Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook

Freud on Oedipus

Freud on Oedipus Sigmund Freud Nearly everyone has heard of the Oedipus Complex, but relatively few have bothered to read the original passages where Sigmund Freud(J856-1939)first articulatedhis still-provocative theory. These passages are well worth reading. For one thing, Freud was a great literary stylist. The force and eloquence of his insights survive translation from the original German. For another, given the taboo nature of his delineation ofthe family romance, and the fact that it took approximately twenty-five hundred yearsfrom the appearance of Sophocles' Oedipus to appreciate the psychological significance of the plot, one should not take Freud's contribution for granted. Whether one agrees with the Freudian reading of Oedipus or not, one's assessment should be based upon Freud's own words rather than a secondary source's excessive praise or dismissal ofhis ideas. Freud himself had a lifelong interest infolklore. His analysis of traditional jokes and of folktales containing dreams reflects this interest. See his Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious or hisjoint work with D.E. Oppenheim, Dreams in Folklore (New York, 1958). For a convenient entree into the still-proliferating psychoanalytic literature on Oedipus, all of which was ultimately stimulated by Freud's revolutionary reading of Sophocles' tragedy, see Lowell Edmunds and Richard Ingber, "Psychoanalytical Writings on the Reprinted from Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Translated and Edited by A.A. Brill, M.D. (New York: Random House. 1938). pp. 306-309. by permission of Gioia Bernheim and Edmund R. Brill. owners of 1938 copyright; and copyright © renewed in 1965. 174 Freud on Oedipus 175 Oedipus Legend: A Bibliography," American Imago, 34 (1977), 374-386. According to my already extensive experience, parents playa leading part in the infantile psychology of all persons who subsequently become psychoneurotics. Falling in love with one parent and hating the other forms part of the permanent stock of the psychic impulses which arise in early childhood, and are of such importance as the material of the subsequent neurosis. But I do not believe that psychoneurotics are to be sharply distinguished in this respect from other persons who remain normal-that is, I do not believe that they are capable of creating something absolutely new and peculiar to themselves. It is far more probable-and this is confirmed by incidental observations of normal children-that in their amorous or hostile attitude toward their parents, psychoneurotics do no more than reveal to us, by magnification, something that occurs less markedly and intensively in the minds ofthe majority of children. Antiquity has furnished us with legendary matter which corroborates this belief, and the profound and universal validity of the old legends is explicable only by an equally universal validity of the above-mentioned hypothesis of infantile psychology. I am referring to the legend of King Oedipus and the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles. Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and Jocasta, is exposed as a suckling, because an oracle had informed the father that his son, who was still unborn, would be his murderer. He is rescued, and grows up as a king's son at a foreign court, until, being uncertain of his origin, he, too, consults the oracle, and is warned to avoid his native place, for he is destined to become the murderer of his father and the husband of his mother. On the road leading away from his supposed home he meets King Laius, and in a sudden quarrel strikes him dead. He comes to Thebes, where he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, who is barring the way to the city, whereupon he is elected king by the grateful Thebans, and is rewarded with the hand of Jocasta. He reigns for many years in peace and honour, and begets two sons and two daughters upon his unknown mother, until at last a plague breaks out-which causes the Thebans to consult the oracle anew. Here Sophocles' tragedy begins. The messengers bring the reply that the plague will stop as 176 Sigmund Freud soon as the murderer of Laius is driven from the country. But where is he? Where shall be found, Faint, and hard to be known, the trace of the ancient guilt? The action of the play consists simply in the disclosure, approached step by step and artistically delayed (and comparable to the work of a psychoanalysis) that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius, and that he is the son of...