Sophocles' treatment of the protagonist in Philoctetes is illustrative of a fixation based on chronic hatred of once trusted comrades by whom one has been betrayed. The resolution of such a fixation involves the overcoming of the felt danger of unbearable shame resulting from unconscious shame fantasies that one is mocked by the betrayers. This resolution occurs through the moral turn and compassion of Neoptolemus and by a modification of the ego ideal by identification with an idealized other, in the play, Heracles. Sophocles' treatment of this type of hate and its resolution in the Philoctetes myth invites conjectures on the significance of the psychology of forgiveness for the problem of working through.