Medea’s trip into horror is aimed at a crazy goal, yet the means she uses to achieve it respond to an extremely astute iron logic. In specific, Medea is a woman who suddenly finds herself in conflict with a world, a culture with different customs and habits that she doesn’t understand and cannot accept. Unfortunately, Medea’s psychological distress has never ceased, such that today, it is a real disease; and it isn’t just by chance that it has been defined by psychology and clinical criminology as “the Medea Complex”. Such complex is delineated by the syndrome in which the mother, placed in a situation of conflict with her spouse, goes so far as to kill her own son, making it an instrument of power and revenge.

As Prof. Gian Carlo Nivoli claims, there’s something ancestral and ineradicable about a woman who attempts to kill her own offspring and the psychoanalytical explanations go very deep. Nevertheless, one of the most common explanations is the killing of one’s own children in order to take revenge against a spouse to whom one doesn’t want to leave even the slightest tangible trace of the relationship that has taken place; there’s the more widespread suicide, anticipated by a form of acute depression of the mother who commits suicide with her children; and then there’s the aggressive mother with little parenting ability who vents her form of disaffection towards her children with aggression.