Euripides wrote Medea around 400 .B.C.. It is a story of intense love turned to such intense hate, that Medea kills her own children to get back at her husband for betraying her. Medea is so madly in love with Jason, that she tricks her own father, King Aeetes, who guards the Golden Fleece, and kills her own brother so that Jason could steal the Golden Fleece. (Jason might have done well to consider how she treated her father and brother before he married her.) Jason leaves Medea to marry yet another princess. Medea plans her revenge. The chorus blames Aphrodite for causing all the trouble, in having intense passion turns to hate. (The Greeks often displaced their psychodynamics onto their gods.) Medea offers the bride her gifts of a beautiful robe and chaplet. When Jason's new bride puts on the gifts, her head and body burst into flame and she dies a horrible, painful death. When her father embraced her corpse, he too bursts into flames and dies the same tortured death. Medea then takes her sword and kills their two children. The chorus amazed at the degree of Medea's vengefulness doubt that anything can rival a mother's slaughter of her own innocent children. Medea escapes Jason with a dragon drawn chariot. She taunts Jason not allowing him to embrace or bury his sons. She rejoices at having hurt him so.
Fred Pine (1995) refers to Medea as an example of a particular form of hatred found in women." Medea's internal experience is a compound of a sense of injury- a sense that builds to imagined public humiliation and a sense of righteousness. ... The righteousness implied here in "the wrong they have dared to do to me" has struck me clinically. It is a frequent accompaniment of hate and hate-based rage. I think it stems from something self-preservative("I have been so mistreated that I have this right...") and some flaw in the super-ego, possibly based on identification with the child's experience of the rageful mother's giving herself full permission- and without subsequent remorse- to express her rage toward the child." (p.109). That is, Pine suspects that for a mother to be so destructive to her own children, she herself must have been exposed to her own mother's unremorseful hostility. (continue)
Long before Gardner coined the phrase "Parental Alienation Syndrome" this problem existed. The earliest mention we could find comes from Greek Mythology.
