Draft:Medea Complex

• Comment: Clearly notable topic as a WP:BEFORE turns up numerous RSes, but the article needs better sourcing throughout. Much of it is uncited, and it also needs to be rewritten. BuySomeApples (talk) 18:15, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

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As sometimes happens, there are modern terms associated with the actions displayed in ancient works, most famously Freud’s Oedipal and Electra complexes. For the work of Euripides’ play Medea, the modern term of the “Medea Complex” has arisen, namely in law and psychology. This page explores the various ways that societies make use of this term.

Legal

In British law, the Medea Complex may refer to premeditated murder without insanity. This definition of the Medea Complex offers one interpretation of what happens in the play where Medea vacillates between killing her children or committing some other form of revenge against her husband Jason, eventually deciding to kill her children for two reasons:

To get revenge on Jason,

and

To keep another from killing them.

Other societies in different time periods differ in their interpretations of how culpable Medea is because Euripides’ Medea presents a person operating in a morally ambiguous arena. US Law makes a distinction between unprovoked murder and manslaughter under provocation or first degree murder and unpremeditated second-degree murder. Since the play and the mythic tradition hold that Medea's children would have been killed by someone by story’s end, it can be argued that Medea was "saving" her children from a more violent death at the hands of a stranger. Also, of note is how much Jason’s actions exculpate Medea, a non-Greek foreigner and mother of his children, who is under immense pressure because she has lost her marital and financial support after her husband abandons her for a princess of higher pedigree.

Psychological

In psychology this term refers to “a mother’s wish to kill her children as a means of revenge against the father” and differs from the term maternal filicide, which is defined simply as a "child murder by the mother".

Legal and Psychological

An example of the Medea complex in actual court proceedings was seen in Athens, Greece, in 1961. In this case a young American woman murdered her children and attempted suicide. This woman was named the "Medea of Kalamaki" for her actions. Due to the time of this case, it was deemed incredibly difficult for the psychiatrist to pronounce themselves as experts on the field of maternal filicide, as it was a much-understudied subject. It was also described that the additional pressure of a large press coverage added additional layers of difficulty. Due to the large press coverage, it was very difficult for the psychiatrist to attempt to persuade the jury to their view that the woman was in a state of acute psychosis at the time she committed the murders. Ultimately, this proved the prevalence of what was dubbed the "Medea narrative". This narrative which suggests that women who murder their own children do so almost exclusively under premeditated motives.