Intimate relationships are important parts of a flourishing life. But grief, and the helplessness it brings with it, are not well addressed by allowing anger to take centre stage.

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice. You can listen to her on The Philosopher's Zone discussing the role of emotions in politics and ethics and the limits of anger.

"Do you acknowledge your wife?" So says Seneca's Medea to Jason, as she throws the murdered children down from the roof.

Betrayed wife, abandoned mother, she says that her anger is morally right, and the audience is sure to feel that she is correct. She invokes Juno Lucina, guardian of the marriage bed, protector of childbirth, to come to her aid.

But since her anger demands misery for Jason, she also calls on a darker group of divinities:

"Now, now be near, goddesses who avenge crime, your hair foul with writing serpents, grasping the black torch in your bloody hands - be near - as once, dread spirits, you stood about my marriage bed. Bring death to this new wife, death to her father, to all the royal line."

Medea's anger is both justified and hideous. Before long, she murders her own children, in order to inflict the maximum pain on Jason - despite the fact that their death also deprives her of love, a fact of which she has long since lost sight. She tosses their bodies down to him from the roof on which she stands, the "last votive offering" of their marriage. Now finally, she says, he must acknowledge the presence of his wife.

Punishment accomplished, she feels her dignity and self-respect restored. "Now I am Medea," she exclaims. "My kingdom has come back. My stolen virginity has come back ... O festal day, O wedding day."

Medea's story is all too familiar. Few betrayed spouses murder their children to hurt their betrayer, but many certainly aim to inflict pain, and these efforts often have heavy collateral damages. Even when self-restraint prevents the enactment of anger's wishes, ill-will seethes within, just hoping for some bad outcome for the wrongdoer and his new family. And so often that ill-will sneaks out after all, in litigation, in subtle deflection of children's affections, or maybe only in an unwillingness to trust men again, which Medea aptly expresses through her fantasy of restored virginity.

But she's supposed to be right, and culturally she is usually believed to be so, so long as she does not go quite to the extreme point of child-murder. People, and women especially, should stand up for themselves and their diminished status. They should not let themselves be pushed around this way. They owe it to their self-respect to be tough and uncompromising. Maybe, just maybe, if the wrongdoer grovels enough and apologizes with sufficient profuseness and self-abasement, some restoration might possibly be imagined - or not. And if not, the ritual of apology and abasement can become its own reward.

Indeed, I used to be sympathetic to this view. But no longer. Let me explain why.

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