Oedipus Rex and Oedipus Complex

The following article is based on a talk delivered as part of a symposium on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex sponsored by the department of Classics of Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. The audience for whom it was intended consisted of a mixed group of students, academicians, and practitioners. Therefore, the article may reiterate material familiar to the readership of this Journal. It is hoped, however that some of the ideas expressed regarding possible similarities between the Greek tragedy and the psychoanalytic conception of a developmental phase will be of some interest.

On October 23, 1896, Jacob Freud, the father of the neurologist, Sigmund, who at that time was struggling to find the cause of hysteria, passed away at the age of 81. Although Freud was already 40 years old at the time and a father himself, this experience shook him to his emotional core, causing him to write to his confidante Fliess that he felt “quite uprooted” (Freud, 1954). Later Freud was to describe the death of one's father as “the most important event, the most poignant loss, in a man's life” (Freud, 1900, p. xxvi).

Jacob Freud's death prompted Sigmund to undertake his two most significant achievements: The writing of the Interpretation of Dreams, undeniably the master work of psychoanalysis, and his own self analysis through which he sought to understand the reasons for his own excessive mourning. These two endeavors are actually closely related as it was through an unflinchingly honest exploration of his own dreams that Freud came to understand himself, and it was a compilation of these same dreams that served as the basis of Freud's magnum opus. Therefore, The Interpretation of Dreams may be seen partially as a great confession or, at least, a novel form of autobiography. As with most men of genius, however, Freud's work is important, not for what it says about himself in particular, but about the human condition