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.
This valuable little book is composed of two essays (translated into English for the first time) by Karl Kerenyi and an essay by James Hillman, ‘Oedipus revisited’, first composed and delivered as a lecture at the Eranos Conference, Ascona, Switzerland, 1987. These complex essays are so dense with knowledge and ideas that I feel the essence can best be gleaned by some carefully chosen selections rather than an abstract.
After a careful re-examination of the Oedipus myth, Kerenyi widens the cultural context of this basic myth of psychoanalysis by comparing the dramatic version of Sophocles with those of a variety of authors from ancient to modern times. I have always appreciated the richness of Karl Kerenyi's profound knowledge and poetic renderings of the Greek myths, even though I usually find his writing difficult to decipher. Because the incest mystery and the Oedipus myth has been a major interest of mine, I was pleased to be invited to do this review. In these essays, Kerenyi presents some important new material, but space allows for only a brief sampling.
In his exploration of the myth he says ‘that it seems as if Jocasta was the source of the royal power in Thebes, for in this city royal power corresponds to matrilinear relationships’ (p. 7). And, in linking Oedipus (‘swellfoot’) to the phallic Dactyls, sons of the Great Mother, he notes that, according to Hesiod, not once did she shy away from incest. Because incest in matrilinear systems is considered to be something deeply desired, Kerenyi states that the taboo had to be much stronger, or at least more uniform, than in patrilinear societies. In The Phoenician Women of Euripides, Jocasta speaks of her situation more as one of misfortune than as an infamy.
In their dramatic versions of the myth, neither Euripides nor Seneca takes the discovery of incest as the high point of the tragedy. Incest was only part of the whole. For Euripides the shattering of the possibility of redem