Oedipus: Greek Myths and Modern

¶ … Oedipus: Greek myths and modern psychoanalytic symbols

The ancient Greek tragedy of Oedipus is a culturally-constructed myth that has often been reinterpreted in modern times. For the ancient Greeks, the character of Oedipus symbolized the cruelty of fate and the dangers of hubris. In modernity, Oedipus has been seen as a symbolic template of the male psyche. In Freud's view, the Greek creation of the Oedipus myth reflects the desire in the heart of all male children to sexually possess the maternal figure in their lives and to destroy their fathers, as Oedipus does, unwillingly.

The Oedipus story begins with the powerful king of Thebes, who vanquished the Sphinx through his formidable intelligence by solving her clever riddle, vowing to destroy whomever or whatever has brought the plague upon his people (Dunkle 1986). At first Oedipus condemns the blind prophet Tieresias' fingering of himself as the cause of the plague: then he discovers that he is in fact the abandoned child of the original king of Thebes who has accidentally murdered his birth father in a quarrel by the side of the road, and married his father's widow Jocasta. Oedipus' attempt to resist his fate, which was learned when he was an adolescent after consulting the Oracle of Delphi, signifies his hubris. In resisting the oracle's prophesy, fleeing his adopted parents, Oedipus walked straight into the god's trap, thus fulfilling his destiny. "The tremendous sense of inevitability and fate in this play stems from the fact that all the irrational things have already been done; they are unalterable" (McManus 1999).

Oedipus is a horrifying figure because he unwittingly commits two of the most primal taboos, in a culture where filial respect is prized. In modernity, less significance is given to the social and cultural implications of Oedipus' crime; greater emphasis is placed on its psychological and symbolic significance. Most famously, the Oedipus complex is the conceptual foundation for Sigmund Freud's theory for the setting up of the ego ideal, identification, superego, loss, castration, desexualization and sublimation (Perelberg 2009, p.1). "A paradox is thus presented: the killing of the father is, in Freud's view, a requirement for the creation of the social order which, from then on, prohibits all killings [of the father]. The father, however, has to be killed metaphorically only, as the actual exclusion of the father lies at the origin of so many psychopathologies ranging from violence to the psychoses and perversions" (Perelberg 2009, p.1). According to Freud, Oedipus is not arrogant -- like all children he wants to kill his father and make love to his mother, and is horrified when this subconscious desire is enacted and revealed. The fact that most men sublimate this feeling, and instead identify with their father to obtain the maternal figure in the form of another woman, is the reason the Oedipus myth was generated in the first place.

Freud's theory was popular not only 'on the couch' but in literary theory. Ernest Jones suggested that it is the reason Hamlet cannot bring himself to kill his uncle: "Now comes the father's death and the mother's second marriage. The long 'repressed' desire to take his father's place in his mother's affection is stimulated to unconscious activity by the sight of some one usurping this place exactly as he himself had once longed to do… the two recent events, the father's death and the mother's second marriage . . . represented ideas which in Hamlet's unconscious fantasy had for many years been closely associated" (Jones 98-99).