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AMONG THE MANY MYTHICAL OR HISTORICAL FIGURES FREUD made use of in his essays on applied psychoanalysis, Hippolytus was not mentioned. Yet, implicitly and indirectly, Freud often referred to him in his use of the concepts of unconscious, repression, and infantile amnesia. Hippolytus, son of Theseus, is "the innocent" of desires; in contrast, Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, is the seductress, the personification of incestuous love and hate; Theseus has the role of the punishing agent, although he himself perpetrates a grave injustice.
Reading the Hippolytus legend, one thinks of Freud's early works, written at a time when he still endorsed the idea of infantile innocence. At the same time one cannot help being impressed by how that which is negated of the individual's inner reality returns to him from the outer world. Desire, love, hate, aggression, and castration fears are all projected onto the parental figures; the child remains exempt of all responsibility; and the monster, of course, comes from the outside—in Euripides' tragedy, from the sea.
His own analysis and the unflinching honesty in his clinical work eventually led Freud to refute these early views. Since