Love’s Trials: An Archetypal Approach to Marriage Counseling

Abstract

This hermeneutic research envisions an archetypal therapy for issues of guilt and justice as they appear in marital counseling. It will consider as a mythic background for guilt in marital counseling the trial of Orestes as it is dramatized in Aeschylus’s The Eumenides, a trial arranged by the goddess Athena to adjudicate the competing claims of Apollo and the Furies. Clinical case examples of couples in marital counseling are reverted to relevant figures, plots, and themes of the tragedy. This research will consider the therapeutic value of “epistrophe,” or reversion to myth, which is archetypal psychology’s primary method of working with psychic affliction and disorder. Athena of The Eumenides is offered as a divine embodiment of the political ideals of justice, tolerance of difference, and the peaceful resolution of conflict, a personification of a sphere of values that are central to marriage as a civic institution. These Athenic values are considered alongside other archetypal claims on the marital relationship, such as Aphrodite’s romantic passion and Hera’s domestic order and stability. This research argues for a polytheistic perspective on marriage which seeks to do justice to the multiplicity of sometimes conflicting values which a healthy marriage learns to properly serve and embrace.