In These Pages…

The concept of oedipal shame is not one that has been generally adopted by the psychoanalytic community. In working on my Disappearing Persons: Shame and Appearance , I stumbled onto the concept while searching for a way of expressing the relation between shame and the tragic situation in Sophocles. In this respect, the concept is associated directly with the shame of Oedipus, the Oedipus of Sophocles (as distinct from the Oedipus of Freud).

Oedipal shame thus expresses an intractable conflict: Oedipus cannot know his fate, for if he does he is doomed. Yet, his not knowing brings about the very outcome he has tried to avert; his hubris causes plagues and devastation. Over and above specific dynamics of the play, this kind of situation—which depicts humankind as caught up in forces that cannot be understood and if they are will diminish and destroy them—seems particularly important for psychoanalytic practice because human experience is more often wrapped up with failed struggles and inconsolable losses than psychoanalytic theory and practice allow for. An awareness of these dimensions of human experience is, I think, usefully associated with shame. It would therefore seem, paradoxically and diabolically, that shame humanizes and dooms at the same time.

Let me briefly comment on the articles in this issue and suggest a few of the ways in which they can be seen to compliment each other in clarifying and deepening the concept of oedipal shame. In my article, “Oedipus and the Oedipal,” I take up the question of how distinct the conceptions of Sophocles and Freud are and what these profound differences suggest for psychoanalytic theory and practice. By recasting Oedipus as an illustration of drive theory, Freud (and psychoanalysts since) left out tragedy. Oedipus became the Oedipus of an Oedipus complex that, at least in principle, is resolvable; there can be a postoedipal world. But, such a “beyond Oedipus” goes directly against the “stuckness” and tragic pain and loss of