Phaedre and Passion in Hippolytus

She felt aggressiveness, uneasiness, and a sense of guilt as a kind of anxiety: ‘obsessional neurosis, the sense of guilt makes itself noisily heard in consciousness; it dominates the clinical picture and the patient’s life as well, and it hardly allows anything else to appear alongside of it. Even in obsessional neurosis there are types of patients who are not aware of their sense of guilt, or who only feel it as a tormenting uneasiness, a kind of anxiety’ (Freud 98). In other words, she felt a sort of malaise and a dissatisfaction of the current state of things. It should be pointed out that religion has never missed a chance to use a sense of guilt and the death is an essential part of the life.

In his works, Friedrich Nietzsche develops a theory that a man cannot live happily as he has nothing to compare happy moments of his life with, and, therefore, he cannot understand all its beauty: ‘When a man finds himself situated in such a way that the world is happy reflected in him, without entailing any destruction or suffering – as on a beautiful spring morning – he can let himself be carried away by the resulting enchantment or simply joy. But he can also perceive, at the same time, the weight and the vain yearning for empty rest implied by this beatitude. At that moment, something cruelly rises up in him that is comparable to a bird of prey that tears open the throat of a smaller bird in an apparently peaceful and clear blue sky’ (235).

Thus, death is an inevitable part of the life and a man is inclined to bring the death nearer as we see in case with Phaedre from ‘Hippolytus’. She has suffered so much that the death seems to her a way out of the situation, an escape from sufferings and pain. Phaedre realizes that it is impossible to satisfy her passion and she is ready to make a leap to the unknown. She is tired to struggle for her love and wants to leave this world and find herself somewhere, where she does not need to struggle, where she will find peace and harmony: ‘I abandon myself to peace, to the point of annihilation. The noises of struggle are lost in death, as rivers are lost in the sea, as stars burst in the night. … I enter into peace as I enter into a dark unknown’ (Nietzsche 237).

Such thoughts and actions lead to a suicide and are the symptoms of psychological deviations called neurotic symptoms. As we discussed in class, Phaedre has a neurosis. According to Sigmund Freud, ‘neurotic symptoms are, in their essence, substitutive satisfactions for unfulfilled sexual wishes’ (103). Her neurotic state is overburdened by an unconscious sense of guilt, which strengthens the symptom using it as a punishment. Besides, she is an example of maximalism: she relapses into opposite conditions and finally, dies as she has no power to bear her passion.