To review this article, select My Account, then View Stored Stories.
To review this article, My Profile, then View Recorded Stories.
By Elif Batuman
“Sons of Thebes, why are you here?” Oscar Isaac asked.His face filled the monitor on my dining table.(It’s my partner’s turn to use the office.) We were a few months dead, only at seven o’clock at night, and some applause for the must-have staff who came through the window.Isaac looked like a smoker with a forties beard, a gold chain, an Airpod and a black T-shirt.Your demo call explained in “Edipus”.
Isaac, one of the many prominent actors who performed Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” from home, in the first virtual presentation of Theater of War Productions: an organization that debuted in 2008, starring “Ajax” and “Philoctète”. By Sophocles for the American military audience and, since 2009, at army facilities around the world, adding Kuwait, Qatar and Guantanamo Bay, with a focus on the trauma of the fighting. After each reading of a drama, a panel of active duty people, veterans, military spouses, and / or psychiatrists described how the play resonated with their wartime experiences, before opening the discussion to the public. Since its founding, Theater of War Productions has addressed other types of trauma. He produced “Les Bacchantes” through Euripides in rural communities affected by the opioid crisis, “La folie d’Héraclès” in neighborhoods affected by armed violence and gang wars, and “Prometheus in chains” through Aeschylus in prisons. ‘Antigone in Ferguson’, which focuses on crisis between communities and forces of order, motivated by an analogy between the unburied body of the son of Oedipus and that of Michael Brown, left on the streets for approximately 4 hours after Brown murdered through the police; originally played at Michael Brown’s Best School.
Now, as trauma traveled the world more contagiously than ever before, Theatre of War Productions had changed its site-specific technique to Zoom.The app was configured in a way you’d never noticed before.There were no yettons to transfer between the gallery.and the speaker’s point of view, which alternated on its own.You were in a “meeting,” but you were powerless to control, proceeding on your own, with the inexorability of fate.There was no way to see the other members of the public., and even the group’s founder and director, Bryan Doerries, did not know how many there were.Zoom later told him it was fifteen thousand.This is the capacity of the Theatre of Dionysus, where “Oedipus the King” would have been created, around 429 BC.These spectators, like us, were at the center of a pandemic: if any, the plague of Athens.
The original audience would have known the story of Oedipus from Greek mythology: how an oracle had predicted that Layo, the king of Thebes, would be killed through his own son, who would later sleep with his mother; how the queen, Jocaste, gave birth to a child, and Layo went through and tied the child’s ankles, and ordered a shepherd to leave him on the mountainside.The shepherd took pity on the mutilated bath, Oedipus (“swollen foot”), and gave it to a Corinthian servant, who passed it on to the king and queen of Corinth, who raised him as his son.Years later, Pedipo killed Layo at a crossroads, not knowing who he was.He then kept Thebes from a Sphinx, king of Thebes, had four children with Jocaste and lived fortunately forever.
This is where Sophocles picks up the story. Everyone would have known where things were going, the fact would come to light and Oedipus would be blinded, but not how they would get there.How Sophocles was given there, encouraged through new events, in anything that in everyone’s mind, even if it does.It doesn’t seem in the original myth: a plague.
In the opening scene, Thebes suffers a terrible epidemic, Pedipe’s subjects arrive at the palace and beg him to save the city, describing the scene of the plague and panic, the screams and the corpses in the street.pedipus’s Response: “Children.Sorry. I know” — it made me feel a kind of desire.It was a remarkable degree of compassion for his absence from the existing administration.I am never someone who wants or wants “leadership,” yet I was surprised to think,” we’d be better off with Oedipus.”I would be a weak leader if I didn’t stick to the orders of the gods,” Isaac continued, reversing the male norm of never seeking advice he had already sent the most productive data that exists, from Delphic Oracle.
Soon, Pedipus’ brother-in-law, Creon, John Turturro, in an examination full of books, was doing his best to pedal strange news from Delphi.Apparently, the oracle said that the plague would not end until the population of Thebes.He had expelled Layo’s killer: a user who was still in town, even though Layo had died several years earlier during an outdoor vacation in the city.Pedipus called the blind prophet, Tiresias, interpreted through Jeffrey Wright, whose eyes were invisible behind a circular glow on his glasses.
Reading “Edipus” in the past, I had exasperated Tiresias, his cryptic laments – “I will never reveal riddles in me, nor the evil in you” – and the way he seemed unable to convey useful information.Spoken through a black actor in the United States in 2020, the phrase had a disgusting meaning.How can you tell the voice of the force that the challenge is in him, actually cooked there, that goes back generations?rage in my direction, ” said Tiresias, as someone who knew he was going to have a tweet.
Pedipo accused Tiresias of treason, denouncing his disability.He cast suspicion on strangers and boasted of his own “wealth, power, unmatched competition.”He condemned the false news: “It’s a scam, you don’t know anything about the interpretation of birds.He developed a deep state situation: Creon had “developed a secret plan to expel me from office,” prompting defamatory prophecies from supposedly selfless agencies.It was, in short, a coup d’éte destined to overthrow the democratic will of the other people of Thebes.
Frances McDormand then gave the impression of being Jocasta. Without visual makeup, speaking of what looked like a shack with paneled walls, it looked like the ghost of a border. I realized, when I saw her, that she had never tried to constitute Jocasta: neither her appearance nor her attitude, what was her business? How did it feel to see Laius mutilate his baby? How did it feel to be presented as a wife to anyone who defeated the Sphinx? What did you think of Pedipe when you met him? Did you ever think he was your son’s age and had terrible scars on his ankles? How did they get along?
When you read the play, you don’t have to answer those questions, you can take advantage of various odds without being satisfied, but players have to make resolutions and stick to them.A resolution that had been made in this case: Pedipe enjoyed “Since I have more respect for you, my dear, than for no one in the world,” Isaac said, so hot in “dear.”I remembered the fact that Euripides had written an edition of “Oedipus” – I lost to posterity, like the greatest Greek tragedies, which some scholars recommend to highlight the romantic quotes between Pedipe and Jocastus.
Yocasta’s immediate task was to calm the potentially fatal dispute between her husband and her brother.She took one of the few rhetorical angles you can have with a woman: well, such grown men deserve to be ashamed of themselves, continue like this when there was a plague.And yet, upon hearing the lines McDormand decided to emphasize, it was transparent that, under the guise of adult rationality and the spread of peace, what he was actually doing was silencing and trivializing.”Go ahead, ” he said, “and we’ll settle this matter in private. And or you stopped doing anything with nothing.It was the voice of denial and, the play, you can hear it moving from one character to another.
At this level of performance, I discovered that I was becoming a kind of cognitive overdrive, switching between text and performance, between the old context, the existing context and the “universal” themes.Surprise: how a text is loaded or has thousands of years about what happens to you, as fashionable and unprecedented as you thought.
“You can’t predict anything,” Jocasta said, and I heard our president say, about the global pandemic I had continually warned about, on the worst terms imaginable, that “no one can have predicted anything like this.”Then the voice of denial passed to Oedipus: “Why, my lady, it deserves that one day we should pay attention to the priestess pitias in Delphi or examine the motives of the eagles and the kingfishers howling upon us in heaven when everyone predicted that they would?So one day, kill my father? Now he’s dead on the ground and I’m still here.This seemed like a replacement for the climate because it was about ignoring the birds, but the most sinister thing was exactly how the elements have become interreplaceable: global warming, gun violence, pandemics, sexual assaults, genocide, the legacy of slavery.
Actually, you never saw “Eedip,” I was surprised to think, until you saw it as a plague.The plague had not marked me in previous readings, but it was the key to each and every one of the things: the way in which the denial of contagion directly reflected the contagion of denial, its tendency to become “denial”.I also felt a new appreciation for all the paintings the plague was making to feed the plot.He resumed the enigma of the Sphinx: Oedipus had to save the city It was a time bomb: in each and every moment when he did not solve the plague, the bodies piled up, Hades, rich in the dead, fled with more nuances.And Delphi’s ultimatum – solving murder, or the plague continues – has turned the Oedipus myth into a thriller, with Oedipus himself detective and murderer.
The plague reached Athens in 430 BC. C., year of the Peloponnesian war. Athens was besieged by Sparta. Much of the rural population, as statesman Pericles said, had sought refuge in the newly built fortifications of the city, placing an additional burden on sanitation and housing. Perhaps a third of the Athenian population died, along with Pericles and his two sons. Thucydides also fell ill, but he recovered and thus was able to leave a living testimony, in his history of the Peloponnesian war, not only of the physical symptoms, but also of the miasma of horror that swirled in the city: confusion. physicians, whose efforts to develop their wisdom about this unknown disease have sometimes been rewarded with slow and painful deaths; the absence of reliable advice, “for what has helped one patient to harm another”; the evident ineffectiveness of divine offerings and supplications, which has led some people to be more devout and others to adopt the maximum antisocial behavior; the collapse of funeral rites and the depression of increasingly remote survivors.
And yet the evidence suggests that the theater was still open. What does that mean? Did Thucydides exaggerate how bad he was? Didn’t the Athenians believe in social distancing? Or were the city’s actors and playwrights noted as essential workers? More and more studies have been faithful in recent years to the connection between ancient theater and medical remedies, which were positioned in the temple of Asclepius, the god of healing. There is archaeological evidence that some of those temples had an adjacent theater, and some have argued that listening to a play would possibly be a component of the remedy that also included regularly sleeping in the main hall, praying for the gods to appear in their dreams, and a consultant. them to a cure, a dream that the priests and accompanying users would later interpret. When Athens was given its own temple at Asklepio, it was built alongside the Theater of Dionysus, apparently with some participation from Sophocles. I went to the Asklepion in Pergamon, in what is now Turkey: an underground passage allows easy access between the theater and the patients’ bathroom. According to Doerries, the acoustics in Athens were such that a bedridden user in the temple can also hear each and every word spoken in the theater.
To what extent was service and theater different from clinic?Possibly the question wouldn’t have made much sense at the time.Plato was born during the plague of Athens, so it had not yet been controlled to articulate some of the dichotomies – frame opposite the soul, genuine opposite to the concept – without which we can hardly believe the world.According to some historians of science, the concept of “religion” and “science” as opposite terms is not an easy reconciliation, however lasting.possibly seem to us today, it dates only from the nineteenth century, when there was, for example, a debate – provoked by Freud’s wife’s uncle – about whether katharsis (purification, purging), the term used through Aristotle to describe the previous Arrangement, a whole medical or devout connotation.
Freud himself would again complicate the categories in his analysis of hysteria: a disease marked by various physical symptoms in the absence of physiological cause, which develops basically in women.In the 1980s, Josef Breuer invented and presented Freud with a remedy he called cathartic.In Freud’s later work, which was more radical and proposed to treat physical symptoms through, for example, the interpretation of dreams, he drew on his wisdom from the temples of Asclepius, alluding to “family processes” of antiquity such as “the eroticization of oracular dreams while sleeping within the temple grounds.The archives of Epidaur Asclepion discussed patients whose symptoms (headache, paralysis, blindness, abdominal suffering) matched those of hysteria.
Freud had been well acquainted with the character of Pedipe since he was in high school, where he studied classical Greek. At the University of Vienna, he dreamed that he would be identified for solving the enigma of the Sphinx. In his psychoanalysis, he had a statue of a Greek. Sphinx about two thousand years old on his table and a replica of “Oedipus and the Sphinx” by Ingres on the sofa. His ex-libris had a Sphinx on it. For Freud’s 50th birthday, his disciples presented him with a medallion engraved with a symbol of Oedipus and the Sphinx. Some resources say that when Freud read the inscription – a quote from Sophocles that essentially said “he knew the pointed riddles and a very tough man” – paled: his teenage fantasy had come true.
The fundamental vision of psychology, as it came to us here through Freud, is strongly related to the enigma of the Sphinx: “What is it that has one voice and yet becomes four, two and three feet? ? ” Oedipus’ answer is a boy – who crawls like a baby, walks unaided as an adult, and uses a cane in old age. So, some currents of psychology tell us that children and young people are already people, with emotions, barriers and dignity that can be violated. , and that such violations cause illness in adults. Psychology also tells us that all adults, without exception, were once babies and are not immune to the humiliations they suffered as a result. These truths would possibly seem obvious, and classicists have infrequently criticized the Sphinx riddle for being too easy: why couldn’t anyone solve it before Oedipus? And yet, as transparent as it is to us, intellectually, that the adult who walks on two feet is the same user as the baby who crawls on his jaws and knees, we rarely fully recognize this. The adult does not look or feel the same as the baby. “Old baby” is not a component of anyone’s symbol of anyone. All we need is that at all times we have been so weak and helpless.
The sphinx’s conundrum unfolds in the plot of “Oedipus”, especially in a scene near the end where the fact still comes out.Two key figures of Oedipus’s years of formation are arrested: the Theban Shepherd, who was finished killing baby Oedipus but did not; and the Corinthian messenger to whom it passed to the mutilated child.Pastor Tebano is the traveling evidence that the riddle of the Sphinx is difficult, because this guy cannot recognize anyone: neither the Corinthian, whom he last saw when he was young, and indeed not Oedipus, a baby he spent decades before.”It all happened so long ago,” he grumbss.” Why the hell are you asking me?”
“Because, ” he kindly explained the Corinthian (David Strathairn) in Zoom, “this guy you look at now was that child once.
It was for me the scene with the catharsis in it. At one point, the pastor (Frankie Faison) obviously understood everything, but he didn’t need it or just didn’t admit it. Pedipus, now invented our brains to be informed of the fact in All Costs, resorted to improved interrogation.”Bend your arms back until they break,” Isaac says in an icy tone.In some other window, Faison howled in a very realistic agony.Faison was an embodiment of mental endurance: the mechanism that a brain develops to protect itself from an insufferable fact.These invisible guards nearly killed him before admitting who gave him the baby: “He was Layo’s son, at least other people say.Your wife might tell you more.
Tears shone in Isaac’s eyes when he uttered the next line, which he understood as the devastating maxim in the total room: . Array she. Does ArrayArray give it to you?How could I never knew the whole, I never felt how painful it would have been for Oedipus to realize that his parents hadn’t enjoyed it?
In a first trial entitled “The Etiology of Hysteria” (1896), Freud described his remedy for eighteen patients suffering from severe hysterical symptoms.In each case, he thoroughly traced every symptom to human reminiscence, until childhood.In more than a hundred hours, each of the patients independently recovered a reminiscence of sexual trauma from the early years of training.The trauma occasionally related to interaction with an adult, occasionally a close relative, such as a parent.Freud and the patients were horrified. The memories of the patients were “reproduced with the greatest disso hook,” Freud wrote.”While they remember the experiences of those formative years, they suffer from the highest violent sensations, from which they are ashamed and seek to hide.
Freud was incredibly reluctant that eighteen other people from respectable Viennese families could have been abused as children (in fact, he soon retracted this conclusion and presented his concept of the Oedipus complex, according to which incestuous abuse was not a genuine memory., though rather a childish fantasy.) But, at least in 1896, he discovered that he was not capable of the reports that patients had experienced before him.The remembered scenes correspond to the larger tale with the specificity of an absent puzzle piece; In two cases, he discovered witnesses who corroborated the patient’s memories.Thus, in “The etiology of hysteria”, as in “Oedipus the King”, an investigation into an inexplicable physical disease (hysteria for Freud, plague for Sophocles) shows an act of violence supposedly unrelated, from decades ago, involving the father against a child.Fighting the fact is a huge pain, the ex-child denies it for as long as possible.When the fact is in spite of all that said, the plague has passed.
When I spoke to Bryan Doerries about Zoom after the performance, he told me that he had originally planned to level “Edipus” with an emphasis on climate change.The themes were all there: a denied prophecy; young people who pay for the sins of their parents; a plague that “devastated the land, killing livestock and crops,” and that Sophocles compared to a furious wildfire; as well as birth defects (“our women die of childbirth, delivering small withered corpses …”).I was hoping to throw Greta Thunberg as Tiresias or the choir.But once COVID-19 occurred and a physical scourge began to reveal and exacerbate pre-existing situations of the political body, a new application was proposed.(A British production of “Oedipus,” starring Damian Lewis, is scheduled for September 3.”The story of a leader who discovers that it is contagion will probably have another resonance there,” Doerries says. Boris Johnson has just returned to the paintings after his own COVID-19 bout.)
Doerries’ first encounter with the Greek tragedy was to play one of the young women from ‘Medea’ (this is where Medea kills her daughters: her phrase was: “No, no, the sword falls!”) It was 1985, and he was nine years old.The exhibition took place at a network school in Newport News, where Doerries’ father taught experimental psychology.Doerries describes his father as one of the last old-school regulars, a disciple of BFSkinner, who was known for his confidence that the loose will is a ghost and that the human and animal habit is decided through positive or negative conditionings.As a child, Doerries visited his father’s lab, where he watched albino rats fulfill the fate dictated to them through rewards.In one experiment, the rats were electrocuted, supposedly randomly, until they gave up their lives, resting their heads on the floor of their cages and waiting to die.
Doerries went to Kenyon College, where he specialized in classics, learning ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and the principles of biblical exegesis. When he and his father debated the meaning of the Greek tragedy, his fatherly idea that the pieces represented a global vision in which other people had no “human agent or conscience.”Doerries disagreed. The analogy he now uses for the functioning of fate in the Greek tragedy is type 2 diabetes, the disease that eventually killed his father.Most people diagnosed, he explains, have a genetic predisposition: it is “inscribed in their DNA, as an old intergenerational curse,” yet they can decide what they do with knowledge, and that selection can replace theirs and that of others.Lives.
For his senior project, Doerries translated and directed Euripides’ “Bacchae”, a Buick Skylark for deus ex machina.A selection of careers looms between the academy and the theater.The interpretation of a classic text, its translation and the staging of a work are historically thought of as other tasks, entrusted to other types of professionals, but Doerries saw them as one thing: a set of techniques to make paintings of old pieces in new audiences.to New York to keep running.
In New York, she began dating Laura Rothenberg, a longtime friend of Brown’s then-student Brown, who had just underderwent a double lung transplant in a long-term effort to treat cystic fibrosis she had been struggling with since childhood.She was kind of a test.As Doerries later wrote in “Theatre of War”, an e-book about the birth of his company, “From the moment we kissed, awkwardly and hesitantly, in his apartment, I knew that I would soon face a choice, one that would outline my own ethical character and perhaps the rest of my life.If I cared about Laura, I’d put everything else on hold …But a persistent and persistent voice of self-preservation in me told me to run as far as possible.
He didn’t run away. The voice doesn’t go away either. Doerries ended up being Rothenberg’s number one caregiver, and this time he witnessed intubations, “air hunger” and “home drowning” that accompanies cystic fibrosis.He was twenty-six years old and had never felt so close to anyone, nor did he learn his own “immense ability to care for another person.”At the same time, he discovered the limits of this compassion – the insufferable nature, sometimes, of the call to be proportionate – and had never felt so alone.
It was then that he reread Sophocles’ “Filoctete”, as if it were written for him.At the beginning of the work, Filoctete has been stranded on a desert island for ten years, with a sucout and smelly wound to his foot.He bit a snake when he and the other Greek warriors stopped on an island going to fight in the Trojan War.His cries of agony destroyed the morale of the other soldiers, so Odysseus left him behind.Then the Trojan War lasted a while. A decade and a seer told Ulysses that the Greeks could not win without Filoctete.Now, Ulysses has returned to the island to look for him and brought a young soldier, Neoptolemus, to speak.
Doerries learned that “Philoctete” was about chronic diseases – the way each and every user in poor health are on a desert island – and the temptation to leave them there and above them.After Rothenberg’s death in 2003, at the age of twenty-two, he began to execute a translation of the work.When he finished, Doerries was back in the hospital, where his father was recovering from a kidney transplant, which was needed due to worsening diabetes (Doerries’ father had learned of diabetes).in 1976, the year Doerries was born, but despite everything, he had given up converting his lifestyle, seeing the diagnosis as a destination.)
Doerries now calls hospitals his “completion school”: the position in which he came into contact with what the Greek works represented.In 2007, at Weill Cornell School of Medicine, he hosted the first Theatre of War Productions-style event: a dramatic reading of “Philthroughtes”, followed through a discussion.It was written in the Times, and when Doerries’ father, who suffered from an ulceration in his foot, read the article, he missed the mention of Philoctete and the idea he was reading about himself and his foot.
In June, I saw Theatre of War Productions staging Zoom from a scene from “Philbytes” for front-line fitness staff in the Baltimore area.Neoptolem (Jesse Eisenberg) was looking for Philoctete (David Strathairn) to settle for the help of the Filoctete seemed to agree, and then began to howl in pain, expressing his anger towards Ulysses, his concern about being abandoned again.The scene was incredibly hard to see. A breathing technician later stated that he felt he was listening to what the COVID-19 patients he was dealing with thought, but that he did not have the lung ability to express himself.Eisenberg’s face has captured all the dismay of someone who lately realizes has written to: be on a desert island face to face with the howling incarnation of a need impossible to resist.
Doerries described “Philoctetes” to me as a “moment of concrescence”, a “dawn that is a way for me out of everything”. As in the story of a Freudian case, the new pieces continued to have compatibility in the puzzle. Weeks later, reading the Walter Reed scandal, in which Iraqi and Afghan veterans languished in a understaffed DC hospital riddled with vermin, black mold and bureaucratic dysfunction, Doerries began to think of Philoctète, too, as a veteran. Technological advances in warfare and medicine had created “a lower class of patients” like him, all deserted on his islands to live potentially long and unbearable lives. A few months later, he read another presentation on one hundred and twenty-one incidents of Iraqi and Afghan veterans who, upon returning to the United States, were accused of having killed someone. Reading about foot soldiers coming home only to “find themselves at war with their spouses, their children, their fellow servicemen, the global giant, and ultimately themselves,” Doerries learned that he was attending a multiplication of the Sophocles’ Ajax: The Tragedy. of a war hero who loses his friend, comes home in pain, slaughters cattle, and tries, in Doerries’ translation, to strangle his wife while she sleeps. Array How had Doerries not identified an ancient description of fighting trauma in this?
Sophocles himself had been a general in the Athenian army, at least twice, and not just Sophocles: the tombstone of Aeschylo, who did not mention that he was a playwright, congratulated him for fighting in the Battle of Marathon.Sophocles, Aeschylo and Euripides, the three most prominent Greek tragedies, wrote his works a century in which Athens was at war for about 80 years.Every citizen, a category that excludes women, youth and slaves, was also a soldier.They had to fight constantly and then pass, how many wonderful tragedies – “Agamemnon”, “The Madness of Heracles” – involved men who may not reactivate the social contract?
Doerries began to think of Greek tragedy in functional terms, such as “ritual reintegration, for veterans, through veterans.”It was, in a way, a continuation of his discussion with his father.If your father had noticed the works as more or less static representations of a world fatalist vision, Bryan saw them as an “old technology” – a program that you direct, in an audience, to do something specific.What if I could just restart it?
In 2008, Doerries hosted its first combat trauma event, for several hundred Marines and their families, at a Hyatt ballroom in San Diego.In his book, he describes the scene of painful awkwardness that follows, with the Marines at the back of the room.”Taking care of the Budweisers, on the floor,” and everyone grimaces when Ajax and Philocte shouted indescribable things in the most sensitive of their lungs.
In the discussion that followed, he went on to say the unspeakable: “My husband went to war four times, and every time he returned, like Ajax, he would drag invisible bodies into our house,” said the wife of a Navy SEAL.who was also the mother of a Marine.He invoked the words of Ajax’s wife, asking his companions for help: “How can I say something that deserves never to be said?”You’d die before you heard what I’m going to say..” A nun who had been an army chaplain stood up and said that one of the lines of Ajax – “Witness how the generals destroyed me!” — it was anything I had heard of countless soldiers.
At the time, the wife of the Marine Deputy Commander, who was sitting at the front with the wives of other generals, stood up and accused the MONJA and the wife of harming their husbands.”It’s a matter of healing, not guilt.!” Soon, at least thirty other people were covered up in front of the microphone.The consultation has become a verbal exchange among other people who, through other hierarchies and standards, cannot address each other.Shortly thereafter, Theatre of War Productions received a $3.7 million contract.Pentagon to reflect the program at military sites around the world.
During World War I, infantry soldiers who had fought in the trenches began to exhibit a variety of troubling symptoms: mutism, speech problems, nightmares, paralysis, blindness, headaches and uncontrollable screams.Some army doctors noticed their similarity to the symptoms of hysterical women., but were reluctant to diagnose the hysteria of the infantrymen, in the face of the threat of wondering about their bravery and masculinity.The new diagnosis they invented, “shell shock,” was based on a theory, later refuted, that their cause was “organic” damage resulting from the proximity of explosive projectiles.Despite its manly name, the remedy of the shock shell, showalter issues out, was roughly the same as the remedy of hysteria: torture, through electric shocks and isolation, designed to take the patient back to the trenches.As soon as possible
In the 1970s and 1980s, it has become increasingly transparent that shell hysteria and surprise shared not only many symptoms, but also an underlying mechanism. Studies conducted or supported through wave of moments feminists produced new insights into domestic violence, rape, and child abuse, such as Vietnam veterans and anti-war activists nevertheless controlled to identify the trauma of the struggle as a valid affliction. Repeated attacks on women and children, by those they trusted the most, produced the same emotions of relentless physical terror, loss of self, and memory and language blocks experienced by infants during a war. In other words, what appeared to be a large number of other problems, or no problems, with other causes, or no cause, was accepted as a genuine and exclusive phenomenon. This was the fundamental point of view of what is known as trauma studies, as we might think of it today. In 1980, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.) was added to DSM-III, based on the knowledge of Vietnam veterans, Holocaust survivors, and survivors of sexual trauma.
Judith Herman, a prominent figure in trauma studies, observed that any progress in examining trauma has only taken position with the help of an accompanying progressive political motion. “It never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim has won over herself; and in any case, it is time to go further and move on”: trauma is inevitably found through the same, complex denials through the authors and accepted by all, because we are all predisposed to identify with power. (Similarly, infantrymen return home to acknowledge that “no one needs to know the real fact about the war.”) Believing in those who suffer is much more painting than believing in the other people who caused or obtained advantages from the prestige quo; after all, perpetrators and beneficiaries only ask for our neutrality, while a victim asks us to pay attention and perceive their long and terrible history. Furthermore, believing in the most needy comes to surpass some of our deeply ingrained maxims, such as that it is herbal or suitable for young men and women to be subordinate in the family, or young men to be sacrificed in wars. . The popularity of trauma becomes so debatable that it ends up being repressed, unless it is legitimized through a political movement. Rape trauma was not considered plausible and genuine until Second Wave feminism emerged; the antiwar motion has done the same to combat trauma. The wonderful progressive motions of the past few years, #MeToo and d Black Lives Matter, both seek to acknowledge the credibility of certain long-denied traumas. The N.D.A. Mobile phone and damaged videos bring new data to the public sphere. Something that many other people had known, and even experienced, but had not always named themselves or others, has become an authenticity. The explanation for why the Greek tragedy paints for so many of our social problems is that virtually all tragedies, like social problems, dramatize the conservative and contagious urge to deny trauma – deny that someone is a victim or that something is wrong. Then someone defies the urge and yells terrible things that no one needs to hear, and the spell is damaged.
Where does the urge for victim denial come from?Many trauma psychologists would say the answer is childhood.Psychoanalyst Alice Miller traced many individual and political evils to the “fourth commandment” – to honor her parents – an edition of which exists in many religions.For Miller, this may simply be translated more particularly as “You Might not be aware” because it has produced a taboo that opposes young people admitting the truth of their own experiences.Even the life of a beloved baby is not easy.According to Miller, parents have children who satisfy their own dissatisfied desires for love, respect and attention, or to please their own parents (the expression “having children” in itself perhaps implies that young people are the activeness of their parents: an ethical and legal perception that has accompanied us from Aristotle).Babies, who rely entirely on their guardians to survive, come to live in the deadly terror of letting their parents down and wasting their love.
“For many other people, the concept that they were not enjoyed by their parents is unbearable,” writes Miller. “The more evidence there is of this deprivation, the more those other people cling to the illusion.” In other words, the first victim who is not ourselves. What most of us are not capable of feeling for those helpless old selves is the “pity and terror” – Aristotelian catharsis – referred to in a tragedy as “Oedipus”. Before the catharsis, when Oedipus is questioned about his scars, he reacts only with shame: “Why are you talking about this old shame? ArrayArrayArray A shameful disfigurement that has marked me since my birth. The scars will have to be innate. (inflicted through his parents), and also in some way his own guilt (“shameful”, “a shame”). Only through the encounter with Shepherd Theban can he feel, in all his past and due immediacy, the terror he had to block to survive, but through then he has already passed on his trauma to all the “children of Thebes”, adding his literal children, whom he curses, and who end up killing each other in a civil war.
Repressed trauma produces wars, as it occurs through them, in armies structured as families, with a ban on criticizing their superiors.Based on her examination of german textbooks on the schooling of young people popular among Hitler’s parent generation, Alice Miller, who was a Holocaust survivor, concluded that beating young people “for their own good” (educating them to adapt and idealize their own abuse) is the best way to produce obedient subjects of an authoritarian government.Children whose perceptions have not been respectable become adults than strong men who rule with the softness of fuel and misinformation.Children who do not have the right “to be aware of their own desires or to protect their own interests,” as she wrote, will never know them.
This is the ultimate and simple answer to the very questionable question of why other people vote against their own interests: the link between “my interests” and “the good” was blurred at a young age.Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, said the set of rules he worked on revealed that one of the ultimate predictors of vulnerability to right-wing nationalism is whether a user is in favor of corporal punishment for children.The set of rules was originally designed to identify potential ISIS recruits, who supposedly represent a percentage Enthusiasm for the right to choose the right to hit children Cult of power, the silence of dissent and logic, and the dehumanization of anyone perceived as weak or different are percentage characteristics through authoritarian teams across the ideological spectrum.study, can have a magnetic effect on other dehumanized people as children.
The Trump administration is known for its preference for putting young people at risk, either by punching them in cages or claiming, despite evidence to the contrary, that they are “almost immune” to COVID-19.on the comics and on Twitter that Trump was not to the liking as a child; A new memoir by the president’s psychologist niece makes Fred Trump’s space closely resemble Laius’ space: a position in which young people are raised to become “murderers,” and kindness is considered a form of corrupt idiocy.But the immense political and economic damage caused by the dehumanization of young people has not yet been treated as the pressing public health crisis it is.
The invocation of the formation years is dismissed as a way of depoliticizing, of seeking to “reduce” the affairs of nations to what happened between mom and dad.And yet, as Tolstoy shows in his “War and Peace” quarantine-compatible crop, whatever happens between mom and dad can lead little Nikolai or Petya to flee their emotions of humiliation and helplessness by joining a war, thus figuring out the fate of nations.We will have to do for young women what the feminists of the moment did for women’s lives (and I have tried, in some cases radically, to do for young people): politicize and depress, erode the regulations that reshape each and every circle of relatives in a realm where the weakest players (women, young people) have no recourse to oppose the most powerful (adult men).
Perhaps the greatest impediment to perceiving the political truth of the formative years is our attachment to the ethical scaffolding of individual guilt and non-public responsibility. In this context, attributing any of Hitler’s moves to his upbringing is considered simple by Hitler, or like attributing the Holocaust to Hitler’s parents. And yet, to quote Alice Miller, “It’s not about blaming individual parents. ArrayArray has yet to identify a hidden social pattern that determines our lives. The Western idea since Aristotle has widely interpreted young people as absent in the explanation of why and, therefore, in total non-publicity. The resulting systemic inability to see young people as fully human resembles the kind of ethical alibi that has been used to excuse slavery and anti-black racism, and which still accompanies us in parts of the law and custom. Early learning, especially the rearing of children between birth and three years of age, the era in which the greatest brain progression develops, is widely viewed as either the hard and inalienable work of mothers or as unassigned hard work. qualified legitimately left to women of lower status.
The essence of structural or systemic disorders is that they cannot be solved by isolating and punishing individual culprits, leaving the rest of society pure.What other people deserve to be isolated, punished, or fired so that our workplaces are not poisonous to women?Which individual is racist? The strength of “Oedipus” is that it still shows that such questions are the wrong ones.Who’s guilty of the plague of Thebes?But Layo tried to kill him when he was helpless in the bathroom.Once again, Layo thought the bathroom was going to kill him.On the other hand, Layo raped the son of the king of Pelops, and however, if you are investigating why Layo raped the son of the king of Pelops, it all began when he was expelled from Thebes in his youth, and so on.
By introducing the plague theme into his “Eedip”, Sophocles invites us to update the mechanism of guilt with that of contagion.Of course, in a scourge given, Americans can be guilty of making matters worse: masking the refuseks, the governors.who won’t give orders to stay at home, or, you know, Pericles, to crowd the entire attic field in Athens, but we don’t expect anyone who has given us a respiratory virus will be punished.in the end, duty is thought to be secondary to the problems of healing and containment.
It was in a context of contagion that for the first time I felt able to perceive the role of destiny, which is actually the ultimate for us in the Greek drama: “So does he have a choice or not?”we ask with exasperation. This is the riddle with which Doerries and his father were fighting, and is at the center of the confusion caused by questions of systemic injustice: “To what extent am I guilty or complicit?”Hiding the police and decriminalizing intellectual disease, addiction and poverty are tactics to change the verbal exreplace of “Who’s to blame?””What to do?” Fate, like the plague, provides us with a path to guilt and innocence of the equation.Fate is the plague. We’re what we catch, but that doesn’t mean there’s no way to replace it.
If we borrow the terms of the Greek drama, 2020 can be considered as the year of a diagnosis: a tragic recognition.On August 9, the sixth anniversary of Michael Brown’s filming, I saw Theatre of War Productions level a Zoom production of “Antigone in Ferguson”: an adaptation of The Narrative Sequel of Sophocles “Edipus”, with the chorus represented through a demographic and ideologically varied gospel chorus.Oscar Isaac returns, this time as Creon, Pedipe’s successor as king.He began as an inquisitor of intimidation (“I’m going to get you rid of your limbs one by one until you reveal the criminal’s call”), ordering Antigona (Tracie Thoms) to be buried alive, insulting everyone who criticized him and accusing Tiresias of corruption.But then Tiresias, with the help of the choir, persuaded Creonte to reconsider.In a sustained evangelical number, the Thebanos, armed with beaks and shovels, driven through their king, rushed to release Antigona.
Antigone being a tragedy, they arrived too late, resulting in multiple deaths, and Isaac once returned lost his completely.It was almost the same functionality that he gave him in “Edipus”, and yet, where Pedipus begins the piece written in a corner, between walls that remain closing, Creonte has a little more margin.His misfortune, like that of Antigona and his brother, feels less irreversible.I first saw “Antigona in Ferguson” live last year, and in the discussion that followed, the theme of fate was inevitably addressed.How Doerries kindly led the audience to see “Antigone” as a representation of how well everything can be just another and how minds can change.The power that spread in the room that night, talking about criminal reform and the urgency of collective change.
Tragic theatre and democracy were at the same time impressed in Athens, and some scholars argue that the two are related: that “Athens’ literary vehicle has allowed its citizens to think about how to manage their democracy.”This is a tempting theory, especially with “Antigone” in mind.On August 9, the exhibition followed through a roundtable with the Mothers of the Movement, an activist organization made up of women whose young black men were killed by the police.”Antigone looked a lot like us,” said Marion Gray-Hopkins, whose nineteen-year-old son, Gary Hopkins, Jr., died in 1nineninenine.”I think it’s very similar to the lawmakers we deal with every day.”Gwen Carr, Eric Garner’s mother, smiled at her Zoom window and said, “Yes!”
“I’m pretty proud of him,” Gray-Hopkins of Creon continued.So we stayed talking to people,” she said, “because someone hears our voice.”
It will be used in accordance with our policy.
Born about two thousand years before Darwin and Freud, Epictete seems to have expected a release from their prisons.
By Elif Batuman
By Robin Wright
Actors, administrators and machinists combine to bring downtown to life while they await a physical return to the Broadway stage.
sections
More
© 2020 Condé Nast.All rights reserved. Use of this site implies acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and the Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and your California privacy rights.The New Yorker would likely earn a portion of sales of products purchased on our site through our partners with retailers.The content on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, unless you have the prior written permission of Condé Nast.Ad choice