The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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The rape of Medusa in the temple of Athena:

Aspects of triangulation in the girl

Beth J. Seelig

To cite this article: Beth J. Seelig (2002) The rape of Medusa in the temple of Athena: Aspects
of triangulation in the girl, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83:4, 895-911, DOI:
10.1516/3NLL-UG13-TP2J-927M

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Int. J. Psychoanal. (2002) 83, 895

THE RAPE OF MEDUSA IN THE TEMPLE OF

ATHENA
aspects of triangulation in the girl 1
BETH J. SEELIG, M.D.
1256 Briarcliff Road, N.E. #154, Atlanta, GA 30306, USA—bseelig@learnlink.emory.edu
(Final version accepted 21 Feb 2002)

The relationship between the Greek goddess Athena and her father Zeus, together with
the competitive hostility she displays towards other females, is presented as illustrating
some previously neglected aspects of triangular developmental con icts in the little
girl. Literature on ‘the Oedipus complex in the female’ is reviewed and discussed. The
mythological early histories of both Athena and the female monster Medusa are
examined for the light they can shed on female developmental vicissitudes and resultant
con icts in both women and men. Unconscious split representations of women as
assertive, phallic and dangerous, or alternatively passive, castrated and receptive
result in defensive repudiation of the idea that a woman can be both actively assertive
and also feminine and sexual. Athena’s enraged action of transforming the beautiful
young maiden Medusa into a monster as punishment for the ‘crime’ of having been
raped in her temple is discussed as illustrating an outcome of the lack of resolution of
the little girl’s early triangular con icts.

Keywords: triangulation, oedipal, female, development, sexuality, mythology, Medusa,

Athena, Electra, Persephone.

The psychoanalytic understanding of female
psychosexual development has long been
marked by theoretical disagreement and at
times by heated political rhetoric. Theories
about the nature and role of triangular con-
 icts in female development, as well as what
constitutes female or feminine sexuality, have
been debated.
Concepts of masculinity are easily inte-
grated with images of activity, authority and
power. Such phallic masculinity is generally
respected, although it may also be feared.
Receptivity and femininity have frequently
been equated with passivity and/or weakness.
Passivity and weakness are sometimes re-
garded as attractive feminine qualities, but
are not usually regarded with respect. Active
receptivity and assertiveness are far from
being universally accepted as being norma-
tive components of mature femininity. Myth-
ological stories about the goddess Athena will
be used to illustrate difŽ culties both women
and men have had in integrating femininity
with assertion and aggression. These difŽ cul-
ties relate to triangular developmental issues
in both sexes.

1 An
earlier version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association
in Nice, France in the 26 July 2001 Panel on Gender in the Psychoanalytic Method.

Copyright # Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 2002

896 B. J. SEELIG
Freud found the subject of female psychol-
ogy puzzling. He stated, ‘in general our
insight into these developmental processes
is unsatisfactory, incomplete and vague’.
(1924, p. 179). In his famous exasperated
plea to Princess Marie Bonaparte, he asked,
‘What does a woman want?’ (quoted in Jones,
1953, p. 421). Richards (1999) has reminded
us that he listened to and respected his female
colleagues and was a strong advocate of
equality for women. However, as Fliegel
(1973) described, when he felt that his
cherished psychoanalytic theories were under
direct attack by his erstwhile followers Jones
(1927) and Horney (1926, 1933), particularly
in the area of female psychosexual develop-
ment, he defended his formulations vigor-
ously, even going so far as to categorically
deny the existence of vaginal sensations in
the little girl (Freud, 1933, p. 118), recognised
by Klein (1932).
Considering it inevitable for a young girl to
feel castrated when she learned about the
genital difference between males and fe-
males, Freud regarded penis envy as the
psychological bedrock of the female. This
theory, in combination with his ideas about
the relative weakness of the female superego
(Freud, 1925, 1931, 1933), led to the unfortu-
nate consequence that Freud’s theories were
globally denounced and subsequently disre-
garded by many feminist authors.
In his recent paper on female subjectivity
Hoffman attributes the root of Freud’s pro-
blem in understanding women to the fact that
‘Freud’s philosophic and intellectual roots
include the assumption that subjectivity is to
be considered possible only for men’ (1996,
p. 24). As Dimen stated, ‘Freud’s anatomical
map of a brave new sexual world plots a
passage that begins as though generic to
Homo sapiens but ends in masculinity: in a
failure of nerve, it inscribes things female on
a ‘‘dark continent’’’ (1997, p. 528).
Orgel wrote about Freud’s conviction that
all males must repudiate the feminine. Unable
to accept his own feminine and maternal
identiŽ cations,
he would not gaze upon his mother in her cofŽ n. He
sent Anna to his mother’s funeral. Anna, his female
self, his Athena-Antigone, would be his eyes. She
could bear to look and take his mother in—for him,
as him (Orgel, 1996, p. 46).
Freud’s difŽ culties with femininity and
female sexuality formed a strong precedent
for generations of subsequent psychoanalysts.
His formulations about women seemed to be
clinically conŽ rmed in the analyses of many
women. It was difŽ cult to get beyond the idea
of ‘bedrock’ for many who respected his
authority and may have suffered from similar
unexamined areas of countertransference
blindness in the area of female psychosexual
development. Gradually, however, alternative
formulations have gained recognition and
female development is recognised as separate
and quite distinct from male development,
rather than being regarded as a variant on the
male norm.
Chasseguet-Smirgel was one of the authors
who suggested that penis envy should be seen
as a defensive construct, rather than bedrock.
She focused attention on the girl’s con icted
relationship with her mother.
The girl’s penis envy seems to me not to rest upon her
ignorance of the vagina and her subsequent feelings
of castration . . . but on her need to beat back the
maternal power . . . My experience with women
patients has shown me that penis envy is not an end
in itself, but rather the expression of a desire to
triumph over the omnipotent primal mother through
the possession of the organ the mother lacks, i.e. the
penis. Penis envy seems to be as proportionately
intense as the maternal imago is powerful (1976,
p. 285).
I will return to this formulation in my dis-
cussion of Athena and her relationship with
junior females.
Following Freud’s use of the myth of
Oedipus as the prototype of triangulation in
the little boy, the myth of Electra was
suggested as illustrating the vicissitudes of
triangulation in the developing girl (Jung,
1913). However, Freud’s formulations about
the girl’s regarding herself as a castrated male
 THE RAPE OF MEDUSA IN THE TEMPLE OF ATHENA
led to his strong repudiation of the notion that
the little girl has her own parallel, but distinct
and different ‘Oedipus’ complex to that of the
little boy (Freud, 1931). He stated that only
the boy demonstrated, ‘the fateful combina-
tion of love for the one parent and simultane-
ous hatred for the other as a rival’ (1931, p.
229). He directly denounced the notion of an
‘‘‘Electra complex’’ (Jung’s proposal), which
seeks to emphasize the analogy between the
attitude of the two sexes’ (Freud, 1931, p.
228) and the term dropped out of general use
in the writing of Freudian analysts. Recently,
the idea that the little girl has an intense and
distinct phase of triangulation and that it
should be given a name of its own has
received renewed attention in the psycho-
analytic literature (Halberstadt-Freud, 1998;
Kulish & Holtzman, 1998; Holtzman &
Kulish, 2000). I am suggesting another group
of stories, those involving the Greek goddess
Athena, as providing a useful rich illustration
of some of the difŽ culties faced by the girl as
she struggles with the inevitable con icts
involving loving, hating, sexual and aggres-
sively competitive feelings towards her par-
ents.
Beginning with Freud, many psychoanaly-
tic writers have made extensive use of
mythology to illustrate their psychodynamic
formulations. However, presenting a new
reading of an old myth can always be
questioned. In her book on psychoanalytic
perspectives on metaphoric representations of
women in ancient Greece, duBois (1988)
takes issue with the usual psychoanalytic
reading of the Greek myths involving women.
She contends that ideas of castration and
penis envy were foreign to the ancient Greeks
and are not central to understanding their
mythology. However, one can also argue that
it is useful to employ a myth as illustration,
independent of its origin, and this is my
intent. I do not wish to engage in a dispute
about the culture of the ancient Greeks,
rather, I wish to borrow their robust imagery
as metaphoric illustration of some powerful
psychodynamic issues. In this regard, I agree
897
with Arlow’s perspective on psychoanalysis
and mythology.
Psychoanalysis sees mythology as a concretization in
the form of an unconscious fantasy of the wishes of
childhood. Derivatives of these fantasies are pro-
jected on to some historical, mythological Ž gure of
the past, who in the myth acts out a direct or
symbolic representation of the unconscious wishes
shared in common by the members of the community
who sustain the myth (1982, p. 187).
The myths of Athena and Medusa
The virgin goddess of wisdom Athena,
born from the brow of her father Zeus, is
generally portrayed bearing a spear and wear-
ing the image of Medusa’s head on her shield
or breastplate. She has been regarded (Balter,
1969) as a phallic woman. However, the story
of the conception of Athena makes her a far
more complex and interesting Ž gure.
Athena was originally conceived in the
womb of the goddess Metis, with whom Zeus
had one of his many affairs. However, Zeus
received a prophecy that the child of Metis,
whose name means ‘council’, would be very
powerful. His solution to the problem was to
swallow the pregnant goddess. Subsequently
he gave birth to the child Athena from his
brow.
The image of the snake-haired female
monster Medusa, one of three sisters, the
Gorgons, is familiar to everyone. Medusa’s
hideous face had the property of turning to
stone anyone who gazed upon it. She was
slain by the hero Perseus with the assistance
of Athena and Hermes. Perseus used the
petrifying power of her severed head to
secure his promised bride Andromeda. Athe-
na is later portrayed wearing the visage of
Medusa on her breastplate or shield.
The severed head of Medusa attracted
Freud’s attention. He regarded the hideous
face of Medusa as representing the horrifying
penisless female genital, in particular the
genital of the mother (Freud, 1922). The
multiple snakes of her hair both disguised
898 B. J. SEELIG
and expressed the mother’s terrifying state of
castration. There is, however, a tragic pre-
history of Medusa, not addressed by Freud.
This early history of the monster sheds
another light on her story and expands its
latent meanings.
Medusa was originally a very beautiful
young girl, especially renowned for the
beauty of her hair. Her tragedy began with
her rape in the temple of Athena. Accounts of
who raped her vary, some saying it was Zeus,
others Poseidon, god of the seas and Zeus’s
brother. In the words of Ovid, who used the
Roman names Minerva for Athena and Jove
for Zeus:
Medusa was once renowned for her loveliness, and
roused jealous hopes in the hearts of many suitors. Of
all the beauties she possessed, none was more
striking than her lovely hair. I have met someone who
claimed to have seen her in those days. But, so they
say, the lord of the sea robbed her of her virginity in
the temple of Minerva. Jove’s daughter turned her
back, hiding her modest face behind her aegis: and to
punish the Gorgon for her deed, she changed her hair
into revolting snakes. To this day, in order to terrify
her enemies and numb them with fear, the goddess
wears as a breastplate the snakes that were her own
creation (1955, p. 120 ).
In this story, Athena apparently excuses the
action of her father or father-representative
and blames the victim, turning her into a hid-
eous monster with snakes in place of the
lovely hair that was so attractive to her own
father or his representative.
I will now return to the history of the Greek
goddess Athena and her relationship to her
father Zeus and some other female Ž gures of
Greek mythology, particularly her connection
with Medusa. Like the stories of Electra and
Persephone, discussed later, these myths pro-
vide a useful illustration of some of the
vicissitudes of female development. The story
of the relationship of Athena and Medusa is
especially useful as an illustration of pro-
blems interfering with the development of
mature feminine sexuality in combination
with power or authority. The myth also
illustrates common defences against the fear
of feminine sexuality and power, and the need
to defensively regard any powerful woman as
masculine or phallic. This fear is prevalent in
both men and women.
The story of the rape of Medusa can be
understood as defending against and at the
same time representing, by a process of
decomposition, a story of the forbidden:
father–daughter incest. The daughter is dou-
bly portrayed. She is on the one hand the
intellectual pure Athena and on the other the
sexual temptress/monster Medusa. Athena’s
temple represents her body. The rape of the
virgin in the temple-body of the virgin
goddess represents the de owering of the
daughter by her father. Athena’s rage at the
violation of her temple-body is displaced on
to Medusa, now the degraded and repudiated
repository of the daughter’s forbidden wish
for a sexual relationship with her father.
Athena, one of the virgin goddesses in the
Greek pantheon, is strongly attached to her
father, Zeus. This attachment is represented
as ‘pure’ and asexual. This revered virgin,
without apparent interest in sexuality, can be
regarded as an example of an individual with
severe con ict about her sexuality, who
represses and/or sublimates her sexual drive.
Athena is the Goddess of Wisdom, thus
epitomising ‘asexual’ intellectual prowess.
We need only look at her competitive envy
and hostility towards sexual women, who
represent her own forbidden sexuality, to see
the envious and competitive aggression in-
herent in her incestuous attachment to her
father and rivalry with other females.
Athena can also be regarded as an altruistic
maternal Ž gure, at least towards males. She
may be regarded as exemplifying Anna
Freud’s (1946) concept of altruistic surrender
in her renunciation of sexuality for herself,
and her furthering and enjoying vicariously
the success, both sexual and otherwise, of her
male protégés such as Perseus. Such vicarious
enjoyment of otherwise forbidden activities,
by a process of identiŽ cation with a proxy,
who is assisted in those activities, is a subtype
 THE RAPE OF MEDUSA IN THE TEMPLE OF ATHENA
of ‘con icted altruism’ (Seelig & Rosof,
2001). Perseus is helped by the goddess to
obtain the powerful head of Medusa with
which he defeats his foes and wins both his
bride, Andromeda, and his kingdom. This
male-identiŽ ed ‘Daddy’s girl’, born from her
father’s head, is both her father’s agent and
the patroness of chosen male proxies. In this
context, she is the patron goddess of Athens,
centre of classic Greek culture.
Having sprung in full battle costume from
the brow of her father Zeus and bearing a
spear, the goddess is ‘Athena Parthenos’, a
father’s phallic daughter without a mother.
The parthenogenesis is complicated, however,
by Zeus having originally incorporated his
pregnant consort Metis. In this sequence,
male fear and envy of woman’s procreative
powers leads to incorporative and aggressive
action. This aspect of the myth will be
discussed in greater detail later. Balter refers
to Athena as the benign phallic mother in
contrast to the malignant phallic mother,
Medusa.
She is the warrior-maiden goddess who always wears
a helmet and carries a spear. She will never accept a
male as lover or mate. She has many benign qualities,
though she is ferocious in combat. It is signiŽ cant
that Perseus gives the Medusa-head to Athena. This
act reverses the symbolic castration of the phallic
mother; it represents the return of the penis to the
phallic mother, now benign (1969, p. 223).
However, Balter neglects Athena’s destruc-
tiveness towards potentially competitive wo-
men. In this regard, she is far from benign.
She cannot tolerate competition from other
women. Her anger at Paris for having chosen
Aphrodite over her as the most lovely of the
goddesses leads to her helping the Greeks de-
stroy the city of Troy. A patient with such ex-
treme envy and narcissistic rage would be
recognised as showing clear evidence of her
pathological narcissism. Athena could not get
revenge directly on Aphrodite, who is also a
goddess, her equal. She wreaks her ven-
geance on Aphrodite’s protégés, Troy and all
its people. However, when faced with compe-
899
tition from mortal young women (daughter-
Ž gures) she is directly aggressive. I have al-
ready described Athena’s destructive compe-
titiveness with the young Medusa and her
subsequent role in the decapitation of her for-
mer beautiful young rival by the hero Perseus.
Another example of Athena’s aggression to-
wards young female competitors is her rela-
tionship to Arachne, who dared to challenge
her supremacy as a weaver, which I discuss
below.
The virgin goddess Athena is forever con-
nected to her father Zeus. Having been born
from his brow, she need not recognise a
maternal rival for his affection. Her male-
identiŽ cation and resultant pattern of helping
junior males in their struggles, while en-
viously destroying potential female rivals, is
nowhere clearer than in her relationship with
the unfortunate Medusa. After she assists
Perseus in slaying Medusa so that he can use
her severed head as a weapon, she places its
image upon her own shield. Just as her father
both protected himself from female power
and incorporated it by swallowing her
mother, she claims the powerful attributes of
Medusa for her own; having earlier made her
rival hideous, she destroys her and takes her
power for herself.
As has been discussed, after Medusa’s
decapitation by the hero Perseus, the image of
her severed head is placed upon the shield of
Athena to frighten the enemies of the god-
dess. Athena, depicted with the face of
Medusa on her protective shield, is two-faced.
The fearsome split-off and repudiated face of
female sexual power, denied as being her own
attribute, is displaced but still carried by
Athena. The purity and virginity of the god-
dess is defended by her other (sexual) face, a
hideously transformed representation of the
female genital.
The symbol of horror is worn upon her dress by the
virgin goddess Athena. And rightly so, for thus she
becomes a woman who is unapproachable and repels
all sexual desires—since she displays the terrifying
genitals of the Mother (Freud, 1922, pp. 273–4).
900 B. J. SEELIG
A detail of the myth, as narrated by Ovid,
underlines the identity of the two female
Ž gures. Jove’s (Zeus’s) daughter hides her
face behind her aegis to avoid seeing the rape
of Medusa. Later Medusa’s likeness is placed
upon the aegis. The faces of Athena and
Medusa are on opposite sides of the same
protective shield.
Athena and Arachne
Adams explores the myth of Athena and
Arachne and that of Athena and Medusa in
connection with creative challenge in wo-
men. She suggests that the Arachne myth
illustrates the dangers for the daughter when
she competes with her mother in the area of
creativity. As told by Ovid, the young
Arachne was very proud of her outstanding
ability as a weaver and made the serious
error of challenging Athena to a weaving
competition. Her skill was so great that her
product rivalled that of the goddess. As
punishment, Athena turned Arachne into a
spider.
Athena owes her possession of Medusa’s head to her
intelligence, which is appropriate to her role as the
goddess of wisdom. It was her advice to Perseus—to
use the indirection of Medusa’s image re ected in his
shield to avoid looking at her—that made it possible
for him to slay Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon. The
male hero Perseus, who, in turn, renounced the
regressive implications of Medusa by giving her head
to Athena, thus carried out Athena’s wise advice. The
pervasive appeal of the Gorgon’s power is evidenced
by its traditional use as an armour or shield device
throughout Western Europe—as if the wearer tri-
umphs over his enemy with the aid of Medusa’s
petrifying glance. Unlike Perseus, Arachne fails to
renounce her childhood attachments and follow
Athena’s advice. As a result, rather than proŽ t from
Athena’s wisdom as Perseus did, Arachne insists on
pursuing the competition (Adams, 1990, p. 598).
In this reading, the (bad) competitive
feelings reside in the junior female Arachne.
Athena is not described as competitive. How-
ever, it is she who avenges herself by
transforming the unfortunate young woman
into a spider. The spider is, like Medusa,
frequently regarded as a Ž gure of horror.
Additionally, the multiple legs of the spider
are much like the multiple snakes of Medu-
sa’s hair and the spider has long been
regarded as symbolic of the bad mother
(Abraham, 1923) and as a ‘polyphallic’
creature, symbolising the castrated female
genital (Flügel, 1924). Thus, Athena trans-
forming her rival into a spider is another
version of the transformation of the young
Medusa. In the case of Arachne, her success-
ful effort to surpass the goddess in weaving is
unacceptable, while in the case of Medusa,
the young girl’s success in attracting her
father is severely punished. In both cases, the
junior female victim of the older woman’s
hostile competitiveness is blamed and se-
verely punished for her success.
Electra, Clytemnestra and
Agamemnon
The term ‘Electra complex’ comes from
the story of Electra, daughter of Agamemnon,
leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War. I am
using the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1984) as my
source for this myth. Clytemnestra is Aga-
memnon’s wife and Electra’s mother. Having
taken a lover during Agamemnon’s long
absence, Clytemnestra murders her husband
on his return. She has several reasons for
murderous rage at her husband. He had
previously sacriŽ ced another daughter, Iphi-
genia, to gain a favourable wind for the Greek
assault on Troy to recapture the abducted
Helen at the beginning of the Trojan War.
Also, he returned from the war with a
concubine, the Trojan prophetess Cassandra,
who is also killed by Clytemnestra. As the
story is generally told, Electra in turn became
murderously enraged at her mother because
of the murder of her father by her mother and
her mother’s lover. She plots the death of her
mother, inciting her brother Orestes to do the
deed.
 THE RAPE OF MEDUSA IN THE TEMPLE OF ATHENA
In the early years of psychoanalysis some
psychoanalytic authors followed Jung (1913)
in regarding the myth of Electra as the female
equivalent of the Oedipus myth in the male
child. The term ‘Electra complex’ was used.
However, after Freud’s vigorous condemna-
tion of the use of the term, it virtually
disappeared from subsequent mainstream
psychoanalytic literature. More recently,
however, the Electra complex has been gra-
dually regaining popularity.
In a paper on psychosexual development in
the girl, Parens (1990) re ects on the Electra
complex in a footnote. He suggests more
extensive examination of clinical material in
girls before ‘Electra complex’ should sup-
plant the expression ‘Oedipus complex in the
girl’. Again in a footnote, Tang and Smith
state in connection with their paper on
triangular con icts in various cultures, ‘In
this chapter, we consider only the Oedipus
complex involving the male child. A similar
analysis can of course be made for the Electra
complex’ (1996, p. 562n.).
In a recent paper, Halberstadt-Freud argues
for the use of Electra as a paradigm for
female psychosexual development. In her
discussion of Freud’s rejection of the Electra
complex, she suggests that Freud’s lesser
empathy for girls led to his insistence that it
is only the male child who feels the painful
combination of passionate love for one parent
with concomitant hatred of the other. She
goes further, saying, ‘the Electra complex
describes the much more fateful combination
of love and hatred for the same parent and
seems particularly applicable to the girl’
(1998, p. 46).
Persephone, Demeter and Hades
Spitz (1991), FairŽ eld (1994), Tyson
(1996) and Kulish & Holtzman (1998) regard
the myth of Persephone as being most helpful
in illustrating the oedipal conŽ guration of the
little girl. The myth is widely known and
reported in many forms. In this brief descrip-
901
tion, I am following Kulish & Holtzman
(1998) by employing The Homeric Hymn to
Demeter (Foley, 1994). In the myth of Perse-
phone and her mother Demeter, the young
girl, at this time called Kore or maiden, is
gathering  owers in a meadow and is kid-
napped by Hades who is ruler of the under-
world and brother of Zeus and Demeter.
Hades takes Kore, thereafter called Perse-
phone, to his underground kingdom of the
dead where she grieves for the loss of her
mother. At the same time her grieving and
enraged mother Demeter removes her bles-
sing of fecundity from the world, plunging it
into winter. Eventually, Persephone is re-
turned to Demeter and winter ends. However,
Persephone has eaten some pomegranate
seeds while she was in the underworld and, as
a result, she must spend seven months below
ground with Hades each year. This is the
origin of the seasons. Winter is visited upon
the earth as a punishment by the mother,
Demeter, for the loss of her daughter, and
spring comes as the mother’s gift when the
mother–daughter dyad is reunited each year.
In her paper on the ‘the Kore complex’
FairŽ eld suggests that the myth of Demeter
and her daughter Kore, later called Perse-
phone, is an excellent depiction of the early
history of the little girl. She says:
If the relationship of a mother and a female child is
the central motif in the myth, this is because, where
children are raised in nuclear families by mothers,
the pre-oedipal child of either sex experiences itself
as feminine in primary maternal identiŽ cation: it is
thus not, as Freud (1925) would have it, a little male,
but rather a little female: a kore (1994, p. 249).
She goes on to differentiate the difŽ culties
traversed by the male and female child as
follows:
oedipal con ict may tend to be especially well
deŽ ned in the boy, with his more acute castration
anxiety; the girl, however, facing the challenge
of separating from her mother while remaining
identiŽ ed with her, is the rapprochement-subphase
child, the kore, par excellence, representing the child
902 B. J. SEELIG
of either sex struggling both to escape and to retain
its feminine identiŽ cation with its mother (p. 249).
Spitz emphasises the triadic aspects of the
myth. She points out that in some versions of
the story, ‘this sweet-smelling  ower, the
narcissus, is placed before Persephone as a
lure by her father Zeus on behalf of his
brother Hades’ (1991, p. 161). Further, she
reminds us that:
on this ‘oedipal’ level, the plot follows the paradigm
articulated by Lévi-Strauss (1969) who, in addition
to analyzing the structures of myth, theorized kinship
as casting women in the role of a medium of
exchange between men—a perspective that Freud
himself did not precisely adopt but which might have
served him well. In the ‘Dora’ case, as has been
much remarked, his lack of attention to this dimen-
sion of the material caused him to become in fact one
of the very men among whom Dora was passed (See
In Dora’s Case, Bernheimer and Kahane, 1985)
(Spitz, 1991, p. 162).
Kulish & Holtzman (1998) regard the myth
of Demeter and Persephone as an excellent
illustration of the speciŽ cally female Oedipus
complex and suggest renaming the Oedipus
complex in the female after Persephone. They
underline the incestuous nature of the rape of
Persephone by her uncle Hades and their
subsequent marriage, symbolically the union
of a father and daughter. The ongoing tie of
mother and daughter is emphasised in most
psychoanalytic readings of the myth. Kulish
& Holtzman have highlighted ‘the girl’s
defensive abdication of her own agency and
ownership over her sexual desires in order to
preserve a closeness with the mother’ (1998,
p. 66). While they agree with Chodorow
(1978) that the task of separating from the
primary maternal object while identifying
with her makes the task of separation between
mother and daughter more difŽ cult than it is
between mother and son, they point out that it
does not follow that the girl’s resolution of
her ‘Persephone complex’ need be any less
deŽ nite or mature than the boy’s resolution of
his Oedipus complex. They argue persua-
sively in favour of abandoning the terms
‘Oedipus complex’ and ‘oedipal phase’ when
attempting to describe the development and
con ictual issues of girls and women. In a
later paper, Holtzman and Kulish stress that,
in many female patients:
passionate sexuality, especially with a ‘forbidden’
male, is opposed by the mother. Sexuality is seen as
belonging to the mother and not to the girl. This
perception produces the striking need in the girl to
compartmentalize intrapsychic representations of a
sexual and nonsexual self. We view this compartmen-
talization primarily as defensive, in the interest of
sustaining the tie to the mother while entering into an
erotized relationship with the father. Thus passions
and sexuality are relegated to a secret part of the self,
separate from mother (2000, p. 1431).
Triangulation in the female
Electra’s father Agamemnon, like Perse-
phone’s father Zeus, is absent during her
childhood. He is away Ž ghting the Trojan
War. Her rage at her mother has been
generally read as being in response to her
mother taking a lover and killing her father,
with the emphasis on the murder of Agamem-
non. However, Electra’s rage began long
before her father’s murder. As she says to her
brother Orestes, ‘We’re auctioned off, drift
like vagrants now. Mother has pawned us for
a husband, Aegisthus, Her partner in her
murdering’ (Aeschylus, 1984, p. 183). In
these words, Electra expresses her fury at
having been rejected by her mother. Her
connection to her absent father is not the
primary reason she sought revenge on her
mother, as is also suggested by Halberstadt-
Freud (1998). Clytemnestra’s earlier crime is
neglect of her children. Aeschylus uses the
children’s nurse to tell of the mother’s neglect.
Electra’s rage originates in her unfulŽ lled
desire for her abandoning mother, rather than
in thwarted sexual longing for her absent
father who was off Ž ghting the war against
Troy.
The Persephone myth can be read convin-
 THE RAPE OF MEDUSA IN THE TEMPLE OF ATHENA
cingly, as it has been by Kulish & Holtzman
(1998), as depicting the girl’s sexual love for
her father con icting with her attachment to
her mother. When she eats the pomegranate
seeds, she symbolically unites with Hades
sexually. As a result, she must return to him
every year. She shuttles between her mother
and her husband, who also represents her
father. The girl’s forbidden desire for sexual
fulŽ lment with her father is portrayed by rape
by his proxy. All direct sexual desire is
attributed to the male. Persephone’s own
desire is represented as oral only. In the male-
dominated Greek culture this form of female
desire might have been less threatening.
According to the myth, Persephone knows
that if she eats anything while she is in the
realm of Hades, she will have to stay. There-
fore, from her eating the seeds of the
pomegranate, we can infer that, at least in
part, she wanted to be forced to remain with
him. Her vaginal hunger for the seed(s) of
Hades is represented and disguised by her
oral hunger for the seeds of the pomegranate.
Athena and Demeter are both powerful
goddesses. They both represent maternal
Ž gures. They are also sisters, daughters of
Zeus. However, unlike Athena, Demeter is a
mother. Her daughter Persephone is her
brother Zeus’s child. Both Persephone and
Medusa are raped by father-surrogates, but
Demeter does not blame Persephone for
having been raped as Athena blames the
victimised Medusa. Persephone is regarded
as virginal and blameless until she eats the
pomegranate seeds.
The story of Medusa in the temple of
Athena depicts the dilemma of the oedipal
daughter from another perspective to that of
Demeter and Persephone, in which the attach-
ment to the mother is the primary focus.
Medusa, like Persephone, is attractive to her
father. However, unlike Persephone who
keeps her mother’s love, by a process of
projection Medusa becomes a hideous mon-
ster to her envious mother. In the case of
human Medusas and Athenas, the mother’s
sexual possession of the father is regarded as
903
monstrous by her daughter. Mother and
daughter can agree that there is a sexual
monster in this story and that she is female.
However, the two disagree passionately about
which of them is the monster. From the
perspective of the Athena-daughter, who has
successfully repressed her sexual desire for
her father, Mother’s sexual relationship with
him is horrifying and disgusting. Her sexual
face is hideous in the eyes of her ‘pure’
daughter. Similarly, in the eyes of the narcis-
sistic Athena-mother, the daughter’s burgeon-
ing sexuality is hideous. She is the Medusa.
The male Ž gure in these mythological
stories is depicted as a rapist god, in an
incompletely successful effort to delegate all
sexual desire and aggression to the male.
However, although a rapist, he is regarded as
entitled to satisfy his sexual desires, even
forcefully. In the Medusa myth, he has been
seduced by the power of female sexual
attractiveness and is not to be condemned for
succumbing to her allure. She is entirely to
blame for attracting his desire. In this way,
the male is also protected from female
condemnation. Paradoxically, he is also re-
garded as weaker, unable to master his own
passions and thus less responsible than the
perŽ dious Medusa.
Athena and Medusa can be viewed as
representing aspects of one person. So long
as the maturing daughter remains virginal
and submissive to maternal authority within
her mother’s temple-body (fused with the pre-
oedipal mother) she is safe. However, when
sexual maturity makes her attractive to and
interested in men and she separates from her
mother, she becomes a threat to her mother.
In this situation she projects her sexual and
aggressive impulses. It is not she who wishes
to have the sexual attention of her father; it is
he who rapes her. It is not she who aggres-
sively separates from and competes with the
mother she envies; it is the envious mother
who punishes her for her sexuality. Female
sexual maturity can, therefore, result in the
transformation from lovely maiden to hide-
ous monster. It is well known that both
904
separation-individuation and triangulation
con icts between mother and daughter are
more complicated and often stormier than
between mother and son (Chodorow, 1978;
Tyson, 1994, 1996).
Gender and power
In the reading of the myth I am presenting,
Athena represents asexual and intellectual
femininity and the Medusa image represents
sexual and aggressive femininity and power.
In the generally accepted accurate, but in-
complete, reading in the analytic literature
both images have been regarded as being
alternative aspects of the phallic woman
(Abbott, 1969; Balter, 1969; Adams, 1990).
The monster’s physical characteristics give a clue to
her psychological signiŽ cance. She has snake-hair
and protruding eyes, tongue, and teeth. All these
show a phallic quality. Her ability to petrify, that is,
render men stiff, also has phallic—and malignant—
signiŽ cance (Balter, 1969, p. 222).
In this interpretation, which follows Freud
(1922), petriŽ cation represents castration
through representation by its opposite. Thus,
Medusa can be regarded as a maternal imago
of the phallic period of child development,
especially in societies in which strength and
power are regarded as male attributes. How-
ever, it is not the only meaning of these
symbols of female power. As Adams has
suggested, ‘the petrifying glance (of Medusa)
resonates with an even earlier developmental
period’ (1990, p. 598).
In Adams’s reading of the myths of Athena
and Arachne and Medusa, we see the ease
with which the male Ž gures are able to accept
the beneŽ t of Athena’s wisdom and the
difŽ culty faced by young women such as
Arachne in accepting her advice. Perseus and
the subsequent knights wearing the image of
Medusa on their shields have not suffered the
girl’s more intense con ict over separation
from and competition with the powerful
maternal image. Perseus has no need to
B. J. SEELIG
challenge Athena. He can accept her gui-
dance and protection as gifts from the good
mother. However, Arachne claims her ability
to weave as her own, refusing to accept
subordination to the goddess-mother. This is
the quandary the little girl Ž nds herself in as
she struggles to separate from, while identify-
ing with, her mother. To accept maternal
authority and superiority during this process
can threaten the development of a coherent
identity that is independent of Mother. Athe-
na is like many excessively narcissistic
mothers who cannot accept their daughters’
independence. She employs a potion made by
the witch Hecate to vengefully turn Arachne
into a spider when the girl insists on continu-
ing to compete with her in the art of weaving.
As in the Medusa myth, the ‘bad mother’
aspect of Athena is split off and projected on
to another female Ž gure, the witch. Athena
only uses the destructive potion (bad poiso-
nous milk from the witch-mother). The
ability to make it belongs to a completely
separate hated and feared image of the
mother. This allows the image of Athena to
remain benign, despite her malignant compe-
titive action.
Medusa has been widely regarded as
representing the negative aspects of the
mother. Miller (1958) suggested that the
hideous face of Medusa can represent projec-
tion on to the mother of the daughter’s ugly,
evil and hostile impulses, an expression of
competitive wishes. More recently, Herman
stated,
Must every Kore not stand in relentless opposition to
this entangling aspect of the mother who would wind
her coils about her and never let her go? And indeed,
it was Athene who, when the Medusa deŽ les her
temple with her lecherous seductions, changed the
hair of the offender into coiling snakes and serpents,
as a just punishment for her vile habits of the swamp
(1999, p. 55).
She goes on to tell us that when Demeter was
looking for her abducted daughter in the guise
of an old woman, she wore the mantle of Me-
dusa and was described as ‘the Black One’,
 THE RAPE OF MEDUSA IN THE TEMPLE OF ATHENA
Demeter Erynis. In this reading of the myth,
the equation of Medusa with the bad mother
is very clear. In contrast, duBois states, ‘The
myth of Medusa, is a myth of fear of women,
fear of their archaism, their self-sufŽ ciency,
their buried power’ (1988, p. 92).
The worship of Athena goes hand in hand
with a fear and devaluation of the sexual and
powerful woman represented by Medusa.
Persephone is saved from the devaluation
because she is regarded as being the victim of
male lust. Medusa is not only attractive to
males, but the suggestion is clear that she
enjoys the sexual act. Such enjoyment and
success cannot go unpunished by the envious
Athena.
Authority and power are abstractions that
need not be regarded as inherently gendered.
However, there are gender differences in the
development and expression of authority. In
his paper on the development of authority in
females and males, Hanly rejects the idea of a
neat, gender-based separation of authority
functions. The dichotomy—maternal author-
ity/desire and paternal authority/law—is as
inadequate to the role of the father as it is to
the role of the mother’ (1996, p. 90). In
differentiating male and female superego
development in the small child, he goes on to
say:
The mother, whose cunning is powerful enough to
cast a spell upon the father which the small oedipal
girl can see with her own eyes, is certainly able to
cast a mortifying evil spell upon her. It is perhaps for
this reason that it is primarily the fear of the loss of
love that gives the girl’s conscience the authority to
exact obedience from her, leaving guilt in a second-
ary place—whereas guilt is primary in the boy, with
fear of the loss of love secondary (p. 94).
We could introduce Athena/Medusa into
Hanly’s statement quite easily. The ‘small
oedipal girl’ regards the mother who casts her
(sexual) spell on her beloved father as the evil
Medusa. On the other hand, if the mother per-
ceives her little daughter’s competitiveness
for Father’s love, she may well condemn the
girl as the evil sexual temptress, the danger-
905
ous Medusa. In this everyday drama, both
mother and daughter agree that there is a dan-
gerous competitive sexual rival for Father’s
affection. They disagree only about which of
them is Medusa.
There is a group of Athena-like women
familiar to psychoanalysts. These intellectual
successful women can be quite nurturing,
especially to male students, peers and even
superiors. An Athena-woman can be nurtur-
ing to younger women as well, as long as her
own superiority is unquestioned by her junior.
However, competition from women peers,
who are often former students or protégés,
claiming equality or superiority may result in
intense hatred and destructive retaliation.
This is particularly the case when the intellec-
tual rivalry is combined with rivalry for the
favour of a revered senior male mentor. In
such cases, the junior rival is regarded with
hatred and fear. By the process of projective
identiŽ cation, she becomes the repository of
the competitive envy and hatred and is
regarded as Medusa. Reciprocally, the junior
female former follower, now rival, generally
regards her erstwhile maternal nurturer as
having been transformed into a hideous,
envious and competitive monster.
The developing small girl, Athena-like,
may protect her idealised father, who is the
chief of her individual intrapsychic pantheon,
her Zeus, from her own aggression. She does
this by turning her aggression against her
own sexuality, repudiating this portion of
herself. If we regard Athena and Medusa as
split part-representations of the same indivi-
dual, this action represents aggression direc-
ted against the split-off sexual part-self. In
this reading of the myth, Athena represents
the sexually repressed intellectual ‘pure’
daughter and Medusa represents the sexually
aware daughter, temptress of the father. This
formulation is consistent with that of
Chasseguet-Smirgel (1976) quoted earlier.
Anna Freud (1958) wrote about the phenom-
enon of asceticism in adolescents who re-
nounce their sexual strivings to preserve the
tie to the forbidden object. The asexual
906 B. J. SEELIG
Zeus-identiŽ ed Athena can be regarded as
illustrating this tie between the ascetic
daughter and her powerful father. Addition-
ally, this defensively driven asceticism can
also preserve the relationship with the
mother, as has been discussed in connection
with Kulish & Holtzmann’s (1998) reading of
the myth of Persephone.
Green wrote:
the fact that aggression in the boy is turned outwards
may correspond to the fact that his genital organs are
external. In the female, the internal location of her
genitals may be related to the internal orientation of
aggression. Internal orientation of aggressive drives
and the inhibitory retention that follows have many
consequences; among others, it may represent a
permanent danger to object-cathexes (the latter being
continually threatened with destruction or damage)
and a protective reinforcement of some narcissistic
cathexes alike (1972, p. 206).
Athena’s temple represents her interior geni-
tals. The repudiation of, and assault on the
sexually attractive Medusa, represents turning
aggression away from her god/father and ex-
pressing it by an attack on the devalued femi-
nine sexual aspect of herself, personiŽ ed as
the de owered maiden/monster. The reinfor-
cement of the narcissistic fantasy of idealised
desexualised intellectual union with the god/
father is gained at the expense of the repudia-
tion as hideous and concomitant sacriŽ ce of
satisfying genital sexuality.
From a male perspective, Athena must
remain a virgin and phallic so that, although
very powerful, she is not a threat to men.
Being female, but carrying a spear as well as
bearing the likeness of the head of Medusa on
her shield, she reassures the men that,
although she possesses power, this power is
inherently a phallic attribute and is not truly a
female power. By remaining a virgin, she
renounces female sexual pleasure and power.
She can be worshipped by all men without
the threat that she will give her sexual favours
exclusively to any one male. In this way, male
competitive strivings are avoided. Her repu-
diation of female sexuality is linked to her
phallic powers. She is not only the Goddess
of (phallic) Wisdom; she is also Goddess of
War.
The desire to have everything
The envy by one sex of the powerful
attributes of the other leads to serious difŽ -
culties. Kubie ventured to say, ‘Out of early
preconscious and guiltless identiŽ cations and
misidentiŽ cations, rivalries, envies, hostili-
ties, and loves grow many unconscious
drives, among which the drive to become
both sexes is one of the most self-destroying’
(1974, p. 353). This envious desire to have
everything, which Kubie elevated to the
position of drive, can lead to abuses of power
on the part of both men and women. It is
beyond the scope of this paper to review the
extensive literature on women’s envy of the
penis and of the male position in society.
However, Green’s interpretation of the myth
of Hercules spinning at the feet of Omphale
is interesting in this context.
We Ž nd here a typically feminine wish to have
constantly at her side the man of her desire in a
double role—protecting and virile like the father, and
at the same time being used as if he were the mother.
Man is feminised here, not so much because the
woman wants to castrate him but because she wants
to be sure of his loving, maternal, reassuring and
undangerous role. The object here is neither external
nor internal, but at a point where the two meet. The
ancient Greeks display once more their deep intuition
of the meaning of myths; ‘Omphale’ is related to
omphalos, which meant both ‘navel’ and ‘umbilical
cord’ (Delcourt, 1955, pp. 144, 150) (in Green, 1972,
p. 208).
Green’s reading of the myth focuses on the
gratiŽ cation for the female who is able to
have a relationship with a feminised, but still
strong, protective male. Other authors (Feni-
chel, 1930; Chiland, 1998) have utilised the
myth of Hercules and Omphale as an illustra-
tion of the transvestite fantasy of a phallic
woman. However, just as the myth represents
 THE RAPE OF MEDUSA IN THE TEMPLE OF ATHENA
the man inside a woman, it can equally well
be read as representing the woman inside the
man. Just as the woman ‘wants to be sure of
his loving, maternal, reassuring and undan-
gerous role’ (Green, 1972, p. 206), the
fantasy of the phallic woman (Hercules in
Omphale’s clothing and Omphale wearing the
lion skin of the hero) reassures the male that
he is protected from castration and that he
will be protected by a benign powerful
woman. Envy and destructiveness are kept at
bay by the fantasy that everyone has every-
thing, a fantasy similar to Mayer’s ‘everyone
must be just like me’ (1985).
The birth of Athena is an example of the
desire to have everything or be both sexes on
the part of a male. Zeus has swallowed
Athena’s pregnant mother Metis (Grant &
Hazel, 1995), taking this action to protect
himself from the threat of female power. This
reading of the myth is consistent with Lax
(1997) in her paper on the relatively ne-
glected topic of boys’ envy of the procreative
power of the mother, Ž rst described by Klein
(1921). This male envy of female attributes,
especially their procreativity, has received
less recognition by psychoanalytic authors
than the parallel envy female children have of
the penis, until relatively recently. Both forms
of envy can be regarded as subtypes of the
desire to have everything. Athena is trans-
formed from the womb-child of Metis, herself
considered very wise, to Zeus’s brain-child.
By swallowing his pregnant consort, Zeus
incorporates and transforms the power of
female intellectual and physical fertility into
a male attribute, simultaneously protecting
himself from future threat by his powerful
warrior-goddess daughter. She is henceforth
an extension of his phallic power. Male envy
of woman’s power to give birth to babies can
be both expressed and defended against by
transformation into the desire to give birth to
ideas, which is possible to both sexes.
2 See
Dahl (1996) for a reconsideration of penis envy as a complex layered compromise formation, different in
adult women than in girls. Also see Fast (1979).
907
The power of creative thought is symbo-
lised by the goddess Athena, but is often
regarded as being predominantly a male
attribute. Women in predominantly male
groups often complain that they are rarely
given credit for their ideas. The typical
sequence described is: a woman voices an
original idea or suggestion. It is initially
ignored, but later adopted by the group, with
one of the male members of the group taking
the credit for origination of the notion, just as
Zeus swallowed the pregnant Metis and gave
birth to Athena himself. The myth directly
attributes the orally aggressive behaviour to
Zeus’s fear of the power inside the female
Metis. By swallowing both mother and child
in one gulp, he takes the potential power of
his unborn child into himself and simulta-
neously acquires the envied female power of
giving birth to children. In this behaviour, we
see the drive to become both sexes (Kubie,
1974) expressed in undisguised fashion by a
male.
Conclusion
Freud was an astute observer. However, as
has been discussed, he made the error of
considering a common neurotic compromise
to represent the feminine norm, requiring no
further analysis. 2 Adherence to a model of
female development that is based on an
incomplete understanding of female psycho-
sexual development can encourage counter-
transference-based difŽ culties in hearing and
understanding clinical material, and subse-
quent difŽ culty analysing both female and
male patients. Kulish (1986), Tyson (1994),
Mayer (1995), Basseches et al. (1996),
Dorsey (1996), Frenkel (1996), Lax (1997)
and Hoffman (1999) are among those who
have recently contributed to our growing
908 B. J. SEELIG
understanding of female development and
female psychology.
Kulish & Holtzman (1998) are correct in
saying that it is problematic to use male-
based metaphors and terms such as ‘Oedipus
complex’ to describe women, as doing so can
contribute to perpetuating the view that male
psychodynamics are the norm, with the
implication that female development is a
variation on a male theme. This author agrees
that as long as we use ‘oedipal’ as our verbal
shorthand for this crucial phase in the
development of girls as well as boys, we
continue to increase the risk of countertrans-
ference denial of the developmental differ-
ences between the sexes.
Numerous authors since Freud such as
Hartmann (1958) and Arlow (1979) have
warned against allowing any theoretical
frame to become a Procrustean bed. As
Grossman recently wrote:
A useful theory to some extent narrows the Ž eld of
observation even as it directs attention to relevant
observations. As we know, chance favors the pre-
pared mind, or as an old witticism says: ‘I never
would have seen it if I hadn’t believed it’ (1995, p.
888).
It is my hope that this psychoanalytic
reading of Greek mythology will contribute
to furthering our efforts to understand analy-
tically and treat our patients. All human
beings have struggled with the complex
psychological sequelae of their own triangu-
lation experiences. The power of these early
experiences is re ected in the illustrative
power and evocative nature of these myths,
even thousands of years after they were Ž rst
told.
Translations of summary
Die Beziehung zwischen der griechischen Göttin
Athene und ihrem Vater Zeus und zugleich ihre
konkurrierende Feindseligkeit, die sie anderen
Frauen gegenüber zeigte, wird hier vorgestellt, um
einige bisher vernachlässigte Aspekte der triangulä-
ren Entwicklungskonikte bei dem kleinen Mädchen
zu illustrieren. Die Literatur über den ‘‘Ödipuskom-
plex bei Frauen’’ wird rezensiert und diskutiert. Die
mythologischen frühen Geschichten sowohl von
Athene und dem weiblichen Monster Medusa werden
im Kontext dessen erörtert, welches Licht sie auf die
weiblichen Entwicklungsverla ¨ ufe und die daraus
entstehenden Kon ikte für Frauen als auch Männer
werfen kann. Die unbewussten gespaltenen Reprä-
sentationen von Frauen als sich selbst behauptend,
phallisch und gefährlich, oder andererseits als passiv,
kastriert und und empfänglich führen zu einer
abwehrenden Verwerfung der Idee, dass eine Frau
sowohl aktiv sich behauptend als auch feminin und
sexuell sein kann. Athenes erzürnte Handlung, das
schöne junge Mädchen Medusa in ein Monster zu
verwandeln, als Bestrafung für das ‘Verbrechen’, in
ihrem Tempel vergewaltigt worden zu sein, wird
vorgestellt, um die Folge einer verfehlten Lösung der
frühen triangulären Kon ikte des kleinen Mädchens
zu illustrieren.
La relación entre la diosa griega Atenas y su padre
Zeus, junto con la hostilidad competitiva que aquella
esgrime ante las demás hembras, se presenta a
manera de ilustración de algunos aspectos previa-
mente olvidados de los con ictos de desarrollo
triangulares en la niña pequeña. Se repasa y discute
la literatura sobre ‘‘el complejo de Edipo en la
hembra’’. Se examinan los primeros relatos mitológi-
cos, tanto de Atenas como de Medusa (el monstruo
femenino), por su potencial de iluminar las vicisi-
tudes del desarrollo femenino y los con ictos que de
ahí́  uyen, tanto en mujeres como hombres. Las
representaciones clivadas inconscientes de las mu-
jeres como impositivas, fálicas y peligrosas, o si no
pasivas, castradas y receptivas, tienen por resultado
el rechazo defensivo de la idea de que una mujer
pueda ser impositiva y activa, y a la vez femenina y
sexual. La acción energúmena de Atenas, al transfor-
mar a la bella doncella Medusa en monstruo, como
castigo por el ‘‘delito’’ de haber sido violada en su
templo, se discute como ilustración del resultado de
no haber resuelto los con ictos triangulares iniciales
de la niña pequeña.
La relation entre la déesse grecque Athena et son
père Zeus, ainsi que la rivalité hostile qu’elle afŽ che
à l’égard des autres femmes est présentée comme
illustrant quelques aspects, jusque-là négligés, des
con its triangulaires chez la petite Ž lle. La littérature
sur le complexe d’Oedipe chez la femme est passée
en revue et discutée. Les données mythologiques sur
Athena et le monstre féminin Méduse sont évoquées
pour éclairer les vicissitudes développementales
féminines et les con its qui en résultent chez
l’homme et la femme. Les représentations incon-
scientes clivées de la femme, comme revendicatrice,
phallique et dangereuse ou bien passive, châtrée et
 THE RAPE OF MEDUSA IN THE TEMPLE OF ATHENA
disponible aboutissent à un désaveu défensif à propos
de l’idée que la femme peut être en même temps
activement revendicatrice ainsi que féminine et
sexuelle. L’action furieuse d’Athena qui transforme
la belle jeune vierge Méduse en monstre pour la
punir du ‘crime’ d’avoir été violée dans son temple
est avancée par l’auteur pour illustrer les consé-
quences de l’absence de résolution des con its
triangulaires initiaux chez la petite Ž lle.
Il rapporto tra la dea greca Atena e suo padre Zeus,
assieme all’ostilità di tipo competitivo che essa
manifesta per le altre femmine, è qui presentato per
illustrare alcuni aspetti precedentemente trascurati
dei con itti triangolari che insorgono nelle bambine
durante lo sviluppo. È inoltre esaminata e discussa la
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