Medusa complex is a psychological complex revolving around the petrification or freezing of human emotion, and drawing on the classical myth of the Medusa.
[1] The term Medusa Complex was coined in 1948 by Gaston Bachelard[2] to cover the feeling of petrification induced by the threat of the parental gaze.
[3] A mute, paralysed fury responds to the danger of the obliteration of an individual consciousness by an external Other (and perhaps by the corresponding internalised desire to obliterate the subjectivity of others in turn).
[4] Later writers have developed Bachelard's idea in various ways.