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On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother
Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, Oresteia , Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization.
According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's first wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's Oresteia , Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example.
Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text, Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm.
By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront, Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology.
According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's first wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's Oresteia , Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example.
Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text, Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm.
By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront, Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology.
- GenresNonfictionMythology
240 pages, Hardcover
First published August 9, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 17, 2018
“Exactly as in a musical score, it is impossible to understand a myth as a continuous sequence. We cannot read myth as we would read a novel, (ie: line after line, left to right). We have to understand the myth as a totality and discover that the basic meaning of the myth is not conveyed by the sequence of events.” ~Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning
“If we take seriously the implications of Levi-Strauss’ statement about the necessity to read myths together as interrelated variants, then we can begin to see how differential myth analysis (which came out of structural anthropology) can be used to challenge psychoanalysis’ unilateral approach to myth. It will suffice to say here that I am using Levi-Strauss’ point that one cannot read any myth in isolation to reinforce my question: what can and cannot be structured/included in the symbolic economy?” ~Amber Jacobs, On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother
“And that dominant order is not neutral but masculine, so that, for Iragaray, the symbolic order, in which we must all take a place, is essentially the male imaginary, structured and in turn endowed with the status of law: “The symbolic you impose as a universal innocent of any empirical or historical contingency, is your imaginary transformed into an order, into the social.” ~Luce Irigaray, The Poverty of Psychoanalysis in the Irigaray Reader
“Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defence Intellectuals” by Carol Kohn
Carol Kohn “lucidly demonstrates an aspect of the lethal results of the social embodiment, or the acting-out, of unanalyzed phantasies belonging to the male imaginary. Writing the article after she attended a workshop on nuclear weapons, nuclear strategic doctrine, and arms control conducted by distinguished “defense intellectuals,” Kohn shows how the “rational” language of nuclear strategic analysis is blind to its source in unconcscious phantasies arsing from a male wish for parthenogenesis.”
“There is one set of domestic images that demands separate attention – images that suggest men’s desire to appropriate from women the power of giving life and conflate creation and destruction. The bomb project is rife with images of male birth….This idea of male birth and its accompanying belittling of maternity – the denial of women’s role in the process of creation and the reduction of “motherhood” to the provision of nurturance – seems thoroughly incorporated into the nuclear mentality….In light of the imagery of male birth, the extraordinary names given to the bombs that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ash and rubble – “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” – at last became intelligible. These ultimate destroyers were the progeny of the atomic scientists – and emphatically not just any progeny but male progeny. In early tests, before they were certain that the bombs would work, the scientists expressed their concern by saying they hoped the baby was a boy, not a girl – that is, not a dud….The entire history of the bomb project, in fact, seems permeated with imagery that confounds man’s overwhelming technological power to destroy nature with the power to create – imagery that inverts men’s destruction and asserts in its place the power to create new life and a new world. It converts men’s destruction into their rebirth.” ~Carol Kohn, Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defence Intellectuals
“If we take seriously the implications of Levi-Strauss’ statement about the necessity to read myths together as interrelated variants, then we can begin to see how differential myth analysis (which came out of structural anthropology) can be used to challenge psychoanalysis’ unilateral approach to myth. It will suffice to say here that I am using Levi-Strauss’ point that one cannot read any myth in isolation to reinforce my question: what can and cannot be structured/included in the symbolic economy?” ~Amber Jacobs, On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother
“And that dominant order is not neutral but masculine, so that, for Iragaray, the symbolic order, in which we must all take a place, is essentially the male imaginary, structured and in turn endowed with the status of law: “The symbolic you impose as a universal innocent of any empirical or historical contingency, is your imaginary transformed into an order, into the social.” ~Luce Irigaray, The Poverty of Psychoanalysis in the Irigaray Reader
“Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defence Intellectuals” by Carol Kohn
Carol Kohn “lucidly demonstrates an aspect of the lethal results of the social embodiment, or the acting-out, of unanalyzed phantasies belonging to the male imaginary. Writing the article after she attended a workshop on nuclear weapons, nuclear strategic doctrine, and arms control conducted by distinguished “defense intellectuals,” Kohn shows how the “rational” language of nuclear strategic analysis is blind to its source in unconcscious phantasies arsing from a male wish for parthenogenesis.”
“There is one set of domestic images that demands separate attention – images that suggest men’s desire to appropriate from women the power of giving life and conflate creation and destruction. The bomb project is rife with images of male birth….This idea of male birth and its accompanying belittling of maternity – the denial of women’s role in the process of creation and the reduction of “motherhood” to the provision of nurturance – seems thoroughly incorporated into the nuclear mentality….In light of the imagery of male birth, the extraordinary names given to the bombs that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ash and rubble – “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” – at last became intelligible. These ultimate destroyers were the progeny of the atomic scientists – and emphatically not just any progeny but male progeny. In early tests, before they were certain that the bombs would work, the scientists expressed their concern by saying they hoped the baby was a boy, not a girl – that is, not a dud….The entire history of the bomb project, in fact, seems permeated with imagery that confounds man’s overwhelming technological power to destroy nature with the power to create – imagery that inverts men’s destruction and asserts in its place the power to create new life and a new world. It converts men’s destruction into their rebirth.” ~Carol Kohn, Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defence Intellectuals
October 28, 2021
A great book for anyone who wants to supplement and expand their knowledge of psychoanalysis and the use of ancient myths in structuring theory. Rooted in the theoretical framework of Melanie Klein, Jacobs takes us through a psychoanalytic maze of Oresteian secrets and and ancient Greek tragedy. She integrates Zeus' parturition of Metis as the psychic foreclosure function of the naval opening (the umbilical cord scar) as re-told in ancient classical Greek literature as the disconnection from the original maternal body and how that myth helps supply us with evidentiary proof to the manifestation of the paranoid schizoid personality position. She structures this myth in her framework as "psychoanalytic blind spot" possessed by some individuals that eclipses the presence of the maternal body and to which helped to influence the dynastic rule of ancient civilizations masculine rights, continuing through to modern day, of man's proclivity to relegate women to secondary status. She incorporates Zeus' parturition of Metis psychic function that helps explain Aeschylus' Oresteia and the murdered mother who cannot be mourned rooted in this ancient play. This is a different perspective on Andre Green's "dead mother complex."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews