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Surely Oedipus has been sufficiently analyzed, the riddles of his unconscious solved; but Oedipus the King is worth returning to once again as a dramatization of the therapeutic process. In an article entitled “Adler, Oedipus and the Tyranny of Weakness,” Roy Huss claims that
Oedipus' rare and unenviable triumph is that he has been able to resume his infantile identity as pampered child by what only seems to be an act of masculine will. His final victory is therefore not a rule of strength but a tyranny of Weakness.2
Aristole's very different reading is much closer to the truth: we recall his characterization of Oedipus as a good but prideful man, who is spiritually transformed through discovering his own fallibility and, with it, an order of the universe beyond his understanding. In the language of psychoanalysis, Oedipus' change is the movement through infantile narcissism to the acceptance of human finitude.
Like the psychoanalytic patient, Oedipus vacillates between the desire for truth and the fear of it, between awareness and denial, between the assertions of omnipotence and of innocence. While the actual text of his discovery concerns the past, its implications are as telling of the present: that he is at once more powerful than he had known and less; that nothing can finally shield him from his capacities both to inflict and to suffer harm; that while he has some degree of autonomy, human engagement in the world is necessarily such as to render clear self-definition impossible. As Aristotle also noted, the essential logic of Oedipus the King is that actions engender consequences