This paper examines the dual significance of the Oedipus myth: its original meaning in ancient Greek tragedy and its modern reinterpretation as a psychoanalytic symbol. In the Greek tradition, Oedipus represents the dangers of hubris and the inescapability of fate. Sigmund Freud recast this myth as a universal template of male psychosexual development, arguing that the desire to possess the mother and eliminate the father underlies the formation of the ego, superego, and social order. The paper also discusses Ernest Jones's application of the Oedipus complex to Hamlet, and concludes by questioning whether Freud's universalizing interpretation does justice to Oedipus as a literary character.
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, then vowed to destroy whomever or whatever had brought the plague upon his people (Dunkle 1986). At first, Oedipus condemns the blind prophet Tiresias for fingering him as the cause of the plague. He then discovers that he is in fact the abandoned child of the original king of Thebes — that he 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 he had learned as an adolescent after consulting the Oracle of Delphi, signifies his hubris. In fleeing his adopted parents to resist the oracle's prophecy, Oedipus walked straight into the god's trap, thus fulfilling his destiny. As one scholar observes, "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 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, in Freud's view, the reason the Oedipus myth was generated in the first place.
"Applying Oedipus complex to Shakespeare's Hamlet"
"Critiquing Freud's universalizing reading of Oedipus"
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