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Sophocles' King Oedipus, the most meaningful synthesis of the essential conflicts of human condition, has been approached psychoanalytically from various viewpoints. Freud pointed out its significance in The Interpretation of Dreams(1900) and studies which followed this are listed at the end of our paper.
Acting out and psychopathic behaviour are so significantly predominant in the oedipal tragedy that we feel the challenge to look for the genesis of both phenomena in this universal plight. As Abraham has rightly remarked and van der Sterren expanded, the major difference between King Oedipus and other works, lies in the fact that, in Sophocles' drama, oedipal emotions are fully and overtly displayed. This can be understood as the presentation of an unrepressed acting out of the most forbidden drives. Due to this lack of repression, the plot represents the manifest content expressed at early levels when repression is not yet organized. We are now in a position to search for the latent contents which are not repressed but denied in their more archaic stages.
We shall develop this viewpoint stressing that, for the interpretation of the genesis of acting out and the accompanying psychopathic behaviour we must—as Rosenfeld (1964) points out—go back to the fixations in the paranoid–schizoid position and to the pathology of splitting that leads to excessive acting out.
Freud (1900, p. 262) considered the development of King Oedipus as "a process that can be likened to the work of psychoanalysis". We shall deal with Oedipus as a case history since there is enough hereditary, historical and contemporary material to enable us to probe further into the bases for acting out and psychopathic behaviour, resulting from persecutory intensification and the reactivation of the defensive mechanisms prior to repression.
We intend to single out filicide as the fundamental causal factor in the genesis of both phenomena, thus being the latent content underlying parricide and incest. I