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Freud, who used the term psycho-analysis in print for the first time in 1896, had, according to Anzieu (1988, p. 23), entered the mid-life crisis the previous year at the age of thirty-nine In the ensuing decades he was to write about infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex.
Did Freud ignore the issues of his own age group? There is no mention in the Standard Edition of Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles' play about the aged Oedipus, and yet Freud must have been familiar with it since, according to Gay (1988, p. 42): “in later life, Freud liked to call his daughter Anna his Antigone … it is Antigone who, in Oedipus at Colonnus [sic], leads her blind father by the hand.” I should like to suggest that Freud used the personage of Odysseus (whom the Romans called Ulixes, which later became Ulysses) to allude to the conflicts of middle age. There are several references to the Odyssey in the Standard Edition, and, aside from Oedipus Rex, the only plays by Sophocles that Freud mentions are Philoctetes and Ajax, the other two plays in which Odysseus appears.
The first reference to Odysseus is in The Interpretation of Dreams, where Freud (1900, p. 245) dealt with “dreams of nakedness and dreams of exhibiting.” On p. 246, we find Gottfried Keller's mention of “Odysseus as he appeared, naked and caked with blood, before the eyes of Nausicaa and her maidens” On p 247, Freud said: “suppressed and forbidden wishes from childhood break through in the dream and that is why the dream which finds concrete expression in the legend of Nausicaa ends as a rule as an anxiety-dream”
I think it is not simply infantile sexuality that is involved here, but also the conflicts of a father having to deal with modesty in the presence of growing daughters.