The Sacrifice at Aulis
Paranoid‐Schizoid Power and the Cost of Witness
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21747878 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paul Wadey (0009-0000-8034-8389, University of Suffolk, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Publication date | 2026-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1556-9187 • E-ISSN: 1742-3341 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/aps.70063 |
| OpenAlex | W7167431056 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
Institutional power routinely rewards developmental arrest in those it elevates, rendering them incapable of perceiving those they govern as whole persons. This article reads Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis through Melanie Klein's account of the Paranoid‐Schizoid and Depressive positions, arguing that the play and the psychoanalytic framework converge upon the same architecture of instrumental violence: the psychic operation that converts persons into fungible units of exchange. Agamemnon is read not as a tragic hero torn between competing obligations but as a figure arrested in part‐object relating, structurally incapable of guilt. Clytemnestra is repositioned as the play's diagnostic instrument: the whole‐object perceiver whose capacity for integration renders the King's pathology textually visible. The argument draws on Wilfred Bion's account of beta‐elements to supply the connective mechanism by which intrapsychic splitting replicates at institutional scale, and on Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of the face to specify the prohibition the split operator cannot hear. Two contemporary cases ground the extension empirically: Boeing's MCAS‐era leadership culture and Wells Fargo's cross‐selling regime. Moral injury is argued to be not a secondary symptom of organizational life but the ontological cost borne by those who maintain whole‐object perception within systems governed by Paranoid‐Schizoid logic
HERO · Narcissism · Perception · Psychoanalytic theory · Sacrifice · Witness · Management and Organizational Studies · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
| Highly cited | No |
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