Orestes strongly sympathizes with his poor, neglected, unhappy, mournful sister. His own destructiveness is stimulated by his resentment and his motherÂ’s neglect. During her lifetime, he had to be sent away for safety instead of being looked after by her. He is thus deprived of her love. The primary motive for ElectraÂ’s hatred also is that she has not been loved and protected by her mother. Her mother, though a queen did not protect her from being married to a peasant and live in utter poverty and discomfort. According to Melanie Klein, ElectraÂ’s hatred, though intensified by the murder of Agamemnon, has its seed in the rivalry of the daughter for the mother, which focuses on the unconscious frustration at not having had sexual gratification by the father. Early disturbances of the girlÂ’s relation to the mother are important in the development of the Oedipus complex, which some psychoanalysts refer to as the Electra complex. According to Bion there is a deeper aspect of the Oedipus tragedy and that is blindness to reality. Electra and Orestes are blind to the reality that their mother does have some goodness in her. She must have cared for them at least to some extent when they were infant. They can only see her as totally bad.

Electra invites her mother to her cottage for the tenth day ceremony. The tenth day ceremony is the naming ceremony and also the purification ceremony for the mother. Both these ceremonies were performed simultaneously.

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