Androgyny and the Life Cycle: The Bacchae of Euripides

Abstract

The concept of androgyny appears in social psychology as an adaptive mixture of masculine and feminine traits unlinked to any age-specific schedule of development. The life cycle developmental view of androgyny is that sex-typed behavior is found early in the life cycle, in response to the “chronic emergency of parenthood,” but that in later life each sex recaptures the prerogatives surrendered earlier in adulthood—women recovering managerial, assertive traits, and men becoming more responsive to their needs for nurturance and dependency. This article proposes a reconciliation of social and developmental models of androgyny based on an analysis of Greek tragedy. The Bacchae, written by Euripides in his old age, suggests that the androgynous individual is advantaged throughout the life cycle, as social psychologists would claim today. However, the fate of Pentheus at the hands of Dionysus suggests that anxieties over the androgynous potential of the self may be heightened in young adulthood and ebb later in life, consistent with developmental observations of sex-typed behavior in young adulthood which gives way to the “normal unisex of later life.” A review of androgyny in psychoanalytic theory and literary criticism shows that recognition of androgyny is not new, but that each recognition has been short-lived—a problem in the sociology of knowledge which suggests that the fear of androgyny reaches into the scientific community.