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.
Freud made the mythic Oedipus absolutely central to the architecture he then put in place. Its presumed storyline was already there: man is fated by his errant desire. The growing child is thereby drawn into the Oedipal conflict, marked by the character's patricide and maternal sexual longing.
It wasn't until the relational turn, and Winnicott, Ferenczi et al in particular, that this premise began to wobble. Jung had moved it with symbol and archetype, critiquing Freud's reductive tendencies in particular, but even though these other paradigms tore at it, the central edifice of Freud's interpretation remained hardened in place.
This myth is, above all, a sad and difficult story. There is a great deal to be proud of in psychoanalysis, but there is also a great deal to grieve. The foundational mythic interpretation of psychoanalysis is sadly, but decidedly, in the latter category.
Exploring the myth itself, entering its scene, we find the Greeks remarkably aware. The mind is lively and acute, psychological and memorial. The vast mythic landscape appears with something already occurring and recurring: Thebes—which we might call home for Oedipus—is cursed.
The curse is a recurrent lack of reverence, one might say. It is generational war and violence. Harmony cannot reign, and occlusion and trauma are instead writ large. A landscape doomed to recursively loop under the threshold where no veneration or dimension can survive, and where rapacity and harm is bound to repeat.
Into this scene arrives Oedipus's father, Laius. And we must be clear about who Laius is.
The story tells us this: before Laius becomes king, he kidnaps, and then rapes, a boy. Laius is a paedophile, a child rapist. This is not tabloid language, but stating fact.
The curse of Thebes becomes more specific. It is handed down to Laius, as a direct result of what he has done to Chrysippus, the young boy he raped. The myth tells us that the trauma he has instigated will be generational within his family line:
If you