Psychology and mythology

"An invisible guest was among them: Orestes, the impure, who had once sought refuge in in Athens.  Nobody had dared take him into their homes, but nor had anyone dared sent him away.  Athens loves the guilty.  Sitting alone at a table, a pitcher all to himself, the man who had killed his mother drank in silence." (Roberto Calasso, 43)

Orestes and his sister Electra collude to kill their mother, Clytemnestra.  Aeschylus in his three part work, the Oresteia, tells the story of how Clytemnestra kills her husband Agamemnon, and then their children conspire to kill their mother.  Psychology would claim according to Carl Jung that Electra was in love with her father because of that love she must avenge her father's death.  Orestes, who if you read Mourning Becomes Electra, is in love with his mother and he is jealous of his father and his mother's lover.  Through the encouragement of his sister, Orestes kills his mother, and in the final play, he stands trial for the deed.

Once again Jerry Springer appears and the characters jump up on the stage.  The audience gasps in horror as these children explain their love for their parents.  Springer questions their "love" for their parents, and eventually Orestes admits his love for his sister (Mourning Becomes Electra).  Jung and Freud would claim that this is all part of human development, and that is why girls marry boys that remind them of their father and the same of boys, that they marry girls that remind them of their mother.