Member-only story
‘Oedipus the King’ by Sophocles
The birth Of metamodernism in 5th century B.C. Athens?
“His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours — because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.”
— Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams
In the Interpretation of Dreams published in 1900, Freud rejected the canonical interpretation of the play Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles as a tragic conflict between human will and divine destiny (pp. 261–263). Instead, he wrote, the legend’s power:
“can only be understood if the hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psychology of children has an equally universal validity” (p. 261).
I am sure that those who have not read or seen the play by Sophocles will undoubtedly know of the ‘Oedipus complex’ that Freud declared was one of the primordial motivational urges that are contained within the myth that the play is based upon. Thus, according to Freud, psychoanalysis illuminated the power of the play, rather than the other way around.
