Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche by Virginia Beane Rutter;Thomas Singer;

Author:Virginia Beane Rutter;Thomas Singer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317551249
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.3 The cover of Elizabeth Smith's dream manuscript. (© Estate of Elizabeth B. Smith, by permission.) But we can’t help wondering what motivates Alcestis to offer her life, especially when we hear how calmly, even beautifully she dies, for as her maid tells us: “she wept/ Not at all, made no outcry. The advancing doom of death/Made no change in the color and beauty of her face.” 22 Is this image of facing death too good to be true? Do such things happen, and if so, how are we to understand them?

Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut gives us a modern example from World War II, one that echoes Jung’s earlier insight about facing death as a celebration of wholeness. 23 Kohut describes the remarkably calm deaths of students in the White Rose Movement, an anti-Hitler organization at the University of Munich. Because of their open demonstrations against Hitler, all were arrested, tried, and guillotined. 24 On the morning of her execution, one of those students, Sophie Scholl (Figure 4.4), aged 22, was described by eyewitnesses this way: she was “calm and peaceful, her skin glowing and fresh, her face radiant … her lips were of a deep glowing red. She was without a trace of fear.” 25 For me, this strikingly parallel account suggests the human reality underlying the fictional character of Alcestis.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.