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The story of Oedipus is a tragedy not just about the passions that make and unmake families, but about the irony of anticipation. To the popular admonition to “be careful what you wish for, because you might get it,” Sophocles (1973) offers us a parallel caution to “be careful what you fear.” The myth of Oedipus shows us a man who prepares for the worst and, by his efforts, seals the worst into his fate. His story, Freud suggested, is our story, in which the effects of our delusions regarding the protective power of preparedness comprise a shadowy and yet ubiquitous backdrop to all our fragile dramas of love and hate.
For those who have suffered trauma, and who now find it of paramount importance to avoid the possibility of enduring further catastrophic disruption, preparing for the future is often given precedence over, and indeed can come to substitute for, other facets of daily life. There are various aspects to this task of preparation. For instance, there is the work of devising procedures for optimal response, such as learning how to call the police, or taking a class in self-defense, or practicing the retort that might allow for saving face. Other aspects of the task, however, are not so neatly circumscribed in time, but in fact must by definition occur eternally and without interruption, such as the need to brace oneself in anticipation of a blow that cannot be foreseen, that is, a blow of the sort that one had previously endured. Thus, the work of preparing erects in the present a monument to the past, whose shadow effectively blots out some portion of the very future it was undertaken to safeguard.
My attention, in this paper, will be to the mechanics of this process, whereby the future comes to be foreclosed not selectively,