You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Pasche disagrees with Potamianou's interpretation. He sees in the tragedy a conflict between Prometheus and Zeus, with both having paternal significance. Although Zeus is acknowledged as master, he has negative counter-oedipal feelings for two reasons: his sovereignty is threatened by the secret of Prometheus
(the birth of a son who will dethrone him if he unites with Thetis) and blemished by the continued existence of the human race which he had wanted to destroy. Pasche sees the negative counter-oedipus dominating the theogony in which children who may succeed the father are swallowed and become fetus again, joined to the body of their progenitor. As Freud recognized, Zeus is not an image of the superego but of a despotic id. Freud saw Zeus' anger as the projected reaction of one whose impetuous desires have been thwarted. An examination of his vengeance shows this even more precisely. Prometheus is bound like an infant; he is buried in a mountain, thus returned to the womb of his mother, Gaia; he is subjected to renewed sexual aggression in the devouring of his liver by Zeus' eagle, the same eagle which carried off Ganymede, thus symbolizing penetration by the paternal phallus, with castration as the precondition of identification with the father. If one considers the pair Zeus-Prometheus as symbolizing aspects of the mental apparatus, the conflict is between the id and the ego: the ego cannot form itself except by drawing the id's energies to itself and binding them. The agony of Prometheus is the ransom paid for the development and activity of the ego. Prometheus also has counter-oedipal feelings. Aeschylus places him in the generation of Kronos, so that Zeus is his nephew, and he has sufficient power to make it impossible for Zeus to take back the fire. His pain and rage do not seem to be on the level of depression, as Potamianou suggests. Nor did he instantly satisfy all the desires of man, as infantile omnipotence would have demanded. He on