Analyzing Oedipus Rex in my literature class, I was struck by its scandals: the gory, suicide, and, unforgettably, the incest. Oedipus didn’t realize that his beloved wife, Jocasta, was actually his old lady!
The Oedipus Rex tragedy is quite interesting.
It opens with Oedipus, King of Thebes, directing his brother-in-law, Creon, to ask the oracle of Delphi for advice regarding a devastating plague in his community. Creon reports back that the plague is a result of the unsolved murder of Thebes' former king, Laius. Oedipus vows to find the culprit.
He decides to recruit a blind prophet, Tiresias, for guidance. Tieresias knows the answer to Oedipus' search for the truth, but he says that he is not at liberty to say. Reasonably, Oedipus turns into a rage monster–but Tiresias defies Oedipus' orders with good reason.
As the play progresses, we come to realize that Oedipus was the one who murdered Laius. When he was still alive, Laius received an oracle that SEEMINGLY never came true. This oracle stated that he would be killed by his own son. Oedipus also received a prophecy that he would wed with his mother. Apparently, when Laius heard that his own son would kill him, he ordered a shepherd to take away his child. But the shepherd took pity on him, and did not kill the child, instead, giving him away to Polybus (Oedipus' adoptive father!). In the end, Oedipus realizes that his encounter with a carriage one fateful day in which he killed fellow travelers was the moment that he murdered his own father. I guess the weirdest part was when he realized Jocasta, his wife, was also his mother.
The play closes with Oedipus finding that Jocasta had commited suicide, Oedipus plunging pins into his eyes wishing to be "blind to the truth" again, and him saying that no man can be fortunate until he is dead.
Nice, right?
But mention Sophocles, and appreciating this quintessential play is probably a secondary reaction of mine. Instead, Freud’s theory, the “Oedipus Complex” is much more thought-provoking: how 3 year-old boys secretly want to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers (as we've seen, this prophecy is fulfilled).
Somehow, Freud derived the bizarre idea of the Oedipus Complex from how he felt watching a performance of Sophocles' tragedy. If you think about it, his ability to formulate this elaborate concept is pretty perplexing.
What beckoned this train of thought that an unconscious sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent exists in all toddlers? How did he muster the courage to share this notion? How was such a revolutionary psychoanalytic concept derived simply from a few scenes?
While Freud's way of thinking intrigues me, the bigger implications of his work are even more noteworthy.
Sure, his ideas were mistaken. But Freud had the insatiable curiosity to posit a provoking theory–a theory, in fact, that catalyzed the process of psychology becoming a field of academia. Regardless of its accuracy, his work in psychoanalysis broke down a collective societal mind block. People were disgusted; they wanted to disprove his immensely outlandish ideas SO BADLY that they were motivated to conduct more in-depth studies in human behavior/mental processes to discredit Freud.
Some like Freud. Others do not. But something to keep in mind is that often times, the most challenging theories of human behavior open up doors to concrete truths–truths we wouldn't have unearthed without a "weird" hypothesis to go off of.
Freud’s outlandish theories provoked deeper investigations, and perhaps, made the search for truth more amusing in the process, too.
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