Psychoanalysis and Euripides' Suppliant Women

A Tragic Reading of Politics

This book explores how ancient tragedy illuminates contemporary political crises through a psychoanalytic lens. Through a “tragic” reading of Euripides’ play, The Suppliant Women, it demonstrates how fractured societies attempt to "heal" themselves through populism, authoritarianism, cruelty, and cultures of deception.

Psychoanalysis and Euripides' Suppliant Women explores how ancient tragedy illuminates contemporary political crises through a psychoanalytic lens. Through a “tragic” reading of Euripides’ play, Suppliant Women, it demonstrates how fractured societies attempt to "heal" themselves through populism, authoritarianism, cruelty, and cultures of deception. It examines how democratic politics requires integrating split-off elements of mythical religious beliefs linked to mourning processes and feminine existence.

The book presents Euripides' painful diagnosis that humans are fundamentally split beings whose public life constitutes a struggle to integrate primitive, "supernatural" forces that exist beyond rational political order. It analyses how humans struggle with omnipotence, bisexuality, and drives, often defending against painful knowledge through catastrophic tragic acts including war, suicide, and violence. The book uses the mother–infant relationship as a model for understanding societal and political functions, showing how tragic plots transform impossible impasses into tolerable paradoxes within transitional spaces. The infant's helplessness is thought of as the founding principle of the human psyche and society.

This interdisciplinary study will be of interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, as well as academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, politics, and classical studies, and anyone seeking to understand how ancient wisdom addresses modern democratic challenges and the pathological mental functioning manifest in contemporary politics.

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