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Oh, blank confusion! true epitome
Of what the mighty City is herself.
Over and over, throughout the Greek tragedies, in Aeschylus almost as much as Euripides, the characters express doubt about the goodness of the gods. Are the gods jealous of human success and happiness per se? Or just jealous of the greed and hubris success so often engenders? Are the gods worthy of esteem because they are good, or merely because they are powerful? If only the latter, then what should be the standards of human goodness? Questions like these are not only the most fundamental human intellectual concerns. They also generate anxiety. How can I protect the good from the bad if I don't know which is which? For Melanie Klein, contemporary of Anna Freud, and often regarded as the founder of object relations theory, there is no more fundamental anxiety than this: that we shall confuse good and bad, love and hate, and so destroy all that we really love and care about.
Below several Greek tragedies are examined from this roughly Kleinian perspective. “Roughly,” because only the general framework of her psychoanalytic theory will be employed, not her detailed studies of the dynamics of internal objects (see Alford 1989). In part my goal is to show that a Kleinian perspective can illuminate several tragedies, not just Aeschylus' Oresteia, to which Klein devoted a brief essay shortly before her death. More generally, my goal is to show that sorting out good from bad is the most fundamental issue humans face, that the Greek tragic poets knew this, and in this regard Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides possess deep psychological insight. It is not unusual to apply psychoanalytic theory to Greek tragedy, several books being devoted to this