Even though Euripides gives the impression of superficiality at every point, the Andromache is really a bottomless play. Even the clothes have depth.
When I was teaching this text, I said in an offhand way something very stupid, which was that Andromache shows every sign of suffering from PTSD. I said this in part to make comprehensible to my students a real phenomenon in the text, which is that Andromache never stops repeating an account of her enslavement which is consistent itself, between iterations, and which closely resembles the prospective version she delivers in Trojan Women. This kind of obsessive repetition is supposed to be characteristic of PTSD (although avoidance is, as well). Andromache even at one point confesses that it delights her to “have her troubles on her tongue,” a confession that seems to ground the chain of repetition on a psychological and not a rhetorical level.
Then why was this stupid of me to say? Well, consider: does Andromache ever get to a position at which she might be said to be “post-trauma?” The nightmare, for her, is ongoing: her husband dies, her city burns, she’s enslaved, she’s raped by her husband’s murderer, she’s besieged by her rapist’s murderous wife. There’s no perspective from which any of this might be fixed as past trauma by comparison with present safety. Whatever the reason for Andromache’s repetition, it can’t be compared with what happens to modern-day people who suffer from PTSD.
All this raises a problem with the PTSD diagnosis which I’m not the first one to have noticed. What such a diagnosis presupposes is precisely some moment after trauma, when the patient may objectively be “safe” enough that responses conditioned by trauma start to seem inappropriate. For much of history, and indeed in much of the world even now, this condition is not satisfied. We imagine that others are like us, but our everyday experience of “safety” is as incomprehensible to the majority of people as shamanistic trance is to us. Far from representing an insight into the mind of humankind generally, PTSD may actually be a culturally-specified disorder of the modern-day first world.
Does it follow that much of history, in this respect, remains a closed door for us? Andromache’s repetition, for instance: why repeat, within a nightmare, the opening movements of that same nightmare? Because these seem to open out onto happier times? Nothing in the play gives us license to think so; this is only a guess, and probably not the most interesting possible guess. But the next four years may give us access to how Andromache felt.