Like Herakles, we cannot simply deal with the mere appearance of things. It appears that as soon as we deal with one problem, two more spring up in its place. When we don’t get to the root of a problem symptoms invariably persist over time. Herakles made his arrows poisonous by dipping them in the Hydra’s blood.įrom a psychoanalytical perspective, I think that the slaying of the Hydra demonstrates symbolically the myriad psychological problems that are often incredibly persistent in the human psyche e.g anxiety, phobias, obsessions etc. Herakles eventually dealt with this deadly foe by quickly slicing off its heads, while his nephew and charioteer, Ioalaus, sealed the wounds with a torch.
However, he was only able to subdue it as it kept reproducing new heads. 193) Initially, ' Herakles flushed the Hydra out of its den by shooting it with blazing arrows,' ( Kershaw, 2007,p. For his Second Labour, Herakles is instructed to slay the Hydra of Lerna ' a many headed serpent that grew two heads for everyone destroyed' (March, 1998, p. In order to provide a telling analysis, I feel that is important to provide significant details about the narrative of this particular Labour. Furthermore, I will provide a fairly brief argument as to why I think one of these perspectives is more convincing than the other. Given that Greek mythology offers a plethora of rich, multi layered symbolism,I’d like to provide a critical analysis of Herakles’ Second Labour – the killing of the Lernaean Hydra :firstly, from a psychoanalytical perspective and then from an allegorical one.
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