The Medea Complex involves a mother who is still pathologically tied to her (ex)husband. She has a great deal of rage probably as Pines suggests (1995) from her interactions with her hostile mother. This rage is rooted in part with a wish to destroy the child, whom she at some level resents being stuck with and may turn her rage into overprotectiveness as a reaction formation. She is unable to let her children separate from her. She tells them the harm that will befall them when they are out of her control. When the mother wishes to punish the father by turning their children against him, she is also aggressing against the children. In her unconscious, both the children and the husband represent the same thing (others that did or might betray), and destructiveness is wished on them both. In short, a mother who brain washes her children against their father has a Medea Complex. She probably has paranoia or at least paranoid features within a borderline or psychotic character structure. She can not deal with the loss, and remains tied to her (ex)husband in an intimate hate, and keeps her children tied to her out of fear.
A Medea mother must kill off her own femininity in order to be destructive to her own children. As Lady Macbeth prays so that she will be able to help murder, "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe topful of direst cruelty!" (Macbeth, act 1, scene 5 ).
