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IN ANCIENT DAYS, the city of Thebes was afflicted by a monster called the Sphinx. Half lion and half woman, it sat at the main road and stopped all travelers, confronting them with a riddle. Only those who solved it could hope to pass safely. Until the arrival of a youth named Swollen-foot, all had been slain, but he was not deterred. He pondered for a moment when the Sphinx asked him "What animal is it that walks on four feet in the morning, on two at noon and on three in the evening?" Then Swollen-foot said, "It is man, who in childhood creeps, in adulthood walks erect, and in old age hobbles with a staff." At this the defeated monster hurled herself over a nearby cliff, for the young man indeed held the key to her question.
Many centuries later, Sigmund Freud again found a key to the riddle of man in the story of Swollen-foot, or Oedipus, as his name was said by the Greeks. In Freud's view, the key lay not in what Oedipus replied to the Sphinx but in the hero's own life. When Oedipus slew his natural father and later married his mother this interpretation has it that he was expressing sexual drives and rivalries inevitably at the core of his childhood relationships with his parents. The theory is well known, of course, to every reader of this journal. But not all would agree that Freud correctly solved the riddle.
The Oedipus Complex has been plagued with controversy to the present day. First proposed in the Interpretation of Dreams