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took up the myth of Oedipus in order to give shape to the insights he was gaining from his clinical practice and above all from his own self-analysis. This crucial step enabled him to objectify his own personal experience and apply it to mankind in general. He chose to examine the myth from the “vertex” of the “Oedipus Complex”, but he also found a surprising analogy between the internal obstacles which, during analysis, hamper the attainment of self-knowledge, and the dramatic rhythm of Sophocles', Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus comes close several times to discovering the truth, only to see it slip away from him once more. “The action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays, and ever-mounting excitement - a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-analysis - that Oedipus himself is the murder of Laius, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta” (Freud 1899).
Of course many analysts have recognised the complexity and ambiguity