by Veronica Gould
A civil war ends when an authoritarian leader takes over the city. A woman tries to bury the body of her brother, but is forbidden by the leader. She speaks out against him, and becomes a rebel against the regime in the process. The rebel is killed by the leader, and yet this causes the leader’s regime to collapse.
This is the story of Antigone, the ancient Greek play by Sophocles, which details the conflict between the authoritarian leader, Kreon, and the woman who speaks out against him, Antigone. The play tells the story not only of the complex political conflict between these two characters, but also shows the psychological motivations that drive them. In this way, it offers a perfect case study for the ideas that Sigmund Freud presents in Civilization and its Discontents. Throughout the book, Freud discusses the many connections between the psychology of individuals and the psychology of civilizations. While the character of Oedipus looms so large in the popular idea of both Sophocles and Freud, Oedipus is not an actual character in the play and will not be featured in this essay. Instead Freud’s ideas will provide a framework to understanding the psychology that surrounds the political conflict between Antigone and Kreon. At the same time, Antigone will act as a vehicle to better understand the application of Freud’s theories.
Both Civilization and its Discontents and Antigone are concerned with the connection between politics and people. Civilization and its Discontents is very concerned with the ways that the psychology of individuals has a direct connection to civilization. Freud says that this comparison “is justified by the consideration that both the process of human civilization and the development of the individual are also vital processes—which is to say that they must share in the most general characteristics of life” (Freud 140). Both the actions of an individual and the development of a civilization are dependent on psychology; civilizations are made up of individuals, after all. As Paul Roazen points out in the opening line of Freud: Political and Social Thought, “all political philosophies in the past have been based on theories of human nature” (Roazen 3). Antigone is also concerned with politics and human nature: the conflict between Antigone and Kreon is both interpersonal and political in nature. Right from the beginning, the political conflict is entwined with the characters of the play, as the shame and disorder that Oedipus brought on Antigone’s family is reflected in the failure of his reign and the chaos that follows in Thebes. Not only does the state fall into civil war, but so do Antigone’s brothers, Eteokles and Polyneices. This parallel between the individual and the state is further reflected in the character of Kreon.
Kreon, as ruler of Thebes, represents the interest of the state and of civilization. Because the old regime of Thebes, Oedipus’ former realm, has fallen, and with it the restraining influence of civilization, the population has fallen into a civil war and unleashed “the hostility of each against all and of all against each” (Freud 111). Freud argues that, without civilization, “man’s natural aggressive instinct” is allowed free reign (111); civilization, on the other hand, is a restraining influence against this and “has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts” (96). Kreon acts as this restraining influence in his efforts to tame the aggression that has been caused by the civil war in Thebes. While Freud talks about this restraining effect of civilization as the work of civilization in abstract terms, Kreon demonstrates how this function can be performed by individuals, namely political leaders. He expresses a similar viewpoint on civilization as Freud, saying, “Nothing is worse than lack of leadership./ It destroys nations, drives men from their homes, / smashes armies, makes allies defect. / But when men are ruled right / their obedience to authority saves their lives” (Sophocles, lines 816–20). Kreon, as ruler and enforcer of the laws of his civilization, represents the ways civilization can bring order against the natural aggression of humanity. Related to this need to bring order, he also represents another of Freud’s ideas.
Kreon highlights the ways in which the super-ego is related to the political leader. Freud suggests that the super-ego is the “means [that] civilization employ[s] in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it,” and that it is the origin of conscience (Freud 114). By this Freud means that the super-ego is an internalized in the individual and “obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city” (114). While Kreon’s own super-ego will be discussed later in this essay, there is another way in which Kreon is connected to the super-ego. Freud says that the super-ego can present itself not just in individuals, but in civilization as “the super-ego of an epoch of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual. It is based on the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders—men of overwhelming force of mind, or men in whom one of the human impulsions has found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-sided expression” (Freud 143). Kreon, as a ruler gaining control of a city still in political turmoil from the aftermath of a civil war, is an example of this phenomenon in his strict style of rulership and his attempt to display authority through the punishing of Antigone. He is often criticized for his one-sided, one-track mind-set, as for example by the messenger who says that Kreon “has shown there is no greater evil / than men’s failure to consult and to consider” (Sophocles 1438–39). In this way, Kreon represents not just the interests of the state, but also the aggressive character of its super-ego.
While Kreon can be seen to represent the interests of civilization, Antigone can be seen to represent the ways in which individual desires run counter to civilization. Kreon demonstrates one aspect of the connection between politics, individuals, and civilization in his role as political leader. However, individuals are always driven by their own interests and own motivations, and so “the two urges, the one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human beings must struggle with each other in every individual; and so, also, the two processes of individual and of cultural development must stand in hostile opposition to each other and mutually dispute ground” (Freud 142). To understand why this happens, Antigone’s personal motivations and actions can serve as an example.
One of Antigone’s motivations is to alleviate the shame caused by her super-ego. The inciting incident of the play comes from Antigone’s desire to bury her brother Polyneices despite the fact that “Kreon has proclaimed that his body will stay unburied” (Sophocles 31). An underlying motivation for this is revealed when Antigone begins relaying this information to her sister, Ismene, by saying, “Today Zeus is completing in us the ceremony / of pain and dishonour and disaster and shame / that began with Oedipus” (6–8). Antigone feels a profound sense of shame and guilt over the tarnished legacy of her family. This shame comes up throughout the play: in one instance Antigone says, “My father’s griefs, the family / doomed whole in its glory disastrous deceptions, / the bed incest lay in, mother and father, / condemned men – these are my origins” (1010–13). Burying her brother and also perhaps herself (this aspect will be addressed later) comes from one of the fundamental human drives, in which an individual “aims on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure” (Freud 42). Thus, Antigone is trying to avoid the pain of her shame.
Antigone’s shame comes from her super-ego. Freud says of shame that it is part of the development of the conscience which can eventually develop into the super-ego: “Thus we know of two origins of sense of guilt: one arising from fear of an authority, and the other, later on, arising from fear of the super-ego” (119). This stage is characterized by a fear of authority and that, “so long as they are sure that the authority will not know anything about it or cannot blame them for it, they are afraid only of being found out” (116). At first glance it does not seem as though Antigone has reached this stage of development. Her sister Ismene is very afraid of authority, reacting to Antigone’s plan to bury Polyneices by exclaiming, “Do you dare, despite Kreon?”, while Antigone—consistently unafraid of Kreon’s authority—says, “He cannot keep me from my own” (Sophocles 54, 55). However, it seems that Antigone simply places more value in a different authority. She says to Kreon “The laws [the gods] have made for men are well marked out. / I didn’t suppose your decree had strength enough, / or you, who are human, / to violate the lawful traditions” (554–57). What Antigone is actually displaying is a religiously motivated super-ego, which Freud characterizes by observing, “Fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If a man is unfortunate it means that he is no longer loved by this highest power; and threatened by such a loss of love, he once more bows to the parental representative in his super-ego…. This becomes especially clear where Fate is looked upon in the strictly religious sense of being nothing else than an expression of the Divine Will” (Freud 118–19). The source of Antigone’s shame is her super-ego that sees the actions of Oedipus as tarnishing her and her family, as well as commanding her to bury her brother in accordance with tradition. However, this isn’t all that motivates Antigone.
It is not just for the desire to avoid shame that Antigone wants to bury Polyneices, but also because of her loyalty to her family. When Freud mentions the ways in which a woman might come into conflict with civilization he ties it into their role in the family, saying “women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence– those very women who, in the beginning laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love. Women represent the interest of the family and of sexual life” (84). This is played out in Antigone, where it is “for an act of loyalty and devotion” for her family that Antigone comes into conflict with the state and with Kreon (Sophocles 1098). While it may be tempting to read this loyalty to Polyneices as a result of Eros, which Freud credits as the reason for “the founding of families,” it is perhaps characterized more accurately in the play as the “‘aim-inhibited love’ or ‘affection’” between a brother and sister (Freud 77, 82). Regardless, Antigone demonstrates the ways in which ties to the family can be stronger than those to civilization or the political goals of a city. As Freud puts it, there is a “conflict between the family and the larger community to which the individual belongs. We have already perceived that one of the main endeavours of civilization is to bring people together into large unities. But the family will not give the individual up” (Freud 83). In this way, Antigone represents not only the conflict between individual and civilization, but also family and civilization.
However much Antigone and Kreon seem to play out this tension between individual and civilization, it is important to recognize that Kreon is also an individual with his own psychological motivations. Kreon represents the needs of Thebes for safety and authority in order to control the chaos and aggression of the civil war. However, perhaps there is a way in which Kreon’s desire to fill that role also represents his desire for that same safety and authority. In Freud: Political and Social Thought, Roazen says:
Freud’s description of social restrictions, of the coercions of life, is so intensely real because he sees the extent to which outer authority is linked to our inner needs. Society is coercive precisely because its rulers are internalized, are taken into the self; and at the same time society is useful in helping to keep some sort of balance between various forces. Just as a child needs parental restrictions to handle his aggression, just as he needs to be stopped before the full horror of his murderous impulses become evident to him, so social restraints assist man in handling his aggression, both by providing vicarious forms of release and by reinforcing his inner controls over drives of release, and by reinforcing his inner controls over drives which are alien to his inner security. (Roazen 158)
Just as Antigone, or indeed any individual, is motivated by their personal desires, so too is Kreon. Specifically, he is motivated by his own wish for the safety of authority, or—as he says at one point—“the state is safety. / When she is steady, then we can steer. / Then we can love” (Sophocles 227–29). However, with individual desire also comes aggression.
While civilization often acts against as a controlling force against aggression, as a political leader Kreon uses his authority in order to also perpetuate aggression: after all, one of the tools that a political authority uses to control individuals is the threat of aggression or aggression itself. As Freud points out, civilization “hopes to prevent the crudest excess of brutal violence by itself assuming the right to use violence against criminals” (Freud 96). It is exactly this logic that Kreon is using when he decides he will commit the highest order of aggression against Antigone: killing her. When giving the order to summon Antigone, Kreon says “Laws were made. She broke them” (Sophocles 584). Kreon has a desire for the authority of the state to provide absolute protection, and so decides to use violence against Antigone in order to protect that interest. While this is the way that civilization operates, its operations must be carried out by individuals, and so it is also an expression of Kreon’s individual aggression directed outwards towards Antigone.
Kreon’s aggression which was once directed outwards towards Antigone is, by the end of the play, directed inward as the death instinct. In addition to the struggle between the individual and society, Freud speaks of another force within civilization, that of “the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction” (Freud 111). Freud believes aggression to “constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization” and that this “aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct” (110, 111). Analyzing Kreon’s psychology reveals the ways in which the death instinct leads to the downfall of him and his rule. Kreon feels the guilt of having indirectly caused the death of his son and wife; this demonstrates that while he represents the super-ego for the state of Thebes, he also has a strong super-ego and conscience himself, as he “expresses…a need for punishment” by saying “Why don’t you hack me down?” (Freud 114, Sophocles 1500). This is a manifestation of the death instinct, which before was directed outwards towards Antigone, and is now turned on himself. Kreon’s unwillingness to listen to Antigone, and his decision to kill her, lead to the events which caused him to turn that aggression back on himself and accept defeat. In this way, Kreon’s downfall comes from a nihilistic orientation of the death instinct.
Just as it is important to not forget that Kreon is an individual, the political impact of Antigone’s actions cannot be ignored. While Antigone does hold the values she fights for personally, her attempt to uphold traditional values as opposed to valuing the power and authority of Thebes can be seen as political. Kreon believes in the authority of the state, but Antigone believes in the authority of the gods, saying to him, “The laws [the gods] have made for men are well marked out. / I didn’t suppose your decree had strength enough, / or you, who are human, / to violate the lawful traditions” (Sophocles 554–57). “Antigone’s ‘law’ is different, of course: hers is a world wherein philia [family] is the main concern” (Tralau 386). These are values that Antigone holds, but she does not use the term ‘value.’ Instead, “she insistently labels the prohibition unjust: nomos is, like dikë, ambiguous: it is used of ‘laws’ in the strictly legal sense as well as of what is objectively `right´—in a sense, natural law—but also of `custom´” (Tralau 386). Antigone’s actions are also very politically disruptive. As daughter of Oedipus, the previous ruler, Antigone has some standing politically as part of the ruling family of Thebes. Perhaps Kreon recognizes this particular problem: when learning of Antigone’s defiance he says, “I caught her in open rebellion, / her alone out of all the nation” (Sophocles 796–97). Gender also plays a role in the politics of the situation, as Kreon states, “She is a man, she’s the king– / if she gets away with this,” revealing that he thinks she’s stepped too far outside what is expected of a woman and into the bounds of politics and even rulership (590–91). Antigone is also apparently supported in her defiance of Kreon and in her values by the people, as Haimon tells Kreon that “The whole nation denies” that Antigone did wrong (882). So, just like Kreon, Antigone has personal motivations, and is in some sense defying Kreon for them, but she is also to be taken seriously as someone engaged in the politics of Thebes. Just like Kreon, her adherence to her values combined with the death instinct has serious consequences for Antigone.
Just as Kreon is ruled by the death instinct, so too is Antigone. Antigone’s commitment to her family, to her values, and her shame about her family causes her to be not just aggressive towards Kreon but towards herself, in the most profound way possible—through suicide. While Kreon only wishes for death at the end of the play, Antigone wishes for death again and again from the very start. She says to Ismene, “You chose to live. I chose to die” (683, 565–68). Just like Kreon, this seems most related to the super-ego, in her case the shame of her family. She speaks of the shame that Oedipus has brought her, saying, “So condemned, I will find a new place, / not a home, a spinster’s residence with them,” essentially meaning that she will die for the sake of the shame of her family (1015–16). This death instinct is not just about shame, however, but also about control. Freud says of the death instinct that “the instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature” (Freud 110). For Antigone, her own death is a way to gain control over the burial of Polyneices, and gives her the strength to defy Kreon. She says to him “I was thoroughly aware I would die / before you proclaimed it…. Since I will die, and early, I call this profit” (Sophocles 565-68). While it is Kreon who gives the order to leave her to die in the cave, it is Antigone who hangs herself in that cave. This shows how it is not really Kreon who is in control of Antigone’s death, but Antigone herself.
In this way, Antigone has the same downfall as Kreon, coming from good intentions but succumbing to the destruction of the death instinct. Both Antigone and Kreon have goals, and both refuse to back down from them. Regardless of who is more justified in their goals, it is this failure to reach a compromise, to control their aggression towards one another, that allows the death instinct to manifest itself. This play shows very clearly the toxic effects of the death instinct, on individuals, on their political situation, and on their civilization. It demonstrates why Freud considers the death instinct to be the force that is most dangerous to civilization and why he writes in the last chapter of Civilization and its Discontents, “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction” (Freud 149).
Ultimately, Antigone and Kreon have their own agendas, both for themselves and for Thebes. They both believe in some way that they are going to bring about the best civilization. They both act as forces for civilization that Freud talks about: Kreon is both the restraining influence of civilization and an individual acting out aggression; Antigone is both an individual and a member of a family, but also someone holding up the traditional values of family and religion. Neither can escape their own aggression or death instinct, and it is that which causes their conflict to reach the place where Antigone dies and Kreon’s rule fails. Analyzing the psychology of both these characters provides an insight into the way that the psychology individuals has a profound impact on this outcome, and on politics and civilization. In this way, Antigone perfectly encapsulates the struggles of civilization that Freud sees in Civilization & its Discontents, both that civilization has a use, that we want it to exist for many reasons, but that inherently there is a struggle between the individual and civilization. However, even more than civilization being threatened and challenged by the individual, it is threatened by the death instinct. Whether the death instinct comes from an individual who challenges society or one who tries to uphold society, the aggression and self-destruction that comes from the death instinct is what can ultimately cause the collapse of not just Thebes, but any civilization.
Works Cited
Braun, Richard Emil, translator. Antigone. Oxford University Press, USA, 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Edited by James Strachey, translated by James Strachey, W.W. Norton, 2010.
Roazen, Paul. Freud: Political and Social Thought. Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.
Tralau, Johan. “Tragedy as Political Theory: The Self-Destruction of Antigone’s Laws.” History of Political Thought, vol. 26, no. 3, 2005, pp. 377-396. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26221709/.