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It is a special pleasure to be able to single out Freud and Oedipus from the vast, and yet ever growing, literature about early analysis. Peter Rudnytsky is a specialist in English and comparative literature, and he has decided to explore the theme of Oedipus as it comes up during the century and a half before Freud's own founding of analysis. In addition, Rudnytsky touches on a variety of biographical problems in Freud's life, at the same time raising numerous issues in connection with contemporary theorists of literary criticism; he also subjects the cycle of Sophocles' Oedipus plays to sustained scrutiny. In contrast to the tendentiousness that mars so much of the writing in this field, I found Rudnytsky's critical judgment unusually well balanced and sophisticated.
Part 1 of Freud and Oedipus is concerned with Freud's biography, but I am afraid that I found this the weakest portion of the book. In his effort to get at “the biographical determinants of Freud's discovery of the Oedipus complex,” Rudnytsky does a conscientious job of assembling the key features to the story. I never thought that Rudnytsky was deliberately distorting any of the evidence; the book is written without any apparent ideological partisanship. But still I wonder how, at this late stage of the game, it is possible to take Freud's own self-analysis at such face value.
It seems to me (but evidently not to Rudnytsky) an open question what in fact really set off Freud's self-analysis. I do not think it sufficient to take Freud at his own word. For all that has been published in connection with Freud's supposed reaction to the death of his father, I am myself inclined to question whether Freud was not indulging here in a characteristic evasion of the present by a flight into the past. Otto Rank, whom Rudnytsky quotes approvingly on a number of occasions, once pointed out that Freud's account of the significance to him of the death of his father was really a cover for Freud's reaction to the simult