigh of relief: there is a way out for her and the children. All of the principal characters can
be bound to their progeny and the next generation can continue. Medea can use her craft to help
Aegeus have offspring, Medea will have her sons, and Jason, children by his new bride. But, dashing
our hopes, Medea will instead choose a diabolically vengeful course. The full extent of this course,
which will cut her off from the social and moral order, emerges.
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First she will kill Creon and his daughter with poisoned gifts. Then, instead of killing Jason:
I weep to think of what a deed I have to do
Next after that; for I shall kill my own children.
And when I have ruined the whole of Jason's house,
I shall leave the land and flee from the murder of my
Dear children.

[ll. 791-795]
If we are to assume, then, that Medea is offered asylum with her children, we are faced with
another problem that requires explanation. We knew very early in the play that she had thoughts of
such vengeful murder, since she told the chorus part of her plan to kill Jason, Creon, and Creon's
daughter. But the idea of killing her children emerges only now as an explicit part of her plan, where
earlier she had expressed it only in a disorganized, emotional manner. We must wonder: was it in fact
planned from the start? If so, what is the dramaturgic and psychological point of the encounters with
Jason, Creon, and Aegeus? These episodes may simply reflect subterfuges used by Medea to disarm
her enemies and further her implementation of a set plan. Although her purpose is stated before the
episodes in question, I see them as depicting more than simple stratagems. I see them as reflecting
Medea's not yet expired hopes of repairing her situation of unbearable shame by eliciting compassion
from Jason and pardon from her sentence of banishment. These hopes of ameliorating her shame all
fail, adding substance to a fantasy that then summates into a murderous plan of action. The Aegeus
episode and its promise of escape for mother and children cause a previously concealed source
of shame to emerge: Medea is faced with the fact that she cannot, in her state of mind at the moment,
emotionally separate from Jason. I will turn to that source of shame in the next section.
I am arguing that, though Medea's vengeful thoughts and intentions precede the encounters in the
first part of the play, her mounting shame, disconnection from the social order, and
attendant shame fantasies, together with her already devalued status, serve to coalesce these
revenge fantasies into a distinct plan of action. Her mental state changes. Now under the sway of the
forces disrupting her bonds to the social and moral order, her state of mind is transformed: she is
diabolically vengeful and absolutely sure of herself. Although states of uncertainty, shame,
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and agony break through on occasion, her vengeful state steadfastly defends against the experience
of those disorganized and agonized states of mind.
This line of thinkingthat her more or less indistinct plans for revenge are transformed into a
specific plan of actionrequires that we consider the instigation of such a transformation and
the processes by which it is accomplished.

Unconscious Shame Conflicts: Instigators of Medea's

Transformation to the Diabolical
Vengefulness is so intuitive to all of us as spectators or readers of the Medea that, however
horrified, we are likely to be so empathically gripped by Medea's vengeful state of mind as to lose sight
of the underlying shame dynamics that shape the fundamental insanitythe irreducible horror of the
playthat fuels her vengeful project. I want in particular to draw attention to the fulcrum of the turn to
vengefulness from a disorganized and humiliated state; here is the essence of a shame-rage cycle,
the instigation of rage by conscious or unconscious shame. Such shame-rage cycles (Lewis 1971;
Scheff 1987, 1990; Lansky 1992) are found in some of the greatest masterpieces of world literature:
the Iliad, Moby Dick, Richard III, Paradise Lost, and Balzac's Cousin Bette are but a few.
After the encounter with Aegeus offers hope that Medea will choose to separate from Jason and
Corinth, will take her sons and leave in safety, her truly dark side emerges. Why just now? In response
to what? It is important to pose the question: Is the vengeful destructiveness that ensues a mere
unfolding of Medea's basic nature that was there all the time, or has it been crystallized somehow by

something specific in the Aegeus episode? Even though Medea has clearly entertained these thoughts
previously, I opt for the latter. She changes after the episode from a woman devastated and
desperately clinging to what is left of her attachments to the social and familial order, to one
determined to destroy the princess, the king, and her own children.
I speculate that at this moment, just when everything seems to point to Medea's relocation to
Athens, she is faced with a final shame-pro-ducing realization that plunges her into the diabolical
pursuit of destruction and revenge: she is too attached to Jason to separate. She is
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not able to take the children and leave for Athens. She still loves him, and is ashamed of it. (Fiona
Shaw's portrayal of this aspect of Medea in a recent production dramatized this point magnificently.)
Absent this line of thinking, the dramatic progression of the play makes no psychological sense.
This understandingthat she now finds herself so fused with Jason, so attached to him, that no
matter the extent of his arrogance and indignities toward her, she cannot take the opportunity to leave
leads us to the realization that her humiliation has become utterly unbearable. Medea's shocking
turn to vengefulness, despite the fact that she has just been given the opportunity to take her children
and leave Corinth, is the dramatic fulcrum of the play, and is instigated by Medea's awareness of her
deep intrapsychic fusion with Jason. Now she faces an impossibly humiliating predicament: she
cannot separate from Jason or the social order, nor can she cooperate with either without experiencing
truly unbearable shame.
For this reason I disagree with Aristotle's criticism (c. 330 B.C.E.) of the Aegeus episode:
Irrationality [is] rightly censured when there is no need for [it] and [it] is not properly used, as no
good use is made of the irrationality of Euripides' introduction of Aegeus in Medea (p. 73).
Ironically, the episode, by providing the possibility of escape for Medea and her children, brings
forward the hitherto concealed impossibility of her leaving.
At Corinth, we must presume, she would have had to endure the comparison of her new status
with her previous one: rejected older woman rather than cherished wife; unwelcome foreigner rather
than honored citizen by marriage. The acceptance of this diminution in status would
require mourning involving not simply painful emotion, but also deep shame. Her anticipation of these
emotional burdens (signal anxiety) works against her capacity to connect to the social order and
propels her further toward diabolical vengeance.
Euripides' sense of the unconscious pathways involved in the crystallization of her vengefulness,
put forward explicitly in the text, is astonishing. Vengefulness and spite are the cardinal features of
the Medea. To understand this fully, it is necessary to consider the instigation of rage by shame, and to
distinguish various types of shame experience in the play: signal shame, shame predicaments,
shaming transactions, and shame fantasies. Medea's revenge, which involves the completion of plans
revealed early in the play, is in fact instigated
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by the cumulative shock and escalating impact of the actual experiences as they combine with
her shame fantasies.
There is in the psychoanalytic literature a dearth of attention to the problem of instigation.
Instigators are discussed frequently, but, with the exception of Freud's very brief discussion
of dream instigation in chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, pp. 651-653), very little on the
intrapsychic process of instigation per se appears in our literature (Lansky 2003b, 2004).
Instigation marks the articulation of the intrapsychic with the external world. Failure to take the
dynamics of instigation into account leaves us with an impoverished and constricted understanding
of conflict and its escalation. Medea's narcissistic equilibrium is disrupted by her general
circumstances, by the shaming transactions we see in the play, and by her processing
of shame through paranoid fantasies. I have taken up the circumstances in Medea's predicament that
give rise to her shame and have pointed to various shaming transactions early in the play. At this point,
I will turn to the shame fantasies that summate into the unbearable shame that triggers Medea's
relentless vengefulness.

Three Types of Shame Fantasy

I use the term shame fantasy to stress that Medea's shame dynamics, like those of vengeful
persons generally, involve not simply an experience of affect (shame as emotion), but
a regression and an unconscious anticipation or interpretation of that shame experience in relation to
significant persons with whom they are intrapsychically bonded. In the Medea, three distinct types

of fantasy are operative: anticipatory paranoid shame; shame relocated in fantasy into the other by
projective identification; and shame defended against by omnipotent withdrawal from the social order.

Anticipatory Paranoid Shame

Medea's first shame fantasy is that her shame is evidence of the deliberate intention of others to
humiliate her. What begins as Medea's situational shame becomes her anticipatory paranoid shame.
She is convinced she will be mocked by the community, and the shame accompanying this conviction
makes the prospect of staying in Corinth with her children and cooperating with Jason unbearable.
After Creon's visit she declares:
- 452 -

I have many ways of death which I might suit to them,

And do not know, friends, which one to take in hand;
Whether to set fire underneath their bridal mansion,
Or sharpen a sword and thrust it into the heart,
Stealing into the palace where the bed is made.
There is just one obstacle to this. If I am caught
Breaking into the house and scheming against it,
I shall die, and give my enemies cause for laughter.

[ll. 376-384; emphasis added]

And again she urges herself onward to revenge:
Go forward to the dreadful act. The test has come
For resolution. You see how you are treated. Never
Shall you be mocked by Jason's Corinthian wedding.

[ll. 403-405; emphasis added]

The first of Medea's shame fantasies to unfold in the play, then, is that her shame, because it
results from the deliberate, ongoing intent of the Corinthian community to mock her, is unbearable (see
Kitto 1939, p. 195; Simon 1988, p. 82). Elsewhere I have pointed to similar paranoid shame fantasies
in Sophocles' Ajax (Lansky 1996) and Philoctetes (Lansky 2003a). Knox (1966), writing of the fifthcentury Athenian view of the heroic culture of yet earlier times, notes that fear of the mockery of others
was a hallmark of the heroic ethos and that it was therefore natural for Euripides to impute to his
protagonist this general cultural trait of the period in which his play is set. I would go further, though,
and make the intrapsychic point that Medea has, in response to the burden of her
overwhelming shame, regressed to a paranoid state in which she imagines not simply that her
enemies, Jason and Creon, will mock her, but that the entire Corinthian communitynot, in actuality,
her enemieswill do so as well. This fantasy is, of course, buttressed by the fact that she is foreign
and a woman.
The first fantasy, then, transforms her felt or anticipated shame, the emotion, into paranoid shame,
which is her interpretation of that emotion as resulting from the deliberate intention of her betrayers
and the entire community to shame her, to mock her, to humiliate her. It is this
paranoid transformation of her initial shame that makes it unbearable and that makes the amelioration
of her situation through cooperation with the Corinthian community a prospect that cannot be borne.
- 453 -

Medea agrees, then, to leave with Aegeus, only to discover that at some fundamental level she
cannot. She is fused with Jason and cannot separate. At this point she announces her intent to kill the
children after slaying the princess and Creon:
I weep to think of what a deed I have to do
Next after that; for I shall kill my own children.
My children, there is none who can give them safety.
And when I have ruined the whole of Jason's house,
I shall leave the land and flee from the murder of my
Dear children, and I shall have done a dreadful deed.
For it is not bearable to be mocked by enemies.
So it must happen.

[ll. 791-798; emphasis added]

For those children he had from me he will never
See alive again, nor will he on his new bride
Beget another child, for she is to be forced
To die a most terrible death by these, my poisons.
Let no one think me a weak one, or feeble-spirited
A stay-at-home, but rather just the opposite

One who can hurt my enemies and help my friends;

For the lives of such persons are most remembered

[ll. 804-810; emphasis added]

Because of the unbearability of her paranoid shame, she cannot do otherwise than kill her
children.
After sending Jason off with the children, who are bearing the poisoned garments for Creon's
daughter, she starts to relent, but her paranoid shame fantasies drive her back to her vengeful resolve:
I cannot bear to do it. I renounce my plans
I had before. I'll take my children away from
This land. Why should I hurt their father with the pain
They feel and suffer twice as much of pain myself?
No, no, I will not do it. I renounce my plans.
Ah, what is wrong with me? Do I want to let go
My enemies unhurt and be laughed at for it?
I must face this thing. Oh, but what a weak woman
Even to admit to my mind these soft arguments.

[ll. 1044-1052; emphasis added]

- 454 -

If they live with you in Athens they will cheer you.

No! By Hell's avenging furies it shall not be
This shall never be, that I should suffer my children
To be the prey of my enemies' insolence.

[ll. 1058-1061; emphasis added]

One might, considering this phenomenology from the Kleinian point of view, look upon Medea as
having regressed to the paranoid-schizoid position. Doing so would point to the usefulness of an
expansion of that concept to include the relationship between instigatory shame dynamics and what in
this case is the specifically humiliating nature of the fantasied persecution: mockery and humiliation,
not annihilation.

Projective Identification of Shame

Medea fantasizes that she can escape her overwhelming shame by vengefully putting her state of
mind into Jason, with whom she is psychologically fused. Shame can be transformed by
projective identification and felt to reside in the shamer.
It is of note that although murdering Jason would be an intelligible and, to many, a justifiable act of
revenge, certainly when compared to killing her children, Medea has, with the exception of one fleeting
remarkI will make dead bodies / Of father, the girl, and my husband (ll. 375-375)voiced no
interest in killing him. She is only able, in her vengeful shame fantasy, to fuse with Jason and relocate
her helplessness and desolation into him in a regressed, vengeful dyad. Simon (1988) notes that it is
as if the two are intertwined in some murderous wrestling match, not entwined as husband and wife in
procreative sex or in complementary efforts on behalf of children (p. 93). Such fantasies of fusion are
involved in fantasies of revenge generally. The realization that she cannot separate from Jason
triggers her destructiveness and the diabolical need to take revenge on him by destroying his bride-tobe, the king to whom he was to be allied by marriage, and his sons. These acts of vengeance work not
by destroying or injuring his person, but by relocating from herself to Jason, in fantasy,
the helplessness, humiliation, disconnection from the social and familial, and utter despair that have
been Medea's state of mind.
This fantasy of relocation and induction of her desperate, humiliated, and hopeless mental state
into Jason is an instance of projective identification. I use the term fantasy because, though she does
in actuality
- 455 -

induce this state of mind in Jason, she is at some level convinced that its induction effects a riddance
of that state in herself. It is not simply an induction of her state of mind into Jason, but a turning of the
tables on the relationship of shamer to shamed. Only when she regresses to the point of thinking that
the entire emotional content of her mind exists within the fused dyad with Jason can she feel with
conviction that if she can induce in him her humiliation and helplessness she will be rid of them.
Imagining herself without connection to the social or the familial, she can indeed, by killing princess,
king, and her own children, impart those feelings and states of mind to Jason, but it is only in her
regressed and paranoid shame fantasy that she can imagine that by doing so she rids herself of them.

Preparatory to arguing for a widened perspective on the concept of projective identification, one
that takes shame fantasies and shame dynamics into account, I want to underscore the curious fact
that shame and its dynamics are overlooked in virtually the entire Kleinian canon. They receive no
mention, for example, in the works of Klein (1975), Bion (1977), Segal (1964), Rosenfeld (1965),
or Joseph (1989). But the phenomenology of Medea's revenge in the Euripidean text points us to an
expansion of the concept, one verifiable in countless clinical situations. The Kleinian notion, which
allows no part for shame dynamics, is summarized by Hinshelwood (1989):
Projective identification was defined by Klein in 1946 as the prototype of the aggressive
object-relationship, representing an anal attack on an object by means of forcing parts
of the ego into it in order to take over its contents or to control it and occurring in
the paranoid-schizoid position from birth. It is a phantasy remote from consciousness
that entails a belief in certain aspects of the self being located elsewhere, with a
consequent depletion and weakened sense of self and identity, to the extent
of depersonalization; profound feelings of being lost or a sense of imprisonment may
result.
In 1957, Klein suggested that envy was deeply implicated in projective identification,
which then represents the forced entry into another person in order to destroy their best
attributes. Shortly afterwards Bion distinguished a normal form of
projective identification from a pathological one, and others have elaborated
this group of many distinct yet related processes. The further understanding of
projective identification has been the major area subsequently developed by Kleinians
[p. 179].
- 456 -

The Kleinian school seem consistently to ignore the role of shame dynamics in the instigation of
many of the phenomena their central concepts capture and to treat humiliation as though it was simply
a phenomenon consequent on aggressivity in a persecutory other, rather than also a source
of shame in the self. I have discussed this omission in my work on the instigation of envy (Lansky
1997; Morrison and Lansky 1999). Yet the clinical examples presented by Kleinian writers often show
how the dynamics of shame trigger projective identification. What is missing in Kleinian writings
on envy is the realization that shame consequent on self-conscious comparison instigates envy, which
in turn instigates maneuvers to deal, however pathologically and destructively, with that shame.
Envy, the attack on the other for possessing attributes more lovable and overflowing (and hence,
on comparison, more shame-producing) than are felt to exist in the self, is a case in point. Thus,
shameful comparison instigates envy. I propose extending that line of thinking to include
projective identification as a mechanism often, though not exclusively, deployed to reverse the
circumstances generating shame. I will argue in future publications that Kleinians have become
trapped in their theoretical view of aggression as a bedrock manifestation of the destructive instinct;
despite numerous clinical vignettes in Kleinian writings suggesting the role of shame dynamics, they
have overlooked those dynamics entirely. Their emphasis on aggressivity, and consequent guilt or
feelings of persecution, glosses over significant features of the phenomenology of
projective identification related to the dynamics of shame. Kleinian formulations regarding envy,
projective identification, and the paranoid-schizoid position are not so much incorrect as incomplete;
they neglect shame conflicts as instigators of the aggressive components of the clinical
phenomenology.
My expanded use of the term projective identification is more attuned than is the Kleinian usage to
the function of that mechanism as a method for handling the burden of anticipated unbearable shame.
Projective identification is instigated by the awareness, conscious or unconscious, of imminent or
actual shame. An important function of projective identification, though by no means the only one, is
that it is a mechanism that can in fantasy relocate one's shame and pain to the other, in the
conscious or unconscious conviction that this will rid one of the problem. This aspect of
projective identification consists, then, of a reversal, a turning of the tables, a reversal instigated by an
incipient
- 457 -

or actual experience of shame. Putting shame into the shamer is a common defensive maneuver and
a significant component of vengefulness.
The awareness of one's deployment of projective identification is itself a source of shame. By the
very fact that the other is felt to be so exalted, the other becomes a consummately significant person.
That turning the tables on Jason through an overpowering act of spite will leave him helpless and

humiliated is of paramount importance to Medea, more important than her freedom and the lives of her
sons. At some level of consciousness, this is a source of added shame. Envy is very difficult to
interpret (Etchegoyan, Benito, and Rabih 1987). This is so, I believe, because exposure, to oneself
or to others, of one's use of envy to adjust one's narcissistic equilibrium (with or without
projective identification) is itself a source of shame.
Medea's deployment of projective identification marks a departure from the unbearable pain of
continued humiliated attachment to the social order; forces favoring disattachment now hold sway,
prompting her triumphant, vengeful, and murderous attacks on the princess and Creon, and on her
two sons. In the final scene she evokes shame fantasies that reveal the injection of desolation into
Jason as more important than her children's lives. Medea admonishes Jason from her chariot above
the stage:
it was not to be that you should scorn my love,
And pleasantly live your life through, laughing at me;
Nor would the princess, nor he who offered the match,
Creon, drive me away without paying for it.

[ll. 1354-1358]
A bitter dialogue ensues that reveals the relationship between her feeling of being mocked and her
vengefulness.
Jason: You feel the pain myself. You share my sorrow.
Medea: Yes, and my grief is gain when you cannot mock it.
Jason: O children, what a wicked mother she was to you!
Medea: But it was your insolence and your virgin wedding.
Jason: And just for the sake of that you chose to kill them.
Medea: Is love so small a pain, do you think, for a woman?
Jason: For a wise one, certainly. But you are wholly evil.
Medea: The children are dead, I say this to make you suffer.

[ll. 1361-1370]
- 458 -

He is left desolate. The state of mind that Medea cannot tolerate grieving, helpless, humiliated,
hopelesshas been relocated to Jason:
Jason: Oh, I hate you, murderess of children.
Medea: Go to your palace. Bury your bride.
Jason: I go, with two children to mourn for.
Medea: Not yet do you feel it. Wait for the future.
Jason: Oh, children I loved!
Medea: I loved them, you did not.
Jason: You loved them, and killed them.
Medea: To make you feel pain.

[ll. 1393-1398; emphasis added]

Omnipotent Withdrawal from the Social Order

Euripides concludes the play with Medea departing Corinth in her chariot with the corpses of her
sons, while a helpless Jason pleads for the opportunity to bury them. All of the half-dozen or so
productions of the play I have seen have deleted this ending. One might consider the magical aspects
of the ending a deus ex machina resolution that allows the play to come to an end, but such
an interpretation does not ring true thematically with the body of the play. Aristotle (c. 330
B.C.E.) holds that the unraveling of the plot should arise from the circumstances of the plot itself, and
not be brought about ex machina, as is done in the Medea. The deus ex machina should be used
only for matters outside the play proper, either for things that happened before it and that cannot be
known by the human characters, or for things that are yet to come and that require to be foretold
prophetically (p. 52). I take strong issue with such a reading of the play's ending.
What superficially appears to be no more than a deus ex machina ending is, in terms of the
psychological unity of the play, far more than an ad hoc resolution of the play's action. I see the final
scene as a profound and precise representation of Medea's state of mental omnipotence, her belief
in fantasy that she can place herself above it all, simply leave Jason desolate, and thereby solve the
problem posed by her shame. What some see as unsatisfactory and sloppy dramaturgy, an exit from
above in a chariot pulled by dragons, is in my view an omnipotent severing of all ties to Jason and the
community. Through the vehicle of her defenses against unbearable shame, Medea herself stages a
circumstance in which she feels liberated from painful attachment and unbearable mental anguish.
- 459 -

This dramatic conclusion exemplifies the third shame fantasy I wish to address: having projected
her shame, helplessness, and desolation into Jason, Medea is able to depart easily from the social
order and from Jason in a state of self-sufficient omnipotent completeness, leaving her distressing
mental states with him.
She can, in this fantasy expressed metaphorically by her departure in the chariot, solve the
problem of her unbearable shame before Jason and the Corinthian community. This is an
omnipotent fantasy, going beyond the second shame fantasy, that of fusion with Jason, operative
while she is in his presence. In this third fantasy, she can leave chaos, humiliation, and despair with
him and depart in a triumphant state of mind. Her departure and the omnipotent state it signifies
leaves us in a state of horror. This is so, even though we have little compassion for Jason. We are
horrified at the vengeful regicide and the filicide, at the overpowering triumph of psychic forces and
mental states favoring detachment over those pressing for reconnection and repair of bonds, at
her omnipotence in her fantasy of separation from all bonds. One might speculate that this fantasy
that one can sidestep shame, mourning, desolation, and diminishment of one's sense of a secure
interpersonal world by exacting vengeance and then leavingis a part of all vengeful fantasies.
The Medea captures our attention because it embodies such a fantasy. In the penultimate speech in
the play, Jason, utterly desolate, laments:
O God, do you hear it, this persecution,
These my sufferings from the hateful
Woman, this monster, murderess of children?
Still what I can do that I will do;
I will lament and cry upon heaven,
Calling the gods to bear me witness
How you have killed my boys and prevent me from
Touching their bodies or giving them burial.
I wish I had never begot them to see them
Afterward slaughtered by you.

[ll. 1405-1414]
The chariot drawn by dragons symbolizes Medea's total narcissistic withdrawal into the mental
states of omnipotence and triumph that replace her previous humiliation and desolation. This
omnipotent
- 460 -

fantasy obviates any need for forgiveness or cooperation with the social order. The final scene is a
portrayal, metaphorically, of a triumphant and omnipotent mental state, akin to the one symbolized by
the deserted island on which The Tempest takes place, a way of expressing a state of omnipotent
retreat in response to the overpowering shame that accompanies betrayal by an intimate. The
Tempest, which portrays forgiveness as the triumph of the forces of attachment over those of
narcissistic withdrawal, moves toward cooperation and restoration of ties to the social order.
The Medea, culminating in the metaphor of omnipotent withdrawal, moves in the opposite direction
from involvement to complete disattachment, triumph over Jason, and filicidal and regicidal
vengeance. Medea, in fantasy, has obviated any need to go through a process of facing and bearing
her shame sufficiently to mourn and continue life with her children, in Corinth or in Athens. She has
done so because, in fantasy, the processes of mourning and continuing her life with her children would
be tantamount to forgiveness and complicity with the world of her betrayers. Such complicity would in
her mind give rise to unbearable shame.

Concluding Remarks
We are left horrified by this play, not only because the mother's vengeful and spiteful slaughter of
her children is fundamentally horrifying, but also because we realize, at some level, the frightening
message that the children's well-being and even their lives depend so intimately on their mother's
narcissistic equilibrium and her tolerance of shame. What is put to the test, with a horrifying resolution
in the play, is whether Medea's current and past circumstances, as well as the paranoid shame
fantasies so innate to her, make it impossible for her to overcome her tendencies toward vengeful
destruction and complete narcissistic withdrawal. Ultimately, she cannot overcome the
powerful, shame-evoking forces and assume a degree of cooperation with the social order for her
children's sake and her own. Cooperation of this kind is a sort of forgiveness in the weakest sense of
the word: forgiving as in letting go of a debt, for no sake other than of her own psychic equilibrium and
the preservation of her ties to her children and the community. That Medea cannot do this, despite her
magical exit, the omnipotently triumphant state of mind with which the play ends, makes the tragedy
truly her own.
- 461 -

Euripides' literary insights point the way to clinical hypotheses that may guide our thinking in
situations in which unbearable shame, with no apparent possibility of external or internal resolution or
repair drives a hardened vengefulness. In such pictures, we look not simply for the external
circumstances that generate shame, but for the workings of paranoid shame, of
projective identification as a method of relocating helplessness and shame into the shamer, and of
omnipotent withdrawal from the moral and social order.

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