Jung, Sophocles, and Socrates: Antigone Archetypes

How Sophocles’ Antigone Portrays the Socratic Tragedy Trough Jungian Archetypes

Link to the Original Essay

In Sophocles’ Antigone, an illustration regarding the events of the children of Oedipus and Jocasta after the Theban Civil War is elucidated. Their sons, Eteocles and Polynices, both fought in the Theban Civil War and died while quarreling over power of Thebes. During this quarrel, the Thebans generally favored Eteocles; further, Polynices was banished from Thebes, which framed him as an outsider fighting against Thebes (this is one account of how they managed this struggle over power, but in this context, it suffices to make the plot of Antigone coherent). The new king of Thebes, Creon the brother of Jocasta, decides to give Eteocles a proper burial. Creon likewise decides not only not to give Polynices a proper burial, but to publicly shame him posthumously by leaving his corpse out on the battlefield. This is because of the perceived traitorousness of Polynices towards Thebes. Antigone, the sister of both Polynice and Thebes, refused to allow such a disrespectful burial on moral grounds. Thus, Antigone defied the law of Creon and gave Polynices a proper burial. This proper burial led to the prosecution of Antigone, via Creon leaving her to rot in a cave and eventually her suicide, along with Haemon’s (who is the lover of Antigone and son of Creon).

This play is a motif on two deeply interconnected archetypes. These archetypes both exist within the character of Creon and is made clear in the consequences of his mode of Being throughout Antigone. Although there are two archetypes that a present in Creon, throughout this analysis I will treat them as one, due to the important fact that the former archetype is a defining constituent element of the latter archetype. The first Archetype is what I will call the Socratic Wise Man. This is a person who because of their aptitude and knowledge (which is synonymous with what Socrates referred to as “wisdom”) in one endeavor (say, in poetry or a sport), believe that they are wise in all aspects of life and in turn, believe themselves to be wise in essence. Such people get resentful when their self-perceived total wisdom becomes shattered — as is evident by Socrates’ trial, which was fueled in part by such resentment. The second archetype is often what is referred to as the “tyrannical father”, which is an archetype that is personified throughout almost all mythology. Coined by the analytic/Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness, the tyrannical father is the mythological embodiment of the negative elements of what is symbolically masculine. Now, to get a better picture of exactly what this entails, and how Creon is a quintessential manifestation of this archetype, an explication of the mythological substantiated of “the great father” and the “the great mother” are in order, as, not only are they present in Antigone, but they’re present in almost all of the world’s most predominant exhibition of mythological stories, starting with the Babylonian creation myth, The Enuma Elish. In essence, Antigone is an allegory regarding the tyrannical manifestation of the great father.

To preface this, the great father and the great mother are seen by Erich Neumann as symbolically masculine and feminine respectively. What this does not mean is that these categories are representative of masculinity and femininity in reality. Granted, perhaps some of these symbolic representations seep into our understanding of such categories in the real world, but that is not the concern of their mythological iconography and/or schema of representation across time mythologically. Given that Creon is a representation of the negative aspect of “the great father”, this is what will be explained first. The great father is the mythological representation of explored territory, the known, order, patriarchy, and masculinity. It is the symbolic representation of culture itself. In turn, the great father is what symbolically represents that which instantiates rules, social conventions, and the defining characteristics of what is considered “true” in the context under which the great father reigns. In short, the great father represents tradition, from the perspective of valuation. Now, there are positive and negative manifestations of the great father. The positive manifestation of the great father is when it is well-integrated with the archetypal hero — generally represented as the son of the great father mythologically — and when it is mediated by the great mother (which is mythologically represented as the Uroboros, which is that which creates all and that which destroys all [chaos, creation, destruction, nature, nurturing, the unknown].) The great father as culture is what fends off chaos and the unknown. Too much chaos and exposure to unknown territory can make culture collapse and, from a psychological perspective, is one of the leading causes of psychological unrest for individuals. The great father, when positive, maintains the positive elements of tradition/what-is-known, and listens to the archetypal hero, who goes out into the unknown to conquer chaos and turn what was previously unknown into the known. When doing so, the archetypal hero has an understanding of the corrupt elements of tradition and can guide the great father to change the culture to make sure that such corrupt elements are eliminated and replaced with the new knowns that the archetypal hero has gathered in his confrontation with chaos.

The great father, a necessary element to culture and the maintenance of society, however, can become corrupt. The tyrannical father mythologically speaking is the Socratic wise man. To this person, all that is known is all that needs to be known. Anything outside of this domain is to be treated with ridicule, scorn and — if it is embodied — death. The walls of the city are to be open to no one. Culture is to remain the same and no external opinions are to be taken into account. Any speech which is against such maintenance of tradition, in both its good and bad aspects, is to be stultified at all costs. Psychologically speaking, from a personality perspective, this is the manifestation of trait conscientiousness run amok, in its substratum of orderliness. It is literally too much order. Under the reign of the tyrannical father, the rules are the only rules and anything that is antithetical to such guidelines is to be taken as a threat. Now, what are the consequences of such a framework? In the real world, we can look to places like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union during the 20th century to see such consequences. That is, a culture that has a tyrannical patriarchal mode-of-being underlying its narrative, it will end in catastrophe not only for its inhabitants but also for its ruling class (as was evident by the demise of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who were both real-life examples of this mythological archetype.)

Given the way in which tyrannical father archetype is described, it is quite easy to see how Creon is the tyrannical father in Antigone. Firstly, when the great father is mythologically represented, he is represented as a king. Creon, being the King of Thebes, fits this category perfectly. Now, Creon is not a wise king. “The wise king maintains stability, not because he is afraid of the unknown, but because nothing new can be built without a strong foundation… he is a master who teaches and disciplines but not to indoctrinate or crush. He represents the tradition fostering cooperation among people whose shared culture makes trust possible, even easy [by keeping chaos at bay insofar as it is necessary to keep culture strong and progressive].” Creon is actually quite the opposite of this. He is tyrannical. This is in part made manifest by the impossibility of Creon to listen to the heroine (Antigone) and the [lesser] hero (Haemon), both of whom have a better grip on morality than Creon (who sees such morality as the unknown, and reacts with anger towards it, which is a manifestation of implicit fear):

So, do not have one mind, and one alone that only your opinion can be right. Whoever thinks that he alone is wise, his eloquence, his mind, above the rest, come the unfolding, it shows his emptiness. A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must not be too rigid… I’d say it would be best if men were born perfect in wisdom, but that failing this (which often fails) it can be no dishonor to learn from others when they speak good sense.

Not only is Creon unwilling to listen to hero figures, but he is also completely unwilling to listen to the Gods (via Tiresias, the prophet, who informs him that the Gods are displeased with his rigidity and in particular, with Antigone’s punishment as a result of said rigidity), who — archetypally — agree with the heroes. This is archetypal because the Gods represent that which is ideal. What is ideal is only embodied through the hero. In turn, it makes sense that the Gods in this instance agree with the hero and disagree with the tyrant. Creon thinks that he is the wisest human being on the planet when in reality his refusal to acknowledge and open hostility towards the opinions of others — to the point of putting people to death — firmly places him in the archetype of the tyrannical father. Yes, he is maintaining order, but too much order. He is unable to break out of the rigidity of the law he dictated to not give Polynices a proper burial, even when the evidence suggests that such a law is actually immoral.

The consequences which derive from the rigidity of Creon also have archetypal significance. The tyrannical father, when in power, inevitably leads to the dissolution of all things of significance within the archetypal landscape. The other elements in the archetypal landscape — all of which are necessary components in the establishment of the ideal moral and societal landscape — to an adequate include the great mother (Eurydice), the hero (Antigone & Haemon) and the validity of the highest values of the great father (i.e. culture), which is onset by the death of the hero. Such dissolution of the archetypal landscape inevitably leads to the constituents of culture disavowing culture, and in turn seeking to revolutionarily transform culture from its negative manifestation into its potentially positive. This is made manifest in the death of Antigone, Haemon, and Eurydice, and is predicted to occur by Tiresias. Firstly, it is uncertain whether or not Tiresias’ prediction that all of Greece will despise Creon, but given his tyrannical nature the fact that this archetypal motif is displayed as a prediction is no mistake and in all likelihood did come to fruition. Antigone’s death becoming news to Creon is exactly when his attachment to the notion of improper burial for Polynices diminished. This is followed by the suicide of Haemon due to the conviction of Antigone, which led to her suicide, by Creon, which ultimately led to the death of Eurydice. In the end, Creon realizes that this is all his fault and condemns himself. It would be unsurprising if such a self-ridiculing king, who deserves such ridicule, will find that his constituents and neighbors do not respect him anymore. Thus the fulfillment of the archetypal prophecy of the tyrannical father: a revaluation of values in this instance is an appropriate measure, though one that is never taken in Antigone. It is simply ideal that in this instant, whoever is at the helm of such revaluation is not rigid but rather listens to heroes, integrates new knowns and dispels with knowns which are detrimental to the stability of culture (i.e. a system of rulership that values the positive aspects of tradition but is open enough to integrate modern values which negate the negative aspects of tradition).