In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In many minds, Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex encapsulates the essence of the Freudian discovery of the unconscious. For both Freud and his interpreters , the figure of Oedipus represents the position of the libidinal individual, an individual burdened with desires that run counter to both the conscious sense of self as well as the interdictions of social reality. According to Freud, the acts that Oedipus inadvertently commits are exactly what every subject’s repressed unconscious wishes to realize. Various mechanisms, including the ego, the super-ego, castration anxiety, and neurotic symptoms, are mobilized in the perpetual effort to subdue and control the parricidal, incestuous urges lurking in the deepest recesses of the seething cauldron of the id. Are the parricidal and incestuous acts of Oedipus the sole features of Sophocles’ tragedy relevant to psychoanalytic theory? Perhaps this question is best answered by first inquiring as to what exactly makes Sophocles’ drama a tragedy. Freud observes that the conventional explanation as to why Oedipus’s plight has a tragic resonance is that it portrays the human individual’s relative helplessness in comparison with the forces of destiny.1 Oedipus is impotent in the face of fate. Prior to killing his father and marrying his mother, oracles warn him that he will indeed commit such atrocities. Of course, Oedipus, upon hearing this prediction , intends to do everything in his power to avoid this terrible future. Ironically, his very efforts aimed at steering clear of this foretold fate lead him inexorably along the path toward the fulfillment of his inevitable destiny . Unknowingly, Oedipus slaughters his father along a roadway, and, upon arriving in Thebes, assumes his slain father’s place; all the while, he is utterly ignorant of what he has done (in the subsequent play, Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus’s deeds are described, from the vantage point of hindsight , as “unconscious,” that is, in this case, inadvertently realized in total ignorance).2 Freud contends that the “victim of fate” theme isn’t the real reason why Oedipus Rex holds the spectator’s attention. The fascination with this ancient, mythical figure is sustained not so much by the formal thematic qualities of the drama, but by the alleged fact that Oedipus’s acts stage the Preface: The Unbearable Burden of Libidinal Liberation xix direct fulfillment of each and every human individual’s most powerful repressed wishes. The libidinal economies of all subjects, in Freud’s view, are configured through a template originating in childhood, a template structured in and by the organization of the familial order. Early “family romances,” although subsequently rendered unconscious, never cease to govern the vicissitudes of the drives. Thus, according to the Freudian account , Sophocles’ tragedy has an eternal attraction for audiences since everyone can identify with Oedipus insofar as he embodies a direct “living out of the drives,” an uninhibited realization of everyone’s most fundamental desires.3 What happens if one accepts Freud’s claim that Oedipus’s actions represent the universal repressed wishes of all individuals and, in so doing, re-reads Oedipus Rex from a psychoanalytic point of view, a view in which Oedipus himself would be subsumed under the governance of the complex bearing his name? What if, contrary to a received critical wisdom that accuses Freud of reading too much psychoanalytic theory back into Sophocles’ text, Freud’s interpretation of this play isn’t, for certain reasons , psychoanalytic enough? In other words, what if, against reigning exegetical sensibilities, one assumes that Oedipus isn’t just an emblem of the libidinal individual, but himself is an Oedipalized subject? In short, this would amount to asserting that Oedipus succeeds, even if this success is inadvertent, in living out his drives. In a violent passage à l’acte, Oedipus, as it were, turns his unconscious inside out; he makes manifest, in the broad daylight of external reality, what almost always remains eternally condemned to the nocturnal darkness of repression. Through reinterpreting Oedipus Rex vis-à-vis the assumption that Oedipus himself is an individual constituted as per Freud’s analytic theorizations about the general features of the human psyche, new light can be shed on Sophocles’ tragedy as well as psychoanalytic metapsychology itself. Common Freudian doxa—particularly as inspired by the second topography’s theory of civilization and “instinctual renunciation”—tacitly suggests that Oedipus, to the extent that he manages to overcome the repression of his primordial drives, gains access to an enjoyment beyond the mitigating influences of egocentric sublimation and socio-cultural norms. He tastes a forbidden fruit...

Share