Analysis Of Medea On Euripides

After the phallic stage is the latent period, where the sexual energy is suppressed due to the development of the ego and superego. Children become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests (Furnham). In this stage, Medea attempts to represses her sexual anger at Jason, almost deciding against killing her children. Despite her attempt, she is unable to transcend this stage. The last stage is the genital stage, where the focus of the child transitions from individual needs to the interest of the welfare of others. The individual should be well-balanced, warm, and caring (Furnham). Based on her behavior, Medea doesn’t reach the enlightenment that is supposed to come with the genital stage because she doesn’t reconcile

Euripides had two disastrous marriages to unfaithful wives (Monogan). Thus, his general descriptions of destructive women, as in Medea and Phaedra, could be attributed to this. In the specific case of Medea, where there is a clear theme of adultery, there is a projection of his wives onto Jason and himself onto Medea. However, rather than writing a play about a male protagonist who had unfaithful wives, like a literal project of his life would be, Euripides inverts the gender roles in Medea. This could be due to the subordinate nature of women during the time, so the fact that his wives were the ones who were unfaithful to him was emasculating to a point of a figurative castration of Euripides. Thus, he describes Jason as unfaithful to Medea, but in reality, he is describing his now feminine self interacting with the unfaithful man that is actually a reflection of his

In short, she did a clinical observation of a specific group of females who all sought treatment for the same symptoms of sexual frigidity and sterility (Leuzinger-Bohleber 10). In the study, she discovered that these woman have what she calls the “Medea Fantasy.” This fantasy is defined by the fact that these women had the conviction that if they fell in love with someone and participated in sexual acts, they would become existentially dependent on the partner who would eventually leave them (Roos 17). The women believed they couldn’t handle the abandonment and would lash out in a destructive way. Thus, they decided to denounce their femininity and consciously make themselves “sterile” (Leuzinger-Bohleber 27). Through the study, it was found that all of these patients had severe traumas in their early lives. For example, all of their mothers suffered from depression and had been treated with antidepressants in the first years of their lives and they all suffered from some kind of narcotic abuse by their mothers. In addition, some of these women lost their fathers during the “oedipal phase or electra phase” (Leuzinger-Bohleber 30). The study basically concludes with the idea that although the Medea fantasy is extremely prominent within the women she studied clinically, it underlies the dark aspects of femininity on a broader