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Freud consecrated two books solely to the question of the murder of the father, Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism.1 In contrast, he never wrote the slightest work on Oedipus, even though Sophocles' tragedy serves as the pivot of his doctrine, to such an extent that one could deduce from it that if he had remained reliant on a neurophysiological model, he would have never been able either to create a new discipline, or to update the great founding myths of human history. In other words, without the Freudian reinterpretation of the Greek myths, Oedipus would have remained a fictional character and not a universal model of psychic functioning.
Through Oedipus, Freud establishes a tragic vision of humanity. Guilty of two of the worst crimes—incest, which disturbs the genealogical order, and parricide, which introduces barbarism in the place of right—the Oedipus invented by Freud is thus determined by his destiny, that is to say, by his unconscious. He is crucible of the modern conscience. Assuming his guilt, he punishes himself and doesn't project his fault onto some other. And yet, I repeat, there is no book on the character of Oedipus anywhere other than the famous letter to Wilhelm Fliess (of October 15, 1897) in which Freud states, “Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy” (Freud, 1985, p. 272).2
For Freud, the figure of Oedipus is constantly associated with that of Hamlet: on one side, the unconscious disguised as destiny, and on the other, the birth of a guilty subjectivity. In contrast to Oedipus, Hamlet doesn't kill the father but finds himself constrained to be the instrument of the father's vengeance. The only one who possesses a truth that no one else realizes—the assassination of his father by Claudius—is confronted