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Accounting for Dignity in the Iliad, Ajax, Electra, and the Clinical Encounter: Debating the “End” of Life

Abstract:This essay explores as “dignity-denuding” case studies Greek tragic protagonists in order to discuss the ethical problematics involved in “accounting for” such figures: i.e. both diagnosing them and constructing (broken) narratives into which they are fitted. Starting with epic’s positive constructions of “aidōs” (shame), it contrasts Ajax and Phaedra—each deprived of their dignity by what one psychiatrist called a “violent storm”—as seeking to construct a restorative story of self after trauma. Finally, it argues that Sophocles's Electra's presentation of her “shameful” state has been misread, by both psychiatrists and dramaturgs seeking, perhaps needing?, to impose an inappropriate closure on both her and the play. It is suggestive and significant that this so-called “hysteric” should attract accounts which so impose a diagnosis, impose an “end.” The essay concludes that such imposition on anyone who has had their dignity taken away, whether protagonist or patient, is the final indignity.