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By now, many of us feel exhausted and fed up with men fighting each other and maltreating women and children on a massive scale across the globe. For the cover of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2026, we turn once again to the Ancient Greeks for inspiration. Theirs was a civilisation also dominated by rivalrous and violent men. Yet, in their myths, plays and art, they made space for extraordinary depictions of powerful women and the feminine. These depictions often represent everything women were expected to repress as second-class citizens in submission to men: their sexuality, physical dexterity and power, athleticism, emotional expressiveness, exuberance, competitiveness (especially with men) and ferocity.
Drawing after an Attic red-figure kylix by the Brygos Painter, provenance Vulci, now in the collection of the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich [2645 (332)]. Published in Harrison, Jane Ellen and D.S. MacColl. Greek vase paintings; a selection of examples, with preface, introduction and descriptions. London: T.F. Unwin, 1894.
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At the centre of their worship, the god was still male – Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy and frenzy. Euripides, in one of his greatest plays, The Bacchae, depicted women in the fullness of their passion. The women of Thebes, the Maenads, were driven into Bacchic frenzy on
Mount Cithaeron, where they performed ecstatic rites. Pentheus, the man who tries to restrain and stop them and reintroduce so-called masculine law and order, is ultimately torn limb from limb by the euphoric women, led by his own mother.
This myth offers an extraordinary vision of the hatred of the “male” logos – rationality, secondary process thinking and boundaries – especially when these are in the service of patriarchy. The story seems to explode with rebellion and “feminine” jouissance, ex