The Furies: What shall I do? Afflicted, I am mocked by these people. I have borne what cannot be borne. Great the sorrow and the dishonor upon the sad daughters of the night.

Athena: No, not dishonored. You are goddesses. Do not in too much anger make this place of mortal men uninhabitable.… Put to sleep the bitter strength in the black wave and live with me.…

In the terror upon the faces of these

I see great good for our citizens.

—Aeschylus, Oresteia

The only way to get through life is to know the worst things about it.

—James Baldwin

In this chapter, I begin to sketch out in more detail the constitutive aspects of what I am calling the democratic work of mourning. The democratic work of mourning involves the public spaces and practices by which the traumas of collective life are publicly worked through in ways that enliven social struggles for recognition while mitigating denial, disavowal, and distrust. In articulating this concept, I lean heavily on the work of object relations psychoanalysis and, in particular, the approach to mourning found in Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott. Klein’s concepts of the depressive position and the good object, supplemented by Winnicott’s idea of potential space, provide the kernel for a sociopsychological theory of mourning that constructively responds to the paradoxes and pathologies that shadow dominant modes of public mourning. With the depressive position, Klein articulated a developmental possibility whereby individuals are sensitized to the ambivalences and tensions of intersubjective life, a process with incipient political content. Winnicott’s concept of potential space supplements Klein’s theory by showing how cultural symbols, public discourses, and civic practices can create the conditions for successful efforts to acknowledge living legacies of misrecognition and undertake concrete steps toward social repair.

The work of mourning responds to the pressing needs of late-modern democracies, such as the challenge of findings ways for loss, vulnerability, and suffering to become opportunities for constructive social action rather than occasions for reaction, resentment, and misrecognition.¹ Public acts of mourning can be called democratic insofar as they cultivate inclusiveness while falling short of (fantastical) social consensus and insofar as they promote interaction and social cooperation across lines of division. Inclusive practices honor and exemplify the equal respect and treatment that are due to members of the democratic polity.² Yet, as Rosemary Nagy argues, reconciliatory efforts that demand social consensus are “too thick” insofar as they come “at the cost of private difference.”³ Efforts to address historical and enduring traumas of misrecognition and to work through a violent past should not sacrifice heterogeneity and difference for the sake of an impossible ideal of social unity.⁴

Alongside this emphasis on ineliminable social differences, however, democratic processes of mourning must aim to facilitate what chapter 2 described as the “agency” of the depressive position. Depressive agency treats power as fluid, relational, and many-sided, and this form of agency is best cultivated through interaction and collaboration across lines of social division. Working through traumas by the actual work of public organizing, association, and problem solving promotes the recognition and acceptance of difference through cross-group contact, dialogue, and interactive problem solving.⁵ In the democratic work of mourning, then, the stress should be placed on the work by which citizens acknowledge and address traumas of misrecognition. We have good reasons to believe that such work is indeed possible, even in the face of significant historical traumas. We have even better reasons to hope that this work can be expanded and intensified, to cope with the violence and pain that is daily on display in our world.

In this chapter, I begin to develop the idea of a democratic work of mourning by first displacing it from the immediate context of contemporary dramas of reconciliation and social repair. In particular, I turn back to the city-state of Athens in the fifth century BCE and specifically to its annual festival the Great Dionysia (where the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were originally performed). The Athenian tragic festival offers an intensely rich practice of representing and honoring trauma and violence. Through a reading of the dramatic festival and of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, I lay the conceptual groundwork for a theory of democratic mourning. Using Klein’s essay on the trilogy, I argue that Aeschylus and the Athenian experience can help us to think about an “Oresteian” politics of mourning that is irreducible to either a Periclean or an Antigonean approach.⁶ Greek tragedy and Athenian democracy are conceptual and practical spaces that—once surveyed—will give us a richer vocabulary and store of practices for working through the traumas of our own time.⁷

The Athenian experience of tragedy, like contemporary dramas of reconciliation, was paradoxical by its nature. I will argue that this ambivalence was part of its democratic function in the polis, contributing to what Christian Meier has called the “mental infrastructure” of Athenian citizenship.⁸ I will also argue that tragedy also provided a “psychological infrastructure” that made Athenian democracy possible—a psychological infrastructure understood as an acceptance of ambivalence, conflict, and trauma within intra- and intersubjective life. Tragedy nurtured the civic identity of the Athenian citizens, but it also nurtured what Josiah Ober has called the “democratic soul.”⁹ This understanding of tragedy is reinforced by Klein’s reading of the Oresteia, which, I argue, captures some of the democratic importance of the trilogy even if Klein’s theory itself focuses on the “micro” reconciliations inherent in interpersonal life. Klein’s conceptual innovations, however, can be used to go much further than Klein herself was willing to go; they contain incipient political content that the space and practice of Greek tragedy helps us to unpack and develop.

If Klein gives us some purchase on the sociopsychological meaning of tragedy, then the Greek polis and its practices in turn give us a means of sounding out Klein’s undeveloped areas from the perspective of political or social theory. For instance, Klein’s theory of mourning/integration misses (or at least downplays) the foundational role that power plays in the politics of mourning. An appreciation of the Great Dionysia as a cultural and political institution at Athens, then, will correct an absence in Klein—an absence, as it were, of the polis itself, with its native fractiousness and radical disparities. In making the argument that tragedy was an “analytic” space, then, it is also worth emphasizing how the analytic space is also a “political” space—in short, how the individual and the democratic work of mourning are intertwined and mutually implicated in each other. By recognizing the connection between these two spaces, we are already some distance beyond Klein. As argued in chapter 1, Winnicott’s idea of potential space builds on Klein’s insights while turning them outward toward cultural and institutional spaces that both embody and cultivate the developmental possibilities she envisioned. Yet, more importantly, an analysis of the Athenian dramatic festival can usefully “politicize” Klein and object relations psychoanalysis. I argue that Greek tragedy gave space for the articulation and interpretation of the micro- and macrodramas of reconciliation within the life of the polis. In my terms, then, the Greek tragic festival represented an ongoing democratic work of mourning, from which contemporary efforts to face down and work through a violent past and conflicted present have much to learn.

In the penultimate section of this chapter, I take on two challenges to my reading of Greek tragedy in the wake of Klein—namely, tragedy’s imitative and distancing character (tragedy by and large assiduously avoids the representation of actual traumas in the polity’s history in favor of distant places and mythical heroes), and the supposed “cathartic” effect of tragedy. Catharsis is a term that haunts both tragedy and psychoanalysis, and I argue that to understand it in terms of purgation or healing keeps us from appreciating the full relevance of tragedy as a piece of the democratic work of mourning. Instead, we should understand catharsis as the act of making pity/fear (and the trauma and terror that elicit these emotions) public—giving them a public account in the interests of working through or mourning them. Doing so provides a means of engaging—rather than displacing—the paradoxes of mourning and reconciliation.

In the final section, I reconnect the strands of this argument to the contemporary politics of mourning by returning to the context of postapartheid South Africa. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) can be usefully seen as a good object that licenses social critique and depressive forms of agency. In this light, I give an interpretation of South African playwright Yael Farber’s Molora. In Molora, Farber repurposes Aeschylus’s Oresteia within the context of South Africa after the fall of apartheid and the experience of the SATRC. Read in a Kleinian light, the play offers a glimpse at a simultaneously tragic/moral practice of mourning that leaves the audience with both reasons for doubt and for hope. It stages an apparently ritualistic reconciliation through the performance of communal norms, but certain ambiguities within the text and its performance cut against the ritualistic movement toward closure. I argue that the play shows the SATRC as a Kleinian internalized good object that—while not without its faults—has become a reflective means of accounting for the enduring conflicts within South African society. Farber’s play is a powerful representation of the challenges inherent in the democratic work of mourning, and it helps us to think about other objects, practices, and spaces that might carry forward this work in South Africa and elsewhere.

The Great Dionysia and Athenian Democracy

The extant Greek tragedies—all composed during the fifth century BCE—display a frankness about violence, cruelty, hatred and injustice that continues to grip the contemporary imagination.¹⁰ Tragedy’s representation of transgression and trauma show “a world ripped apart,” a world with “civic foundations shattered and the noble values of citizenship turned against themselves in violence, confusion, despair, and horror.”¹¹ In tragedy, mothers murder sons, sons kill mothers and fathers, husbands are slain by wives, queens become slaves, cities are leveled, and legendary families are brought to utter and complete ruin. The strong are laid low, the pure are polluted, the peaceful turn violent, and the certain become confused. Yet tragedy is not simply the waking dream of a violent society; it reveals a keen sensitivity to the dilemmas of collective life and the often-disastrous consequences of our actions. Tragedy shows the unforeseen costs of our necessarily blind choices and provides room for the regret and lamentation that follows from the realization of disaster.¹²

What makes the tragic spectacles even more compelling is that the audience members could not maintain a detached posture of aesthetic appreciation. The theatergoers (theates) at the Great Dionysia were also the citizens (polites) at Athens: just as they sat in the theater of Dionysus and witnessed the potential consequences of action, so too would they sit in the assembly in order to debate and decide on the polis’s best course of action. The same citizens who watched representations of Trojans, Persians, and Thebans bemoan the disastrous effects of warfare would later sit in the assembly and vote to support (and to fight) wars of their own. The same citizens who beheld Athena’s delicate negotiations with the Furies would sit in the law courts and adjudicate between competing claims of guilt and innocence. Participation in the theater, then, was but one aspect of a comprehensive political experience for Athenian citizens.

Over the past thirty years, a scholarly consensus has developed that the Great Dionysia—the Athenian festival held annually in the spring at which the tragedies and comedies were performed—had an important civic function, and therefore that our understanding of the plays is enhanced by an attentiveness to their location within the larger context of political life in Athens.¹³ The Great Dionysia is now itself seen as a constitutive part of the Athenian democratic experience—a “vigorous civic practice” as relevant to the democracy as the institutions of the assembly, the council, and the law courts.¹⁴ Accordingly, Josh Beer reads the extant tragedies in the light of the “conflicts and policy decisions” faced by the enfranchised demos; as he sees them, “the plays raised serious ethical, social, religious, and political problems that provided a major part of all Athenians’ education.”¹⁵ Peter Euben notes that funding of a chorus was “a liturgy equal to the maintenance of a trireme … as if to suggest that the cultural survival of the Athenians depended on the courage of its people in confronting the risks of tragedy in the same way as its physical survival depended on its sailors’ courageously meeting the risks of battle.”¹⁶ Helene Foley identifies the reciprocal connection between democratic debate and tragic narrative, arguing that drama required its audience to “negotiate among points of view as it would in a court of law or an assembly.”¹⁷ The festival itself is said to have had a “democratic ambience”—ordinary citizens danced in the choruses and acted on the stage,¹⁸ and judges were selected by sortition.¹⁹ The procession—or komos—on the first day of the festival mixed rich and poor citizens together in a celebratory atmosphere that emphasized the commonalities binding Athenians together over and against the class and factional lines that cut across the polis at all other times.²⁰

The tragedies were performed, then, in a “political forum” that “allowed the Athenians to consider the nature of their own society.”²¹ The Great Dionysia was a “democratic institution” and tragedy was “a form of public discourse.”²² Because ordinary Athenian citizens had to exercise agency—to “engage in politics on a grand scale”—they needed to “have answers ready for all the conscious and unconscious questions and doubts that arose.”²³ Tragedy (perhaps) provided some of these answers, but, more importantly, it provided a space for the examination and exploration of questions, doubts, and anxieties. The Great Dionysia was one of the crucial components of the democratic imaginary at Athens; it responded to the Athenians’ need to “think themselves into being democratic citizens.”²⁴ Tragedy by its very nature as a periodic but extraordinary liturgy could “introduce perspectives which might otherwise have been overlooked” in a polis concerned with day-to-day survival.²⁵ Freed from immediate pressures of decision, Athenians could reflect on the values and practices of their polis, explore alternative imaginaries, sound out new and even uncomfortable ideas, and then return to the challenges of self-government, their skills of discernment and judgment (ideally) sharpened by the experience. Ultimately, tragedy “helped the Athenians to work through difficulties, threats, and uncertainties which would otherwise have hampered them in their thinking, feeling, and acting.”²⁶ Tragedy was not only a democratic space, then; it was, as Euben argues, “a theoretical institution” insofar as the “form, content, and context” of tragedy provided “a critical consideration of public life.”²⁷

Sara Monoson argues that three primary elements of Athenian democratic culture emerged in part from the experience with tragedy: unity, reciprocity, and what she calls “strong-mindedness,” or the ability of the common Athenian citizen to judge important matters skillfully and prudently.²⁸ Unity emerges from the admixtures of the processional komos and the visual “mapping” of the polis in the theater of Dionysus. Yet importantly, according to Monoson, this mapping of the unified polis did not erase social and factional differences but, rather, brought attention to them. Prominent citizens were marked by where they were seated for the performances, and wealthy elites at Athens were made visible through their liturgical duties as chorus sponsors. The festival emphasized commonality, but not at the expense of particularities and differences. Instead, these differences were negotiated through reciprocal acts of participation and service—particular citizens filled different roles, but the entire polis shared in the burdens and the rewards of the festival. Reciprocity was also exemplified through the public benefaction of citizens in the ceremony that initiated the festival. The bestowing of honors for citizens whose service had benefited the polis during the preceding year sent a message that such actions would not go unacknowledged. Lastly, there is the value of “strong-mindedness.” The difficult and trying subject matter of the performances reflected the assumption that the ordinary Athenian citizen was capable of making careful and thoughtful judgments. For Monoson, even the physical rigors of spectatorship (the audience sat through a tragic trilogy, a satyr play, and a comedy performance each day of the festival), lent credence to the Athenian citizenry’s claims of intellectual and physiological fortitude.

Athenian unity as represented (or performed) by the tragic festival, scholars argue, did not come at the expense of social heterogeneity and conflict. As Mark Griffith reads them, the surviving tragedies provided an occasion for Athenians to think through the clashes and inconsistencies between aristocratic and democratic norms. However, rather than glorying in aristocratic family failures and frailties, the tragic poets “reinforce[d] a notion of mutual inter-dependency between elite families and their communities.”²⁹ Tragedy helped to foster a sense of social solidarity, but for Griffith it was “solidarity without consensus … among the different social groups and ideologies that comprised the theater audience.”³⁰ Following Nagy’s treatment of discourses of reconciliation, Athenian tragedy could be seen as cultivating a “thinner” form of social solidarity, which did not paper over social differences or deny ongoing conflicts.

In fact, it was the Athenians’ ability to practice solidarity without consensus that may have provided the groundwork for the polis’s success in areas of social innovation and interpolis competition. As the work of Josiah Ober has demonstrated, Athenian society was consistently responsive to self-critique and capable of significant cultural and political innovations in the wake of this critique. According to Ober, tragedy was one of the crucial venues through which such critique filtered into and influenced the Athenian imaginary.³¹ The tragic performances, then, demonstrated a keen awareness of (if not an obsession with) the fraught tension between norm and transgression in a fluid society. As a result, Athenians could remain highly conscious of the vertigiousness and contingency of democratic action. Athenians of the fifth century could rewrite the structure of the polis at every assembly meeting. In this way, they were attuned to the tension between continuity and change—a sensitivity that shows forth in tragedy. By participating in an ambiguous and contradiction-rich discourse—where social roles were upended, and boundaries between man and woman, nature and polis, pure and polluted were constantly troubled or blurred—Athenians learned both to “think alike” (to share common values or norms) and to “think differently” (to question those very same norms when challenged by unexpected events or ideas).³² In this way, they were able to maintain a dialogue between the desire for constancy and the need for innovation.

Moreover, the broader culture of participation (in which even a staged performance would elicit active engagement and critique) promoted “an enlarged understanding of common predicaments”³³ that prepared the Athenian citizenry for the demands of self-government. As Bruce Heiden puts it, “tragedy … [gave] the Athenians the flexibility to play a variety of roles as situations might require, especially the role of friend to a former enemy.”³⁴ Role-playing and sensitivity to role reversal perhaps explains the Athenian capacity for high levels of social cooperation despite a heterogeneity of social interests and often deep social divisions.³⁵ On these terms, we can see how the Athenians might have used tragedy to understand and practice solidarity without consensus and social cooperation without homogeneity.³⁶ In other words, tragedy facilitated a depressive form of civic agency in which power was seen as fluid and relational, not as something located in a central place but available to a variety of actors and circulating through a variety of spaces.

Although it was not its only purpose, tragedy provided a venue for the Athenian citizenry to practice and hone the skills necessary for democratic life. Moreover, as I will argue shortly, by witnessing and working through the traumas represented on stage, the Athenians also nurtured a psychologically resilient and integrated identity. This nested sociopsychological challenge is captured by Ober’s idea of the “democratic soul,” which includes the “moral psychology, ethical judgment and conception of justice and law that is appropriate to the democratic citizen.”³⁷ The Great Dionysia was not only a democratic and a theoretical institution but an analytic space, and it not only provided an occasion for intellectual reflection and social cooperation; it was also a scene of mourning that honed an integrated psyche.

The Internal Assembly and the Democratic Soul: Melanie Klein at the Great Dionysia

The developmental goal of Kleinian analysis is the “integration” of the ego, a process that takes place through repeated moments of recognition or understanding by which the individual accepts and comes to terms with the painful losses attendant to their relationships with imperfect others, who, by necessity, both fail and fall away from them. These moments of recognition facilitate a process of mourning whereby losses of purity and innocence are acknowledged and worked through. The work of mourning within the depressive position mitigates pathological states of mind such as omnipotence, denial, and splitting. The depressive position and its labor of mourning, however, are precarious achievements. Klein’s understanding of the positional nature of these cognitive and psychological states means that integration names a perpetual aspiration more than a reachable endpoint. The archaic defenses of the paranoid-schizoid position remain a live possibility throughout life. These defenses persist as a powerful hedge against intense anxiety and feelings of powerlessness, and they provide a fantastical consolatory extension for desires of omnipotent control or sovereign agency because it is through these defenses that we create a space of frictionless belonging populated by one-sided part objects that exist only for the gratification of our needs (for a scapegoat; for an enemy; or for something hideous, twisted, and corrupted so that we might feel beautiful and pure).

Although Klein did not extend her analysis into group life, others have noted the ways in which social pressures exacerbate paranoid-schizoid tendencies or entrench persecutory interpretive frameworks.³⁸ The effectiveness of symbolic politics—demonization of “the immigrant,” for instance—rests in part on the deep grammar of psychological functioning that Klein locates in the paranoid-schizoid position.³⁹ Inchoate, painful experiences and the anxiety and frustration therein are often displaced through what Wilfred Bion calls a “psychotic” form of group identification. For Bion, in fact, one of the primary functions of groups is to contain the destabilizing and psychotic anxieties that we cannot cope with ourselves by giving them expression through the idealizing empowerment of insiders or the demonization of abject outsiders.⁴⁰ The group is able to act out individual pathologies, such as omnipotence and denial, in ways that the individual cannot; as Fred Alford puts it, “only a madman would say, ‘I am the most wonderful and strongest person in the world. Yet, groups say things like that all the time about themselves.”⁴¹

The mitigation of denial and splitting inherent in many forms of symbolic politics requires the integration of the psyche, which involves practice with ambivalence and acceptance of conflict within the self and between self and other. Mourning is the hinge of this practice. The psychological weaning from the idealized objects of the paranoid-schizoid position requires, once again, the internalization of the good object, a process that begins with the depressive recognition that this object’s purity was a fantastical construct. The good object shifts the superego from a univocal, harsh voice into an internal, polyvocal “assembly” of whole objects.⁴² The internal assembly in turn enables more reciprocal connections or encounters between self and other. Idealized internal objects, by contrast, pre-interpret the world. The (melodramatic) story of absolute love and pure hatred is already written in the paranoid-schizoid position, whereas the depressive position marks a shift toward the risky or “treacherous field of communication through language.”⁴³ In essence, our ability to mourn for a lost pure other is tied to our ability to engage with complex, whole others within the inherently risky terrain of the political, and vice versa.

At this point, we might begin to see the relevance of tragic drama for Klein’s theory of integration. Greek tragedy portrays the dilemmas and ambivalences attendant to intersubjective and intrasubjective life with delicate precision. Tragedy is replete with viable or ambivalent others, who unsettle the emotions, judgments, and habits fed by paranoid-schizoid fantasies and anxieties. For instance, in tragic drama conventional judgments and norms are called into question and often undergo dramatic reversal. Heroic characters and those in positions of authority are often indecent and hubristic, and those who are of lower status often gain the sympathy of the chorus. Antigone is a case in point. Antigone shocks her sister Ismene and the chorus of elders at Thebes by refusing to obey Creon’s edicts surrounding the exposure of her brother’s body. Yet this shock seemingly yields to a growing acceptance of Antigone’s choice, and then even to sympathy with the ill-fated daughter of Oedipus (the chorus joins the lament with Antigone as the latter is led away by the henchmen of Creon). As Helene Foley interprets this sympathetic shift, “it appears that it is possible to be both subversive and at least partially right on the tragic stage—that the notorious and dangerous ‘female intruders’ who often stalk the tragic stage have a point.”⁴⁴ Antigone is an unacceptable danger, a threat to the social order, violently transgressive, and justified in her actions. Accepting this mixed picture is part of the chorus’s (and ultimately Creon’s) growing awareness of the fragility and ambiguity of the situation.

That the hero is often mistaken and the denigrated other often “at least partially right” is what Simon Goldhill has described as the “unsettling force” of tragic drama.⁴⁵ Perhaps it is impossible to recapture the difficulty of experiencing such cognitive and emotional dissonance. But with Klein, we can ask a slightly different question: What precisely is unsettled by this incessant practice of unsettlement? It is not simply the idealized picture of the hero (or the god, or the polis) that is disrupted or put askew—it is the psychological mode of functioning in which such idealized images are necessary. The great heroes are upended and exposed as partial and failing beings. In the wake of the unsettling of this (fantastic, imaginary) world, the audience can achieve a clearer understanding of the often-fraught relationship between self and other. This is the recognition, at its root, of how our fantasies and fears can keep us from appreciating the full range of the other’s character—recognition of our misrecognitions.⁴⁶ According to Klein, “It is an essential part of psychoanalytic therapy … that the patient should be enabled by the analyst’s interpretations to integrate the split-off and contrasting aspects of his self; this implies also the synthesis of the split-off aspects of other people and of situations.”⁴⁷ Greek tragedy was, then, a social analytic practice whereby the Athenians could integrate the split-off and denigrated parts of their collective identity. This view mirrors the work of mourning as depicted by Klein, and it has similar effects. By making the world difficult on stage, we might say, tragedy was a fantasy or waking dream that could mitigate the more destructive fantasies of escape and omnipotence to which we are often prone. Tragedy made more likely what Sedgwick calls the “agency” of the depressive position, in which collaboration across divisions and differences requires power that is fluid, shared, and relational.

Famously, Aristotle thought that the effect of tragedy was to elicit pity and fear among the witness-participants.⁴⁸ The elicitation of tragic pity and fear is an aesthetic achievement on the part of the poet, but it is also ethically and politically relevant. Pity establishes a connection between the suffering hero and the audience members, expanding and educating the latter’s sympathetic imagination. However, pity does not obliterate the distance between the self and the other. Identification does not imply incorporation, where the suffering is taken into the witness-participant as their pain. We do not take the character’s place on stage; instead, Aristotle implies, we project ourselves into a similar situation as the protagonist. We imagine the enacted suffering as potentially our own, but we do not collapse the difference between self and other. Rather we come to better appreciate that distance in the light of common bonds of sympathetic identification. As Martha Nussbaum interprets Aristotle, the appropriate amount of pity and fear nurtures the ethical/political virtue of suggnōmosunē—fellow feeling and/or “thinking-along-with.”⁴⁹ This leads to a new understanding of shared vulnerability and interconnectivity that allows us to see the other outside the frozen dichotomy of friend/enemy.⁵⁰

Yet why exactly, we might ask, does the experience of mimetic terror or trauma serve to make us more sensitive to the plight of others—why does it not lead to quietism or resignation, cold indifference, or hostility toward others born of overwhelming fear? Again, Klein helps us to see the mechanism at work—primarily because it is the same mechanism behind her notion of analytic interpretations:

Very painful interpretations—and I am particularly thinking of the interpretations referring to death and to dead internalized objects … have the effect of reviving hope and making the patient feel more alive. My explanation for this would be that bringing a very deep anxiety nearer to consciousness, in itself produces relief. But I also believe that the very fact that the analysis gets into contact with deep-lying unconscious anxieties gives the patient the feeling of being understood and therefore revives hope.⁵¹

Confronting and giving some form of articulation to deep-seated anxieties tied to trauma, suffering, and death can elicit a shared experience of pity and suggnōmosunē, akin to the attainment of the depressive position. Yet this only takes place, we might say, if the act of working through does not reinforce paranoid-schizoid fantasies. Enter Aristotle’s famous emphasis on reversal and recognition.⁵² Reversal—change “by which the action veers round to its opposite”—and recognition—the “change from ignorance to knowledge”—are, according to Aristotle, the “most powerful elements of emotional interest” in tragedy.⁵³ We can see obvious parallels between Aristotle’s description of the emotional/cognitive transformations inherent in tragic pity and fear and Klein’s view of a successful analysis. Take the example of the analysis of “Richard,” presented in her Narrative of a Child Analysis. Richard suffered from persecutory fantasies and a rigid internal split between idealized and denigrated objects. Yet in the course of his analysis, Richard’s internal world began to morph—the idealized mother image was implicated in the menacing persecutory figures (reversal), and the ambiguity of the situation was fully acknowledged (recognition). By bringing together the isolated and split images of the internalized objects, Richard’s persecutory fantasies decreased and his hopefulness surged. This did not signify a removal of psychological discomfort or difficulty; in fact, Richard reflected that it was “difficult” to operate with “so many kinds of parents” in his internal world.⁵⁴ The analytic space did not erase life’s difficulties; rather, it helped to remove certain obstacles that blocked the acknowledgment of the manifold complications inherent in existence. As Richard said to Klein, in a remarkable insight for a ten-year-old, “I have discovered that there is no happiness without tragedy.”⁵⁵ Richard’s internal and external conflicts were not fully resolved by his ascension to the depressive position; they were instead faced fully for the first time:

Richard, before leaving, inspected his jacket, which was stained with soot. He did not seem perturbed and said that though there would be a row with Mummy over this, it would not be too bad. He parted in a friendly way, neither particularly excited or elated, nor persecuted or depressed.… Richard’s insight into the need to dirty himself, if he wanted to clean something, seems to me of some significance. His whole development at this stage showed a diminution of idealization, progress in integration, and therefore a greater capacity to acknowledge that a person can be good without being perfect … dirty yet useful, helpful, valuable.

Richard’s internal and external worlds were dirtied yet valuable, and even all the more precious and secure for their imperfections. The life instinct—enhanced and inflected by positive object relations—had gained predominance as Richard’s envy, greed, and persecutory anxiety had dimmed and as his ego was increasingly able to integrate the tensions within and between internal and external worlds. In the analytic environment, Richard’s conflicts with his actual parents began to emerge, become conscious, and find expression. By successfully leaving behind idealized part objects, Richard was able to gain a measure of security and independence that he had heretofore lacked. By internalizing the clashing objects into a fractious but coherent multitude or assembly, Richard was able to look forward to and accept new relationships. This narrative is Klein’s clearest portrayal of a healthy work of mourning, through which the analysand develops an identity that is capable of reflecting on loss and damage without succumbing to the defensive temptations of idealization or denial.

I argued earlier that integration marked Klein’s understanding of the goals of analysis. Yet again we must understand “goal” here less as a telos toward which we are progressively moving than as a fraught achievement from which we perpetually fall away. Well-integrated selves have nurtured habits of interaction and reflection to mitigate pathological compromises that uphold a false sense of stability through the repression of conflict and tension. By remaining committed to engaging or facing the small-scale traumas of intersubjectivity (our disappointments and frustrations; our imperfect relations with others whom we both hate and love), integrated selves better appreciate the complexity and ambivalence of life. Following Klein, I have taken to calling the mechanism by which this takes place the work of mourning. Mourning is endless—we have to do it, in Klein’s words, “again and again”—because our dependency on and relationships with others put us under constant pressure of a sudden oscillation between persecution and respect, fear and empathy, hate and love.⁵⁶ The drama of the self is a drama of loss, mourning, and recovery, repeated ad infinitum.

In the figure of Orestes, Klein discovers a character that models the promise and the difficulties of life in the depressive position. Orestes is cognizant of the ambiguity of his objects of affection, sympathetic to even those he must defeat, and able to face down his mortality, partiality, and guilt through reparative acts of love. Unlike (Freud’s favorite) Oedipus, who flees from his fate only to fall into it, Orestes is able to act in full awareness of the terrifying consequences, and, with a little help from Athena/Athens, he is able to bear the suffering and guilt that follows from his actions. Unlike Oedipus, who is an object of sheer horror and pity,⁵⁷ Orestes is a “good object” of identification because he overcomes paranoid-schizoid functioning and restores the plurality to his superego. Orestes models the difficulties inherent in achieving integration between internal phantasy and external reality—or between unconscious needs and desires and conscious aptitudes and actions.

Orestes first appears to the audience in the grips of an idealized fantasy of his father, Agamemnon. Because of his absence from Argos, Orestes had failed to prevent his father’s murder; as a result, Orestes is persecuted by feelings of guilt, which could not be expressed or properly contained (“I was not by, my father, to mourn for your death” [8]) and which has turned round into a desire for vengeance (“Zeus, grant me vengeance for my father’s murder” [16]).⁵⁸ Grief unexpressed and unworked is projected out only to be reabsorbed as persecution, which feeds a murderous passion. The idealized Agamemnon exists alongside the persecutory Clytemnestra, the “cruel, cruel all daring mother” (429–30). But there are costs to Orestes’ blocked grief over Agamemnon. The idealization of his father leads him to dismiss Agamemnon’s ambivalence. For instance, the memory of Orestes’ sister Iphigenia, sacrificed at Aulis by her father, is seemingly repressed. As a corollary, Clytemnestra is demonized; she becomes a “deadly viper” who is “all unworthy” of her deceased husband.

Orestes, according to Klein, is suffering from a delusional state of mind characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position. He is unable to tolerate his grief and his guilt, and he is haunted by persecutory fantasies of heralded punishment should he fail to avenge his father’s death: “Apollo’s oracle … told me to cut them down in their own fashion, turn to the bull’s fury … He said that else I must myself pay penalty … and suffer much sad punishment; spoke of the angers that come out of the ground.… The wrath of the father comes unseen on them to drive them back from altars. None can take them in nor shelter them. Dishonored and unloved by all the man must die at last, shrunken and wasted away in painful death” (270–96).

The weight of these persecutions leads Orestes to put faith in a passage a l’acte that will absolve him of his guilt.⁵⁹ Yet when he has murdered Aegisthus and has turned to confront Clytemnestra the watertight distinctions he has drawn between purity and corruption, justice and evil, begin to be troubled. Clytemnestra begs for her life—“Hold, my son. Oh take pity, child, before this breast where many a time … you would feed” (897)—and suddenly Orestes is at a loss: “What shall I do, Pylades? Be shamed to kill my mother?” (898). This moment of doubt and deliberation may seem incidental because it only takes a brief reminder (“of the oracles … and sworn oaths”) by Pylades to convince Orestes to proceed: “I judge that you win. Your advice is good” (903). But the meaning of the pause becomes clear through its distinction from what has come before and what will follow. Until this point in the trilogy, all violent acts have been justified by an appeal to the gods, and the agents behind the violence use such a pretext to claim blamelessness and innocence. Agamemnon, fresh from genocide at Troy, avoids guilt through his faith that the gods “in one firm cast” had given to him (“the beast of Argos,” a “wild and bloody lion”) the joy of conquest. Clytemnestra, astride her husband’s corpse, was “made glad” by the “sacrament” of Agamemnon’s blood that “spattered” her as she, “in thanks and reverence to Zeus” struck him “with this right hand that struck in the strength of righteousness” (1394–1406). In Klein’s terms, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra each suffer from a persecutory superego, which has grown increasingly malignant through repeated acts of denial.⁶⁰ Moreover, once their deeds are committed, they succumb to manic triumph that serves to seal off the possibilities of culpability and guilt. As Clytemnestra says, “You can praise or blame me as you wish; it is all one to me” (1404). Neither praise nor blame affects a manic self who is incapable of showing regret for her actions and who refuses to acknowledge their implication in the lives of others or to treat those others as anything but one-sided part objects.

Orestes breaks this cycle of denial, even if he carries forward the cycle of violence. Orestes’s moment of doubt—“Hold, my son”—is where unthinking repetition yields to deliberation and public judgment. It marks the repopulation of Orestes’s superego, which had been flattened under persecutory pressures and unbearable guilt.⁶¹ The fantasized “viper” of Clytemnestra is rejoined with the image of the nurturing mother, which had been repressed in order to feed a murderous passion. We can think here of Klein’s analysis of Richard, and the latter’s admission that it is “difficult” with “so many kinds of parents” in his mind.⁶² Orestes, unlike both Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, is able to acknowledge the competing pressures of his multiple identifications. He acts, but it is a self-conscious action in that he understands its costs and consequences. After the deed has been committed, far from absolving himself from punishment and blame, Orestes acknowledges that this “victory is soiled, and has no pride” (1017).⁶³ Orestes does not succumb to manic triumph, à la Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who presume that their acts of violence will set things right once and for all. By contrast Orestes “grieve(s) for the thing done, the death, and all our race” (1017), and the chorus joins the lament: “There is no mortal man who shall turn unhurt his life’s course to an end not marred. There is trouble here. There is more to come” (1018–20).

The heralded trouble, of course, soon arrives in the form of the Furies—“the mind of the past”—who appear and become the main protagonists in The Eumenides. Their presence reminds us that the Oresteia is not only the story of Orestes. In fact, most readings of the trilogy within political theory neglect the narrative arc of Orestes’s microdrama and instead focus on the final scene between the Furies and Athena, which takes place only after Orestes has left the stage. As Klein would have it, however, the final agon between the Furies and Athena is a replaying of Orestes’s struggle for integration. Athena/Athens joined by the Furies represents the mature superego that Orestes has already obtained by acknowledging his guilt and publicly mourning (in concert with the chorus) his loss and the brute fact of loss.

I read the ending somewhat differently than Klein. To me, the negotiation between the Furies and Athena—on the behalf of Athens—shows that Orestes’s individual work of mourning is nested within Athens’ democratic work of mourning. The larger social challenge of recognizing and understanding the presence of terror and trauma is both reflective and partially constitutive of the intersubjective task of integrating the self. The success of the conclusion to the trilogy is not that the Furies/Eumenides have been transformed—after all, they are still terrifying, even if they are given a less terrifying title—but that Athens has, following the example of Orestes, committed itself to seeing the “great good” that can come from the practice of working through terror and trauma.

How does Klein’s interpretation of the Oresteia (and my modifications to it) compare with other readings of the trilogy? Richard Seaford is a strong representative for one prominent line of interpretation, as he reads the conclusion of The Eumenides as an origin myth of the Aeropagus court. The dangerous disorder represented by the Furies has been restrained, and their “eye for an eye” brand of dike has been subordinated to an open process of public adjudication. Athena’s tie-breaking vote and her mollification of the Furies are, for Seaford, reminiscent of the “controlled ambiguity” inherent to ritual, a process whereby “ambiguous power is canalized … the negative elements separated from the positive.”⁶⁴ Emphasizing the transformation of the Furies into “the kindly ones,” Seaford sees the ritualistic procession at the close of the play as signifying that the trilogy’s troubling dilemmas have been successfully remedied: “The questions are indeed answered and the conflicts resolved.”⁶⁵ The audience would leave the festival reassured that the polis could incorporate older practices (and gods) into its new rituals and institutions.

However, it seems that Seaford overstates both the transformation of the Furies and the implications of this transformation. The Furies have been integrated into the polis, but this integration involves not merely their mutation but also that of Athens—the “terror” in their faces has been modified, but only insofar as Athens has accepted this terror and committed to honoring it. Indeed, we see that it is only after Athena has shifted her tactics from force to persuasion that her dispute with the Furies begins to soften. Instead of asking the Furies to “put away” their hatred and anger, she says, “I will bear your angers” (847). Athens has morphed into a holding environment; instead of asking the Furies to give up their claims, Athena offers to integrate them into the structure of the polis: “Do good, receive good, and be honored as the good are honored. Share our country.…” (165). The Furies do not seem reconciled with Athens so much as Athens has reconciled with the Furies. Moreover, the mutual reconciliation is a momentary achievement that must be repeated again and again. Even in the guise of the “Kindly Ones,” should the polis ever return them to a condition of wandering and exile or neglect to honor them properly the Furies retain a right of disturbance. Lastly, the ritualistic resolution at the end of The Eumenides does not appear to subsume or cancel out the tragic denouement that closes the Libation Bearers, where the chorus and Orestes share a scene of public mourning and acknowledge that “there is trouble here … there is more to come.” In light of Orestes’s (and Athens’) attainment of the depressive position, the Eumenides’s claim that “life will give you no regrets” seems dissonant. For that reason, the processional that follows is all the more unsettling.

If Seaford overstates the case for a ritualistic resolution of the dilemmas and conflicts of the drama, Christopher Rocco makes the opposite mistake by overstating the case for irresolvability.⁶⁶ Rocco rightly rejects a “rationalist” reading of the trilogy, one that would see in the conclusion a salutary progression “from chaos to order, darkness to light, perversion to normalcy, miscommunication to mutual understanding and reconciliation.”⁶⁷ For Rocco, the ambiguities in the Oresteia reassert themselves throughout and upset or overturn this progressive narrative. None of the negative forces have been defeated or cancelled out; instead, they’ve been held momentarily to bring about (temporary) relief. For Rocco, then, instead of ritualistic closure, the trilogy models a “democratic politics of disturbance” that “problematizes the sedimentations and accretions of cultural practices and norms that constitute the self and other.”⁶⁸ Aeschylus becomes the first genealogist, and his trilogy “elaborates the contours of a … politics of disturbance that resists the sedimented norms of a consensually achieved self and order even as it provides democratic norms against which to struggle.”⁶⁹

Rocco’s account of the Oresteia is persuasive in its details, but it is compromised by a larger interpretive framework that sees norm and disturbance as necessarily opposed forces. Norms for Rocco exist “to struggle against,” and disturbance is seemingly always a salutary process of undoing oppressive sedimentations of identity. However, a Kleinian view of precarious identity through repeated acts of mourning could not accept such a simple and rigid dichotomy between norm and disturbance. Disturbance is not something that we take to norms in a heroic act of theorizing; disturbance is in the self/polis, and the work of integrating split-off and dangerous elements through a public work of mourning requires norms of speech and action in order to exist and persist.⁷⁰ Instead of focusing on a struggle between norm and disruption, we might instead pursue and practice norms whereby we can recognize and honor the disruptions that are already there. Tragedy, like Kleinian analysis, partially fulfills this function;⁷¹ it was the annually refreshed commitment to breaking through denial and triumph and reestablishing communication with the dangerous, the terrifying, and the unbearable.⁷²

Perhaps Simon Goldhill is correct that any interpretation of the Oresteia that reduces its meaning to a simple message distorts the trilogy’s “democratic paideusis” (culture or education) which emerges from the trilogy’s presentation of contradictions and tensions without the possibility of a finalistic redemption.⁷³ In such a nonreductionist interpretation, Orestes’s microdrama of mourning would gain in importance relative to the ritualistic resolution of The Eumenides, and the Eumenides’s claim that “life will give you no regrets” would be leavened by a depressive awareness of impurity and a commitment to the inevitable regrets accompanying our actions and inactions in the world. Klein’s reading agrees with Goldhill’s insofar as she emphasizes the precariousness of depressive integration heralded by Orestes’s (and Athens’) recognition of the Furies. The appearance of Athena/Athens, joined by the heretofore split-off Furies, as the mature superego for the city is a momentary pause—Hold, my polis—but the opposing votes of the Aeropagus “show that the self is not easily united, that destructive impulses drive one way, love and the capacity for reparation and compassion in other ways. Internal peace is not easily established.”⁷⁴

But can Klein speak not only to the microdramas of reconciliation inherent in interpersonal life but to the contemporary dramas of public mourning such as those described in the chapter 1? In part, Klein sheds light onto these processes because of her insight into the causes and consequences of sociopsychological defenses such as denial, splitting, idealization, and demonization, which inevitably surround scenes of transitional justice and a multitude of other political conflicts.⁷⁵ These defenses not only maintain social divisions or support acts of violence, but, as Robert Meister and others have argued, they also exist within public efforts for reconciliation and forgiveness. Klein gives us a grammar of psychological functioning that can help us to identify when the messy work of mourning is being spurned or avoided. Beyond this diagnostic contribution, however, Klein’s depressive position forms the kernel of a democratic theory of public mourning that emphasizes ambivalence and discord while pursuing a fractious coherence or solidarity. Klein’s theory is both tragic and moral; it provides a sober means of acknowledging the native discord and distance within the self and between self and others, and yet it also sketches out a developmental possibility with both interpersonal and broad social relevance.⁷⁶ Still, Klein herself did not develop the social implications of her theories, leaving it to others to chart this course.