Oedipus and Abraham

OEDIPUS AND ABRAHAM* Moshe Shamir Oedipus Rex is undoubtedly the most famous among the thousands of names that pepper the vast panoply of Greek mythology. Out of the scores of tales of this mythology interpreted as symbols, none other has been as embellished with interpretations as the tale of Oedipus. Especially today, in the wake of Freud and his disciples, Oedipus has been elevated from a merely historical symbol to the key for the study of the human psyche. Just as modern mathematics seeks to integrate all natural phenomena within a single unified formula, so, too, modern literary and art criticism, along with psychology and education, philosophy and ethnology, seeks to find a single formula that is universally true for everything human. Though proposed by many for this purpose, the Oedipus Complex does not have the force of a mathematical formula. It nonetheless is much more popular than any such formula, even the Pythagorean theorem. The revolt of the son against the father, the desire of the new to usurp the old, is seen by many as the very essence of every social interaction and as marking every mode of social expression: religion and art, philosophy and law. The psychoanalytic method, that on occasion dangerously approximates the method of pilpul, endowed the Oedipus Complex with wondrous flexibility. Anyone who follows the application of the Oedipus Complex in contemporary intellectual thought, especially in literary criticism, will note how the Oedipus Complex is capable of inverting itself, of being itself and its opposite , of embracing love and hate “under one roof,” of holding sin and regret together at the same time. Needless to say, the secret of this flexibility is not unknown to both the disciples of psychoanalysis and its detractors: the Oedipus affair inheres totally within the realm of the unconscious. This emphasis, though it may seem self-evident, is necessary for our enquiry. It is important to emphasize that in selecting Oedipus as a key symbol for decoding the subconscious of the human psyche, Sigmund Freud was attracted not only to the plot itself (a son killing his father in order to possess his mother and the father’s domain), but rather by the realm within which this plot takes place, namely, the realm of the unconscious. This story would not have been of interest to * Published in Massa, February 8, 1957; republished in M. Shamir’s collection of essays ryhm swmlwqb (Merhavia: Sifriat Poalim, 1960), pp. 329–333. Translated from the Hebrew by S. Bowman and Y. Feldman. Thanks to G. Morahg for his helpful suggestions. Hebrew Studies 47 (2006) 276 Shamir: Oedipus and Abraham Freud had Oedipus acted knowingly. For the investigator of the subconscious , the appeal of this story is the fact that up to the fateful moment of realization [anagnorisis: trans]—which is already beyond the Complex and its horror—the son does not know what he has done to his father and his mother. Moreover, this principle of “not knowing” is maintained to the very end. According to Freud and his followers in the investigation of mythology or the study of literature in general, even the authors of the Oedipus story did not know what they were telling. The story is naïve, and encodes its symbol unknowingly and unintentionally. This is apparently sufficient for an investigator of the subconscious. He has at his disposal a wonderful “case;” all of western civilization (if not all of world civilization) keeps retelling—as if in a dream—a tale about an unconsciously committed act without ever knowing the meaning of this tale. Can one ask for a more obedient and compliant patient? All this investigator has to do now is to decode the meaning of the tale for western civilization, thereby opening a way for a resolution of its hoary Complex. However, for a student of consciousness, or for anyone wishing to examine a problem in the realm of the conscious, the “Oedipus Complex” is not sufficient. From the moment the dilemmas of consciousness became more impenetrable and more difficult than the dilemma of the subconscious , our era has ceased to be the era of Freud, of Joyce, or of Kafka. I do not mean to say...