The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 20, 1951, No. 3.: Joel Friedman and Sylvia Gassel. 'Orestes. A Psycho-analytic Approach to Dramatic Criticism 11.'

The authors have followed up their papers on Oedipus with a study of the legend of Orestes as described in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The central point of the legend is that Orestes murders his mother in order to avenge his father, Agamemnon, who in his (Orestes') infancy had been slain by his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, a blood-relative of Agamemnon. Orestes' crime is the reverse of Oedipus's and the myth is interpreted as depicting in the person of Orestes a psychology based on rejection of positive oedipal wishes by psychosexual inversion. Orestes reverses his father and rejects his mother, and in murdering her he not only avenges himself for her rejection of him—the invert's 'denial of loss of the breast'—but also denies the value of motherhood by hypercathecting the father (penis). The ambivalence of the society which created the myth is shown in Orestes' trial and acquittal. The rejection of the mother is not so complete as to render a trial unnecessary, but his crime is condoned as an upholding of the taboos of totem and incest, which have been broken by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.