An Investigative Study of the Psychological Approach Evident in Euripides' Play Bacchi

Abstract

Classical Greek theatre is considered one of the oldest documented art traditions in the world. Critics claim that almost every Greek drama that exists today was born in the city of Athens in the ancient Greek kingdom. Among them, Greek tragic drama has received the attention of most critics. It is an art that reproduces human society and the nature of the world by an artistic rule. Euripides (480 - 406 BC) was the last scholarly pioneer of the tragic dramatic aesthetic bequeathed to the universe by classical Greek society. The great playwright Euripides can be called as a writer who followed an independent rule in the development of artistic reproduction that did not adhere to the ideology of the predecessor playwrights. Euripides' Bacchi can be called as a famous play in Greek drama. The legend of Dionysus provided the inspiration for Bacchi. Scholars point out that according to Greek thought, Dionysus is a symbol of fertility, alcohol and spiritual human feelings in the Greek pantheon. According to the story, when Dionysus arrived in Greece to introduce himself and the rituals, a dilemma arose between the philosophical views and the worship of gods by Dionysus. Against that dilemma, a psychological approach is evident in the play. Accordingly, the research problem here is how the psychological background of the fictional drama is depicted. A literary data analysis was used as the research methodology, which was done by taking the original Sinhala translation of Euripides' play Bacchi as the primary source and the critical books written on psychological principles as the secondary source. As revealed in this research, Sigmund Freud's psychoanalyticism can be identified as a psychological approach related to the main post-Freudian and neo-Freudian psychological approaches reflected in actual visual poetry.