PSYCHIATRY AND THE MEDIA Classical Greek tragedy and the inner world

Femi Oyebode and Christina Pourgourides show how audience. These classes have explicit moral Greek tragedy tests established morality and helps an duties imposed upon them by tradition. The audience resolve its own emotional conflicts. power of the play derives from the interplay between these duties and the conflicts Drama is the representation of life and action. constructed in the dramatic plot. Orestes, for example, is motivated equally by It provides the opportunity for an audience to the obligation to avenge his father's death and participate emotionally in the transactions of imaginary characters whose stories unfold his need to kill his mother, in a symbolic within a defined space and time. In essence, sense, in order to assert his independence of the inner world of the audience walks on the her and to claim his potency. The act of stage, speaking in lines which articulate matricide at once purifies and condemns him. His sister, Electra, exercises influence unspoken and often unacknowledged over him. She says "I have no husband and no feelings. The drama brings to life, making other child", emphasising that in her real and palpable, the possibilities for error, consciousness the wish for her mother's the potential for sinfulness and catastrophe, death is partly determined by a need to and the capacity for choice and endurance. replace her mother in her brother's affection. Classical Greek tragedy with its combination of elevated language, of song and spectacle had as its goal the enactment of a plot in which particular characters suffer a reversal in their Sophocles and the Theban trilogy fortunes. This reversal is the tragic, compelling Sophocles, who was born in Colonus in force of the drama and through this, the fear 496 BC, wrote a hundred plays of which only and pity of the audience is aroused and seven are extant. The Theban trilogy, expurgated, thereby producing a cathartic especially Oedipus the King, is regarded as effect. his greatest achievement. The first play, Oedipus the King, opens on the scene where the citizens of Thebes, exacted Aeschylus and the Oresteian trilogy by pestilence and famine, sit in supplication of Aeschylus, born in 525 BC, is considered the Oedipus. As the plot unravels, Oedipus comes father of the tragic form. He wrote 92 plays of to know himself, to discover fully who he is and which only seven survive. The Oresteian to 'own' his crime of incest. The play ends with trilogy, comprising Agamemnon. The Oedipus being led away to exile and the chorus Choephori and The Euminides, is regarded as lamenting "behold: this was Oedipus, greatest his masterpiece. This is the story of a family, of men". This play is dependent for its tragic the house of Atreus. The action of the first play effect upon the device of dramatic irony. The opens on the return of Agamemnon from the audience know in advance the outcome of Trojan war and centres on his murder by his Oedipus' search for self-knowledge: his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. statements and actions therefore take on The second play deals with the revengeful exceptional clarity, meaning and significance. murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, by Aristotle regarded such discovery as an Orestes with the support of his sister Electra. essential Ingredient of tragic drama, and this The Euminides is a ritual drama in which notion of discovery is analogous to the notion Orestes' action is tried before an Athenian of psychological insight. court where he is absolved of responsibility The Oedipus myth is an important and guilt. organising principle in psychoanalysis and These plays succeed because they are about Freud asserted "that the Oedipus complex is a family whose members represent particular the nucleur complex of the neuroses, and classes of individuals in the inner world of the constitutes the essential part of their

362 Psychiatric Bulletin (1995), 19, 362-363 PSYCHIATRY AND THE MEDIA content". Freud recognised that Oedipus' women, commenting upon the events as they persistence at self-examination was similar to unfold and witnessing the tragic evolution of the process of psychoanalysis. However, he the plot. Their complicity is not in doubt, but it viewed Sophocles' play as "essentially ... an is the complicity of all participant observers. amoral work" which absolved men from moral Responsibility for the tragic action depends responsibility, exhibited the gods as promoters upon the perspective of the observing mind. of crime and showed the impotence of moral This examination of the relationship impulses. This is a misinterpretation of between men and women which Sophocles. The strength of Oedipus the King characterises much of Euripides' work almost lies in the fact that given the force of fate and always exists alongside his concern about the the inescapable necessity of particular actions, power of passion to escape the control of Oedipus still had responsibility for his actions, reason and order. In Hippolytus, Phaedra is and guilt, remorse and punishment all possessed by a passionate love for the pure applied. youthfulness of Hippolytus who is her step son. She struggles to resist this passion and her heroism lies in her attempt to subjugate Euripides and Medea, Hippolytus and her impulses to the rule of reason. The implicit The Bacchae message of this play is that "it is not for us to Euripides was born in 484 BC and is thought struggle after tiresome perfection". to have written 92 plays of which 17 have The Bacchae is thought to be Euripides' survived. His plays are the most modern in greatest work. In it he addresses the primacy structure and many of these plays deal with of revelry and celebration in human affairs. It war and also with the relationship between is a complex play. The dramatic action is men and women. His technique was to portray limited in range but the tension and a situation which was easy to interpret in a symbolism of this limited action is profound. traditional way while using irony to subvert The story is simple. Dionysus/Bacchus arrives the basic assumptions of social life. This in Thebes amid ongoing Bacchic rites which means that several different readings of his Pentheus resents and attempts to stop. In the plays are possible; the superficial meanings end Pentheus is killed by his mother, Agaue, often reveal a contradictory intention. and other devotees of Dionysus. The thesis is In Medea, he gives an account of the rejected that if the pleasure principle is denied ruin will wife (Medea) whose husband, Jason, has follow. Euripides is conscious of the anxiety chosen a younger woman as his bride. that pleasure provokes, recognising the fear Euripides uses this play to explore the place that it will be corrupting. of wives and women who "at home live free This is probably the most opaque of the from danger" but "would rather stand three tragic dramas, yet it is also the best example of times at the front line than bear children". a play in which the symbolism speaks directly There are several levels of understanding here. to the inner world of the audience without Medea who is from "a barbarous land" being mediated by a well developed plot. represents all who are not civilised, who live In the works of the classic tragic dramatists, in a society where force does not yield to law. therefore, drama utilises several devices to form Her ungoverned rage is a reflection of this. The alliances with the inner world of the audience. irony, of course, derives from the fact that her Tragic drama, especially, has this capacity to husband who stands for the justice and order engage the private world in a discourse. It tests of Greece is the very person who has broken and on occasion subverts established morality. It his marriage vows. His civility is undermined arouses emotional disquiet, assuages guilt in by his actions which break the moral code of tragic ritual, and mobilises inner reserves of fidelity. endurance. These functions are not disimilar to Medea deliberately plans the murder of the aims of psychotherapy. Jason's bride and then murders her own children to spite Jason. An act which is *Femi Oyebode, Consultant Psychiatrist, Queen tragic and inexcusable becomes, in the hands Elizabeth Psychiatric Hospital Mindelson Way, of Euripides, understandable. Edgbaston, Birmingham BIS 2QZ and Christina In Medea, the chorus are active participants Pourgourides, Registrar, Uffculme CUnic, in the action of the play. They are all women Queensbridge Road. Birmingham B13 8QD and their relationship with Medea is intimate and confiding. They are the conscience of all •Correspondence

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