You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Unspoken within ongoing definitions of psychoanalytic identity (Miller, 2015; 2016) is a conceptual dilemma shaped by an aesthetic, literary contrast that has become unrecognizable today—largely because the education of contemporary clinicians varies so radically from the education of psychoanalysis’ 19th century, Continental founders.
It concerns the nature of Freud's foundational Oedipal myth, imported from ancient Greek literature. Every introductory psychology student learns the bullet point: how Oedipus unwittingly murders his father and beds his mother, reducing in this catechism, the vast array of ethical challenges presented by Sophocles in his intergenerational three-play cycle of Orestes’ family, including Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.
Freud's aesthetic reduction of Sophocles’ dramas to the dynamics of parricide and maternal incest exactly follows its recommended form of reading by Aristotle in his Poetics (Aristotle, 4th Century BCE, p. 27). Under Freud's guidance, Aristotle remains the conceptual father of this standard psychoanalytic trope. Both Aristotle and Freud soft pedal the beginning of Oedipus’ story, with the attempted murder by Laius and Jocasta of their newborn, whose very name, hidden to us in plain sight, means “deformed foot,” the physical sign of traumatizing, parental mutilation of the next generation.
Aristotle's selection of incest and parricide as the particular human actions underlined by Sophocles, is in the service of high praise. Observing their combined psychosocial forms in leading to shock and horror, Aristotle establishes Oedipus Rex as the epitome of the literary mechanism through which narrative becomes meaningfully conveyed from the stage toward the affective internal worlds of the audience (Aristotle, 4th Century, BCE, p. 27; Mendelsohn, , p. 243).
Almost 2500 years later, it is this transformative capability of classical drama to resonate cathartically within the listener, that occupies Viennese cultural inter