Seneca,Self-Destruction,and the Creative Act

Abstract

The life, the works, and the suicidal death of Lucius Annaeus Seneca help us to understand not only the nature of suicidal behavior but the significance of creative actions within the life of the self-destructive individual. Separated from his mother at an early age, raised by a stern, patriarchal father in Rome's authoritarian culture, Seneca extols in his philosophical prose works a life of reason, of control, of obedience to the laws of nature and tradition. In his plays Seneca focuses upon familial passions, particularly patricidal, matricidal, filicidal, and incestuous deeds, with an intensity that can only be described as remarkable. The reasonable universe of the essays gives way to the ungoverned universe of the tragedies. An exploration of this contrast, or “split,” sheds light upon Seneca's system of defense, and by extrapolation, upon the defensive systems of all creative writers, who strive for equilibrium between unconscious wish and conscious aim. The tensions of Seneca's early life, especially those surrounding maternal separation and paternal control, surface in his suicide and are resolved thereby in a manner that strikingly confirms his powerful ambivalence toward the parental figures.