Ramallah letter: I.T.’s tragedy

Shame conflicts and tragedy in The Scarlet Letter.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter has much to teach psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. Perhaps no other American novel lends itself so well to an exploration in depth of the dynamics, conflicts, and defenses characteristic of shame. While most commentators on The Scarlet Letter have assumed Hester Prynne's pain to be shame-based, and the Reverend Dimmesdale's to be guilt-based, a rathe...

Pediatric Tragedy

Recurrent Human Tragedy During Hajj

Hajj, a unique yearly mass gathering pilgrimage of more than 2 million Muslims from around the world, presents enormous challenges to the Saudian Arabia government.1 The potential for deadly epidemic outbreaks of bacterial and viral diseases leading to upper respiratory infection and meningitis and human stampedes call for prompt attention from both pilgrims and the ministry of healt...

Aristophanes on Tragedy

Fifty years before Aristotle wrote his Poetics, Aristophanes had devoted two comedies, Thesmophoriazusae (411) and Frogs (405), to the subject of tragedy. In both plays the plot shows the education of the main character in the nature of tragedy. Euripides learns in Thesmophoriazusae that he must present noble and not base women in his dramas. His depiction of perverse women in the theatre had m...

A Greek summer tragedy

Fires have raged across southern Europe during the exceptional heat of this summer but in Greece, where they have been particularly severe and widespread, they caught the authorities by surprise. They have been occurring over weeks from late June in the forests of the north to Crete in the south. They are doubly troubling because of Greece's dramatic biodiversity — more than 25 per cent of an e...