Heaven, Hell, and the Earth: Infanticide in Seneca’s Hercules

Abstract

The methodology used in the paper combines the traditional philological method of text analysis with methods of interpretation of the object relations school of psychoanalysis. My focus is on the images of self and other expressed in characters’ interactions as well as in poetic metaphors and similes. In the paper I describe several crucial self and object patterns of relationship that are intertwined in various ways. Through the analysis of conflicted self and object relationships, the central conflict of the play is determined as a conflict between two images of emotional dependence. Infanticide, as the dramatic climax of the play, is understood as an attempt to symbolically destroy the children and their mother, who stand for conflicted dependence patterns. The resolution, however, is not a liberation from the struggle between love and hate, but turns out to be another expression of painful dependence, depicted through Hercules’ suffering towards the end of the play. The poetic dynamics of Hercules’ madness seem to come very close to certain psychoanalytic theories of the narcissistic personality structure. Ultimately, in this play Seneca seems to criticize certain forms of pseudo-Stoicism by showing a caricature of the Stoic sage.