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of the fantasy, and his jealous concern for his daughters' virginity (even at the end of the play, when he seems to see the men of Argos as an equal threat) indicates his complicity in their fixation. |
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7. The absolute authority which the Danaids attribute to Pelasgos, at variance with his actual role as a constitutional monarch who needs the consent of his people, nevertheless conforms with his status in the Danaids' fantasy as a replacement for the omnipotent oedipal father. |
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8. Of all Greek tragedies the Suppliants contains the most expansive and absolute statements of the omnipotence and omniscience of Zeus. This is probably not, as some have thought, a monotheistic theological statement by Aeschylus. It is a statement by the Danaids of the qualities invested in the father of childhood and now transferred to the deity. The replacement of Danaos by Zeus is an unconscious effort by the Danaids to maintain their oedipal fixation while at the same time suppressing its incestuous aspect. |
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9. Although Io is their great-great-great-grandmother, the Danaids clearly identify her both with their mother(s) and with themselves. They repeatedly call her mother, but they also find in her a double of themselves, both actually and wishfully. The situation is contradictory they view Io both as a woman who, like them, renounced sexuality in the face of threatening masculinity, and also as a mother who was loved by the father but contradiction is the ordinary discourse of the unconscious. Io's tortured wanderings are both her punishment for keeping the father to herself and a projection by the Danaids of their own incestuous guilt. |
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10. The immaculate conception of Epaphos follows from the roles of Io and Zeus as fantasized mother and father. The Danaids deny authentic sexuality to this relationship because they wish to have the father for themselves and to deny the mother sexual access to him; at the same time they strengthen their own identification with Io by assigning her to a state of quasi-virginity. |
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The Psychology of the Danaid Trilogy |
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Bound by a compulsive repetition of the past and an obsessive attachment to their father (an attachment which can only be intensified by the series of substitutions it goes through), the Danaids exemplify the abdication of individual will by members of a group (the choros as protagonist). The necessary step to individuation and maturity is a sexual initiative, the transformation of a girl in love with her father into a woman able to love other men, and this step will be taken by Hypermestra. |
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For both Freud and Aeschylus, an essential and continuing task of man is the struggle to free oneself from the past, in a way that is not self-mutilating but liberating. In the Danaids' relationship with Io, their equation of the mother of fantasy with the ancestress of the race, we see a portrayal |
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