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Oedipus and Narcissus are two male protagonists of Greek tragedies who, as we know, stood sponsor to Freud when he wished to draw attention to ubiquitous conflicts of human mental life. Freud postulated that myths, as narrated to us by creative writers in every age, continue to fascinate us today because they portray central unconscious human fantasies and conflicts, as a rule connected with our repressed, early infantile sexual fantasies. These fantasies are preserved in our own unconscious minds and, in projecting them on to the main figures in these tales, we unconsciously recognise our own destiny in them: ‘It may even be that not a little of this effect [of an imaginative work] is due to the writer's enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame’ (Freud, 1908, p. 153).
There are of course also female Greek mythological figures who still fascinate us today and have inspired creative writers down the ages to depict and recreate their fate in ever new forms. One such figure is Medea, who, it seems to me, has become particularly relevant to our time, characterised as it is by migrations of ethnic groups, high divorce rates, new forms of neglect, and the recurring murders of children reported voyeuristically in the media (see, for example,
Kämmerer et al., 1998). Medea's fate surely confronts us unconsciously with one of the most profound taboos of our western civilisation, a form of female destructiveness in which intense unbearable countertransference reactions arise in us analysts, making it hard for us accurately to perceive and recognise this dimension of the ‘dark continent’ of femininity in our female analysands. We are often at a loss for images and words to help us even begin to grasp our horror of such situations, which at first floods and confuses us. In our struggle for visualisation and verbalisation, myths present themselves as a helpful, neutral ‘third party’, on to which we first direct our own pro