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The Impossibility of Forgiveness: Shame Fantasies as Instigators of Vengefulness in Euripides' Medea

Melvin R. Lansky

10921 Wilshire Boulevard #509, Los Angeles, CA 90024, mlansky{at}ucla.edu

Unforgivability in Euripides' Medea is explored in the context of intra-psychic 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.

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 53, No. 2, 437-464 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/00030651050530021701
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