Psychoanalysis and Euripides' Suppliant Women: A Tragic Reading of Politics

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 of love and destruction, 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