The author outlined assorted conceptions of “madness” across the ages, from antiquity to contemporary times. In dong so, she described attempts at a humanistic approach to the afflicted: the eighteenth-century ”moral healing” movement, derived from the Quaker ideology, the nineteenth-century asylum, i.e. the “great enclosure”, the first half of the twentieth century with Freud and his conception of psychoanalysis and the analytical treatment method. The period in the wake of World War II witnessed the creation of “therapeutic communities” envisaged as a method for curing mental illness. This conception became a point of departure for the reform of mental hospitals in the 1960s in Europe and the USA. The new experiment of the second half of the twentieth century was the emergence of “home treatment teams”, which appears to have been important for producing the present-day situation in which the epoch of the “asylum” - the psychiatric institution - will already become part of the past.
The article aims to examine the tragedies: Ήρακλής μαινόμενος by Euripides and Hercules Furens by Seneca and exactly the different types of the madness, by which the main character is overcome in the above mentioned dramas. Although the article touches also on the issue of the insanity sent to the hero by Hera/ Juno, concentrates especially on the fit of madness, that is here defined as a human madness.
Euripides’ Heracles has drawn the attention of numerous scholars, since Willamowitz’s excellent commentary on the play. The play has been seen as lacking unity, full of contradictions, incoherent, bizzarre even. Later critics tried to show structural unity, especially by analyzing recurrent motifs and ideas. The madness was being explained by Willamowitz, Verrall, Pohlenz, Grube and others with reference to Heracles’ inner process, of a “megalomaniac” character. Such psychological interpretations of madness were widely questioned in the second half of the 20th century, and Heracles himself provoked extreme reactions and opinions of scholars. In the article Heracles’ madness is considered a central theme of the play, expressed both in the fragmented and split structure of it and in the contradictions and bizzarre elements within the tragedy. I used Melanie Klein’s (especially, the concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as well as of primitive defense mechanisms) and her followers’ (especially, Segal’s notes on symbol formation and Bion’s theory of psychotic thinking) theory to show the essentially psychotic character of the play. The dramatis personae, in their behavior and words manifest such psychotic mechanisms as splitting, denial, idealization, projective identification, omnipotent control as well as primitive envy. The gods can be seen as projections of Heracles and other characters, as well as of the common unconscious space of the play (“the analytical third” of the tragedy, to use Thomas Ogden’s concept). The climactic Heracles’ madness is understood as a breakdown of psychotic defense mechanisms, cause by intense, yet split off, envy and by a powerful threat to dependent parts of the self, symbolized in Heracles’ children and wife. The whole tragedy is a way from the world of fantasy, gods, underworld towards more realist world of human beings and their relationships, which in Kleinianism can be conceptualized as a movement from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive one.
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