Orestes and Electra in Greek Literature

The reader with a Freudian interest who turns to Sophocles' great play Oedipus Rex is likely to be disappointed. The play itself contains no study of the Oedipus complex, no attempt whatever to delineate Oedipus' feelings toward his parents. It is true he killed his father and married his mother. But he did not know they were his parents, since from infancy he had been brought up in another land. Furthermore, all this action had occurred before the opening of the play and largely as a result of external chance — not through any plan by Oedipus. The play itself is devoted to Oedipus' horror as he discovers, step by step, that the man he killed and the woman he married were his parents.

The significance that Freud found in the play is based largely on the fact that Oedipus did kill his father and marry his mother. Interpreting this fact in the light of his own theory and experience, Freud inferred that Oedipus was expressing unconscious wishes. That interpretation, however sound or significant it may be, is Freud's, not Sophocles' and it is not present in the play.

Freud (5) found some support for his interpretation in the persistent popularity of the play:

If the OEDIPUS REX is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks, the only possible explanation is that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend upon the conflict between fate and human will, but upon the peculiar nature of

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the material by which this conflict is revealed. There must be a voice within us which is prepared to acknowledge the compelling power of fate in the Oedipus… And there actually is a motive in the story of King Oedipus which explains the verdict of this inner voice. His fate moves us only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him. It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred