Electra presents us with a world in which Help Friends/Harm Enemies remains unquestioned. In the prologue Orestes announces his intention ’to shine out like a star against my enemies’, and when he reappears, declares that he will stop his laughing enemies in their tracks. Electra expresses similar sentiments, and makes loyalty to friends a cardinal principle. Like Orestes, she assumes that their enemies are indulging in hostile mockery. Clytemnestra prays that if her dream is hostile it may recoil on her enemies, and that she may enjoy prosperity with her present friends. The chorus console Electra with the assurance that Orestes is ’noble (esthlos), so as to help his friends’, and their general approval of Electra’s values is clear from their praise and sympathy. When they advise her to moderate her hatred, they are thinking of her welfare, and add that she should not forget it entirely. Neither they nor Chrysothemis, in their efforts to restrain her, maintain that she is wrong in principle. Clytemnestra does suggest that Electra should not treat her philoi as she does (518), but she casts no doubt on Help Friends/Harm Enemies – in fact her criticism of Electra depends on it.

The essay provides an overview of Wright’s engagement with psychoanalysis. It traces Wright’s literary adaptations of psychoanalysis from his first completed novel Lawd Today! to his later writings and surveys his collaborations with the German-American social psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Wertham’s studies of matricide provided Wright with the material for his novel Savage Holiday (1954), which has long been recognized as his most explicitly psychoanalytic fiction. Wertham developed his theory of matricide partly through a critique of Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of Hamlet and he repudiated Freud’s claim of the universality of the Oedipus complex. In contrast to the critical consensus that reads Savage Holiday as an orthodox depiction of an Oedipus complex, the essay traces the novel’s indebtedness to Wertham’s work and its relation to Wright’s anti-colonial nonfiction. Within these contexts, Savage Holiday appears as a critique, rather than an orthodox representation of Freudian psychoanalysis. Through this rereading of the novel, the social history of matriarchy emerges as an important theme of Wright’s writings of the 1950s.