Trauma, Envy and Revenge1

Carole Tarantelli, in giving a brief overview of the presentations, highlighted the possible relationship of the concept of the death instinct to trauma and the varying opinions of its relevance held by the three presenters. The question of whether traumatic experiences unleashed the death instinct in the victim which was then projected on to the perpetrator was also to be addressed.

Sharon Roberts dealt with the theme of revenge in Euripides's Medea. She asserted that the play demonstrated the pain of betrayal and the pleasure of revenge. What factors might lead a mother to kill her children? In answering this question, it is important to consider the notion of the ‘alien,’ which in Euripides's drama is the placing into the protagonist of disavowed aspects of the human condition. Maternal filicide stirs disbelief in the audience that any mother could commit such a crime, which is even more horrifying than Oedipus's patricide and incestuous relationship with his mother. It is clear that the dangers of incest and patricide are less frightening than the thought of maternal filicide. While psychoanalysis has given great weight to the Oedipus myth, Roberts questioned whether the Medean story should be accorded wider significance in our analytic thinking.

Roberts posited a Medea complex that is characterized by a mixture of betrayal and revenge as a reaction to trauma. Jason's actions betrayed Medea and caused her to seek revenge for the loss of his love and the threat that she and her sons would be exiled. Medea killed their children to exact a revenge on Jason, an act that Roberts sees as the ascendance of her death instinct released by the trauma she endured. Roberts related her idea to the work of Laub and his colleagues who assert that trauma can trigger the emergence of the death instinct. The contributions of Freud and Klein regarding our understanding of the death instinct were briefly reviewed and, in this regard, Medea's actions are viewed as a reflection of her