The Story
Oedipus was doomed before birth. Laïus, the king of Thebes, learned from the Delphic Oracle that a child born of his wife Jocasta would become his murderer. When in due course Jocasta delivered a healthy boy, the king snatched him from the nurse’s arms, pierced his feet with a nail, bound them together and ordered a servant to expose the infant on Mount Kithairon. But the servant disobeyed the command and instead he passed the baby boy to a shepherd, who in turn took him to Corinth, where a childless royal couple adopted him as their son.
As a young man, Oedipus was teased about his origins, and in search for the truth he consulted the Delphic Oracle. (Of course, he could have just inquired with the Corinthian couple, but that would have been decidedly unmythical.) At Delphi, he heard the dreadful prophesy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus understood the Oracle as referring to his adoptive Corinthian parents, and decided never to return to Corinth, thus defying Apollo’s will. But at “the crossroads where three roads meet” he encountered an old nobleman in a chariot who ordered him out of the way. Oedipus, who was on foot and alone, retorted that he acknowledged no betters except the gods and his own parents, meaning the Corinthian couple. When the old man struck him on the head, the infuriated Oedipus killed him and his entourage. Oedipus then proceeded to Thebes where the Sphinx (which means ‘the Strangler’) awaited him at the city gate. Half-woman, half-lion she had been devouring any traveller who could not give the correct answer to her riddle: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening?” Oedipus correctly answered with one word: “Man.” The Sphinx, offended in her pride, resorted to suicide. The grateful city offered Oedipus the hand of the widowed queen Jocasta and the throne. The couple had four children and lived happily... until a plague struck the city many years later.
This is the moment at which Sophocles’ play begins. Jocasta’s brother Creon, having consulted Delphi (again!) on Oedipus’ behalf, tells him that the city is polluted by the presence of Laïus’ murderer, who must be found and punished if the plague is to end. The city’s elders turn to Oedipus for help – he once saved them from the monster, he must now save them from the plague. In the process of investigation, Oedipus discovers that it was he who killed the old king at the crossroads, and that he had married his own mother. The dreadful prophecy has thus been fulfilled! Uncannily echoing the Sphinx, Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself before going into exile.
Freud and Oedipus
Having reached middle age, Freud was desperate to make a monumental discovery to match that of his hero, Charles Darwin. When his ‘seduction theory’ became a liability, he needed a new dogma which would form the centrepiece of his psychoanalytic theory. Rather like Oedipus, who unlocked the riddle of Sphinx with one word, Freud believed he had discovered a single key-idea that solved the riddle of neurosis. In October 1897, after reading the play, he confessed to his friend, Fliess:
A singular thought of general value has occurred to me. I have found amorousness in regard to the mother and jealousy towards the father in myself, and I consider it now a universal event of early childhood… If that is so, then one understands the thrilling power of Oedipus… The Greek saga seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognises in themselves. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy, and this causes everyone to recoil in horror.
Freud arrived at his Oedipal insight not through the “painstaking research” and observation of his patients, as he often claimed, but in a moment of sudden epiphany when reading these words of Jocasta:
As for this marriage with your mother—
Have no fear. Many a man before you,
in his dreams, has shared his mother’s bed.
Oedipus had no sexual desire, conscious or unconscious, for either of his queen-mothers. His ‘marriage of convenience’ to Jocasta came with the throne. As conceived by Freud, the Oedipus Complex was not a result of complicated emotional relationships within a family, but an instinctive biological impulse that all males go through. According to his theory, young toddlers already plot to murder their fathers in order to sleep with their mothers. It looks like a spectacular revival of the doctrine of ‘original sin’, despite Freud’s official stand as an atheist. Redemption can be achieved only through a vigorous scrutiny by a trained Grand Inquisitor, who would not hesitate to use “the strongest compulsion of therapy” (Freud’s own words) in the most resistant cases. Any protestation on the part of the analysand would only confirm his guilt, while any memory of real sexual abuse in childhood would be deemed a fantasy. The ghost of Joseph K. (from Kafka’s The Trial) lurks in many psychoanalytical consulting rooms, as does that of Dr Krokowski – the “father-confessor” with the “redeeming power of the analytic” (from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain).
Freud was neither a classical scholar nor a student of myths. His encounter with Sophocles’ play was casual and not backed by research into the culture and history of Ancient Greece. Yet, he pursued his overvalued idea without a shadow of doubt. He never attempted to falsify his earth-shaking discovery in a scientific way but instead the Oedipus Complex acquired a status of a religious creed, and ‘heretics’ (his own term) were excommunicated from the Psychoanalytic Movement (among them C.G. Jung). Only ‘spurious confirmations’, a key feature of pseudoscience and religion, were admitted. Could it be that this concept represents Freud’s lapse into a mythic mode of thought? It seems to concretise the myth’s symbolic message, much like his other ideas in The Interpretation of Dreams concretise the symbols of dreams. The Oedipus-idea could be retraced to Freud’s relapse into cocaine addiction. Freud jumped to this idea at a moment of epiphany and then extorted the ‘confessions’ from his patients to prove his theory. As his older colleague, Joseph Breuer, once commented Freud had been prone to speculations and unsubstantiated generalisations. Also, the research shows that ‘jumping into conclusions’ is a hallmark of mythical/psychotic thinking, which could be induced by cocaine addiction.
Tellingly, Freud completely overlooked what one might call the ‘Laïus complex’ – a jealous tyrannical father wishes to annihilate the son whose powers he fears. Perhaps this blind-spot was a result of Freud’s own repressed hostility towards his younger intelligent and creative colleagues? (At least one of them resorted to suicide, having been rejected by the Master). Perhaps one reason why Freud never acknowledged the influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on his speculative theory was that, rather like Laïus, he had to ascertain his priority where the ‘three roads meet’ (see my article ‘Freud’s Burden of Debt to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’)?
