The Death Mother and the Ethics of Burial: Group Life After Oedipus

A reflection on Antigone, the NHS, and the moral task of mourning in group life.

Much attention in psychoanalysis (and by extension, group analysis) has been given to the Greek myth of Oedipus.  We are fluent in the language of the Oedipal triangle: the child caught between love and law, desire and prohibition, longing for union and fear of punishment.  The myth has become almost synonymous with psychic development, shaping how we think about authority, rivalry, and individuation.

However, Oedipus did not live, or die, alone. Behind the familiar story lies a family, a group, equally implicated in what could not be seen or said. His children are also his siblings; his wife, their mother. As he discovers the truth, they discover the truth with him. As Oedipus awakens to the social world, so the social world awakens to him. If Oedipus Rex is the story of blindness and revelation, then Antigone, the story of his daughter/sister, is the story of the group - of what follows insight, when we must learn to live among the ruins and begin the work of restoring meaning.

And perhaps, in this post-Oedipal landscape, we discover something essential about group life, especially in the reflective spaces of the NHS and in multidisciplinary teams (MDTs), where care, law, and mourning intersect.

Oedipus and His Children: Intergenerational Wounds

Like all intergenerational wounds, the story of Antigone begins before Antigone.  Her father/brother, Oedipus, was abandoned as an infant to die. This was his parents' reaction to a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. On his abandonment, he is rescued and raised in ignorance of his origins.  Oedipus later receives his own prophecy that he will kill his father, and now, in his young adulthood, runs away in the service of protecting the man he believes to be his biological father. In his fleeing the prophecy, he ends up fulfilling it: he kills a stranger at a crossroads (his true father, Laius) and later marries Jocasta, an older woman who happens to be his mother. They have children. In doing so, he becomes both son and husband, father and brother.

When the truth is revealed, Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus blinds himself with her brooches, exiling himself from Thebes.  But the story doesn’t end with his departure.  Oedipus leaves behind four children: Eteocles, Polyneices, Ismene, and Antigone. Each carries the psychic residue of the family's secrets and suffering.  The next generation inherits the wounds, and with them, the impossible task of making meaning from them.

If Oedipus represents the tragic hero who confronts the limits of knowledge, then his children represent what happens after trauma: the task of living on.  In this sense, Antigone and her siblings are the first “group” in psychoanalysis - a microcosm of inheritance, loyalty, and rupture.

Antigone’s Dilemma: The Ethics of Burial

When the play Antigone begins, both of her brothers are already dead.  They have killed each other in a war for control of Thebes . This is a repetition of the same tragic binary that consumed their father: love and hate fused, brother against brother.

Creon, the new king and Antigone’s uncle, decrees that one brother, Eteocles, will be honoured with a hero’s burial, while the other, Polyneices, condemned as a traitor, will be left unburied. His body left to rot as food for crows.  To the ancient Greeks, this was not merely political punishment.  To deny burial was to deny passage to the afterlife: to condemn the soul to eternal unrest.

Antigone cannot accept this.  She insists that the dead must be honoured, even if the law forbids it.  “I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living,” she says, performing the burial in secret and sealing her own fate.  Creon orders her entombed alive.  His son (her betrothed) kills himself in despair, followed by Creon’s wife.  The state survives, but at what cost?

Antigone’s defiance exposes a moral truth that echoes through every system of care: there are things worse than death: exile, denial, and the erasure of mourning.

From Myth to Team: What We Bury and What We Deny

If Oedipus is the myth of the individual against fate, then Antigone is the myth of the group after catastrophe.  Her story invites us to ask: what happens to a system when it refuses to bury its dead?

In the NHS, our modern Thebes, we are surrounded by the living and the dying and by the unburied.  The MDT is our chorus: doctors, psychologists, nurses, social workers, therapists.  We meet in rooms with coffee and risk forms, caught between care and compliance.  On the surface, the meeting is about coordination and efficiency.  Beneath, there are undercurrents of loyalty, rivalry, love, and loss.

And like the Thebans, we too inherit wounds that predate us — service restructures, moral injuries, betrayals of care.  The ghosts of past teams, failed initiatives, whistleblowers, and departed colleagues linger in the psychic field.  We call this “organisational memory,” but often it is not memory at all — it is haunting.

Exile from the Group

In Antigone, exile is worse than death because it represents the loss of belonging. Being unclaimed and unspoken for. 

In team life, exile takes quieter forms.

A member leaves, and the group pretends not to notice.  Someone resigns under pressure, and the story told is a thin managerial one: “It just wasn’t the right fit.”  Another is scapegoated, their departure met with a collective sigh of relief.  Or there’s the opposite: a lavish leaving party, a flurry of gifts and photos - and then silence, as if speaking their name afterwards would break a taboo.

How a group treats its leavers tells us everything about its ethics of burial.  Is departure allowed to be mourned, or must it be sanitised?  Can the team tolerate the ambivalence of loss. Love and irritation, gratitude and guilt. Or must it repress it into legend or erasure?

When departures are unacknowledged, when losses are rationalised away, the unburied begin to feed the Death Mother archetype . That aspect of the collective that devours rather than digests, consumes rather than transforms.

The Death Mother in the Institution

The Death Mother isn’t a person but a psychic atmosphere.  She appears when care becomes compliance. when in order tosurvive we must kill something off and refuse to mourn. When systems prioritise order over aliveness and call it helpful.  She whispers: You need to get used to it. Don't think about it. What's the point. Don’t look there. Don’t feel that. Keep moving.

In the grip of a refuasl to mourn, the MDT becomes a place of emotional famine.  How we remember is a warning to all. You too can be forgotten and erased. Stay useful or leave. Meetings are drained of vitality; risk replaces reflection.  Clinicians grow numb, ashamed of their own lack of helpfulness.  The Death Mother feeds on the unburied - on the patients who died without ceremony, on the colleagues who left unacknowledged, on the ideals that were quietly sacrificed to the gods of performance.

The group learns to survive by disowning its grief.

Antigone speaks to this atmosphere.  Her defiance, her insistence on burial, is the refusal to let the Death Mother rule.  She acts not out of sentimentality, but out of the deep moral knowledge that to honour the dead is to keep the soul of the group alive.

The MDT as Chorus: Containing the Tragic

In classical theatre, the chorus holds the tension between individual tragedy and collective meaning.  In the MDT, this function is both necessary and fragile.

When the group works well, it can metabolise what’s unbearable - the horror of a child protection case, the slow death of a patient, the unbearable ambivalence of a service closure.  Someone speaks, another listens, a third adds meaning. The process of containment unfolds.  The dead are given symbolic burial, allowing the team to stay connected to reality. Only then can they engage in their tasks.

When the group is defended, the tragedy becomes literal.  Self-editing and silence set in.  Meetings are procedural.  The chorus stops singing, and connection collapses into pathology: burnout, cynicism, and fragmentation.  The unburied return as ghosts: in recurrent conflict, unprocessed blame, or the persistent sense that “something is off” but no one can name it.

Ethical Burial as Group Practice

To bury symbolically is to recognise, ritualise, and release. It is not indulgence but integration. Ethical burial might look like:

• naming the pain of a patient’s departure, even briefly;

• acknowledging the absence of a colleague with honesty rather than platitude;

• pausing to grieve a failed initiative before rushing to the next;

• speaking aloud the loss of meaning when a service’s values are compromised or its purpose erodes;

• creating time to reflect on what has been silenced — the patients not seen, the conversations not had, the feelings that could find no place to land.

It requires slowing down, a radical act in an overstretched system. It asks for spaces where mourning can coexist with meaning, where the group can tolerate ambivalence instead of evacuating it into blame.

Antigone teaches that care without mourning becomes sterile. Burial is not about the past — it’s how we make a future possible.

The Risk of Speaking

Of course, Antigone’s act of conscience costs her her life.  Systems rarely reward those who insist on burial.  The colleague who raises moral questions risks being pathologised as “difficult.”  The clinician who slows the pace to reflect may be accused of inefficiency.

But there is a lineage of Antigones in the NHS — those who hold vigils in corridors, who write reflective notes that will never be read, who remember the patients long after the files are closed.  Their acts may seem small, but they preserve the ethical soul of the institution.  They remind us that there are things worse than death: the death of feeling, the exile of conscience, the refusal to mourn.

These dynamics are not confined to our teams. We can feel them pulsing through the wider culture too — in the moral fervour of our institutions, in movements that seek to cleanse rather than to contain. Whether in healthcare or politics, the same archetype stirs: the wish for purity, the terror of contamination, the fantasy that we can build a just world by expelling what feels tainted. But as Antigone shows, meaning cannot be purified into existence. It must be buried, mourned, and reworked together — in the muddy, complicated water of shared life.

Group Analysis and the Labour of Mourning

In group analytic terms, the work of ethical burial is the work of symbolisation.  It is how the group transforms beta elements — raw affect — into thought and meaning.  It is how the social unconscious is metabolised.

Without this symbolic function, the group becomes trapped in repetition — like Oedipus at the crossroads, killing what it cannot recognise as kin.  The task, then, is not to avoid tragedy, but to learn to hold it — to make it thinkable.

In this sense, Antigone’s act is profoundly group analytic: she insists on creating meaning where the law forbids it.  Her defiance is a form of containment.  She refuses the foreclosure of thought.  She rehumanises the system through the act of burial.

Closing Reflections

Perhaps this is the unspoken task of every MDT: to hold the tension between Creon’s law and Antigone’s love, between the need for order and the call of conscience.  To be willing, at times, to turn from compliance back toward care — even when it feels dangerous.

In our own teams, we might ask:

• Who or what remains unburied here?

• Whose name can no longer be spoken?

• What losses have we turned into policies instead of stories?

These are not rhetorical questions but ethical ones.  They invite us to return, again and again, to the task of burial — to acknowledge the dead, the departed, the forgotten.  Not as a luxury, but as a necessity of psychic life.

For in story as in life, there are things worse than death.  The greatest of these is exile from the group, the emptiness that follows when mourning is denied. To resist that emptiness, to keep burying with care, is to stay human within the system.  It is the work of Antigone and, perhaps, the truest form of healing we have left.

Today, as I write, I learn that Earl Hopper has died. It feels right to name him here. He was, in many ways, an Antigone for group analysis — refusing the comfort of denial, insisting that the group must face its own incohesion if it is to live. His work reminds us that ethical burial is not only a metaphor but an ongoing task: to keep naming the unspoken, to honour the dead and the divided within the social field, and to do so in the service of meaning, not purity.