Freud on the Oedipus Complex

To express the matter boldly, it is as though a sexual preference becomes

active at an early period, as though the boy regards his father as a rival in
love, and as though the girl takes the same attitude toward her mothera
rival by getting rid of whom he or she cannot but profit.

Before rejecting this idea as monstrous, let the reader consider the actual
relations between parents and children. What the requirements of culture
and piety demand of this relation must be distinguished from what daily
observation shows us to be the fact. More than one cause for hostile feeling
is concealed within the relations between parents and children; the
conditions necessary for the actuation of wishes which cannot exist in the
presence of the censor are most abundantly provided. Let us dwell at first
upon the relation between father and son. I believe that the sanctity which
we have ascribed to the injunction of the Decalogue dulls our perception of
reality. Perhaps we hardly dare to notice that the greater part of humanity
neglects to obey the Fifth Commandment. In the lowest as well as in the
highest strata of human society, piety toward parents is in the habit of
receding before other interests. The obscure reports which have come to us
in mythology and legend from the primeval ages of human society give us an
unpleasant idea of the power of the father and the ruthlessness with which
it was used. Kronos devours his children, as the wild boar devours the brood
of the sow; Zeus emasculates his father and takes his place as a ruler. The
more despotically the father ruled in the ancient family, the more must the
son have taken the position of an enemy, and the greater must have been
his impatience, as designated successor, to obtain the mastery himself after
his fathers death. Even in our own middle-class family the father is
accustomed to aid the development of the germ of hatred which naturally
belongs to the paternal relation by refusing the son the disposal of his own
destiny, or the means necessary for this. A physician often has occasion to
notice that the sons grief at the loss of his father cannot suppress his
satisfaction at the liberty which he has at last obtained. Every father
frantically holds on to whatever of the sadly antiquated potestas patris still
remains in the society of today, and every poet who, like Henrik Ibsen, puts
the ancient strife between father and son in the foreground of his fiction is
sure of his effect. The causes of conflict between mother and daughter arise
when the daughter grows up and finds a guardian in her mother, while she
desires sexual freedom, and when, on the other hand, the mother has been
warned by the budding beauty of her daughter that the time has come for
her to renounce sexual claims.

All these conditions are notorious and open to everyones inspection. But
they do not serve to explain dreams of the death of parents found in the
case of persons to whom piety toward their parents has long since come to
be inviolable. We are furthermore prepared by the preceding discussion to
find that the death wish toward parents is to be explained by reference to
earliest childhood.

According to my experience, which is now large, parents play a leading part

in the infantile psychology of all later neurotics, and falling in love with one
member of the parental couple and hatred of the other help to make up
that fateful sum of material furnished by the psychic impulses, which has
been formed during the infantile period, and which is of such great
importance for the symptoms appearing in the later neurosis. But I do not
think that psychoneurotics are here sharply distinguished from normal
human beings, in that they are capable of creating something absolutely
new and peculiar to themselves. It is far more probable, as is shown also by
occasional observation upon normal children, that in their loving or hostile
wishes toward their parents psychoneurotics only show in exaggerated form
feelings which are present less distinctly and less intensely in the minds of
most children. Antiquity has furnished us with legendary material to confirm
this fact, and the deep and universal effectiveness of these legends can only
be explained by granting a similar universal applicability to the above-
mentioned assumption in infantile psychology.

I refer to the legend of King Oedipus and the drama of the same name by
Sophocles. Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and of Jocasta, is
exposed while a suckling, because an oracle has informed the father that his
son, who is still unborn, will be his murderer. He is rescued, and grows up as
the kings son at a foreign court, until, being uncertain about his origin, he
also consults the oracle and is advised to avoid his native place, for he is
destined to become the murderer of his father and the husband of his
mother. On the road leading away from his supposed home he meets King
Laius and strikes him dead in a sudden quarrel. Then he comes to the gates
of Thebes, where he solves the riddle of the Sphynx who is barring the way,
and he is elected king by the Thebans in gratitude and is presented with the
hand of Jocasta. He reigns in peace and honor for a long time and begets
two sons and two daughters upon his unknown mother, until at last a plague
breaks out which causes the Thebans to consult the oracle anew. Here
Sophocles tragedy begins. The messengers bring the advice that the plague
will stop as soon as the murderer of Laius is driven from the country. But
where is he hidden?

Where are they to be found? How shall we trace the perpetrators of so old
a crime where no conjecture leads to discovery?

The action of the play now consists merely in a revelation, which is

gradually completed and artfully delayedresembling the work of a
psychoanalysisof the fact that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius,
and the son of the dead man and of Jocasta. Oedipus, profoundly shocked at
the monstrosities which he has unknowingly committed, blinds himself and
leaves his native place. The oracle has been fulfilled.

The Oedipus Tyrannus is a so-called tragedy of fate; its tragic effect is said
to be found in the opposition between the powerful will of the gods and the
vain resistance of the human beings who are threatened with destruction;
resignation to the will of God and confession of ones own helplessness is
the lesson which the deeply moved spectator is to learn from the tragedy.
Consequently modern authors have tried to obtain a similar tragic effect by
embodying the same opposition in a story of their own invention. But
spectators have sat unmoved while a curse or an oracular sentence has been
fulfilled on blameless human beings in spite of all their struggles; later
tragedies of fate have all remained without effect.

If the Oedipus Tyrannus is capable of moving modern men no less than it

moved the contemporary Greeks, the explanation of this fact cannot lie
merely in the assumption that the effect of the Greek tragedy is based upon
the opposition between fate and human will, but is to be sought in the
peculiar nature of the material by which the opposition is shown. There
must be a voice within us which is prepared to recognize the compelling
power of fate in Oedipus, while we justly condemn the situations occurring
in Die Ahnfrau or in other tragedies of later date as arbitrary inventions.
And there must be a factor corresponding to this inner voice in the story of
King Oedipus. His fate moves us only for the reason that it might have been
ours, for the oracle has put the same curse upon us before our birth as upon
him. Perhaps we are all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward
our mothers and our first hatred and violent wishes toward our fathers; our
dreams convince us of it. King Oedipus, who has struck his father Laius dead
and has married his mother Jocasta, is nothing but the realized wish of our
childhood.

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

A Comment on Freuds Oedipus Rex by Jeffrey Rubin in Psychology Today
2012 (retrieved from web)

Sophocles Oedipus Rex is one of the towering works of the human

imagination; a play that has captivated audiences and readers alike for centuries.
In Freuds hands the play became an illustration of the supposedly universal
Oedipus complexa sons wish to possess his mother and eliminate his
fathera cornerstone, according to Freud, of human development and the
psychoanalytic edifice.
I dont doubt that there are some children who wish to be more closely aligned
with their opposite sex parent and feel antagonistic toward the one who is
viewed as a threat or misattunedto them. But Freud misread Oedipus
Rexwhich does not illustrate the Oedipus complex and distorted its
meaning to suit his theoretical preconceptions. A new world opens up, however,
when we focus on the psychological implications of Sophocles haunting story,
rather than on Freuds theoryor his errors.
Before Oedipus was born, his father Laius was informed by an Oracle that if he
had a son, Laius would die at his hand. Three days following his birth, Oedipus
was given by his mother Jocasta to a shepherd, with instructions that he be cast
away to perish. In other words: she abandoned her infant son to die. Discovered
by another shepherd on a mountainside, Oedipus was brought to the childless
King of Corinth, Polybus and his wife Merope, who raised him as their own
son. Oedipus did not know that he was adopted.
When Oedipus was a young man he consulted the Oracle at Delphi who
informed him that he was fated to be the slayer of the sire who begot him and
to defile his mothers bed. Attempting to escape his destiny, and believing
that Polybus and Merope were his biological parents, Oedipus fled Corinth,
hoping to never see the fulfillment of the infamies foretold by his evil doom.
In other words: he tried to protect his parents, not sleep with one and murder the
other.
After he left his adoptive parents, Oedipus was rudely accosted on the road from
Delphi to Thebes by the herald of a man in a carriage. Oedipus struck down the
driver and then dueled with and killed his bosswhom he didnt know was
Laius, his biological father.
After Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx, the Sphinx threw herself upon
the rocks and perished and the Thebans made Oedipus their King and gave him
Jocasta, whom he didnt know was his biological mother, for a wife.
What Freud willfully omitted from his theory of the Oedipus complex were two
terribly important facts about Sophocles play: Oedipus Rex begins with
parental aggression and abandonment, not filial patricide or incestuous relations
between a son and a mother. And the son with supposedly lustful wishes and
murderous impulses actually tried to protect his parents and avoid the very fate
Freud attributed to him.
The real power of Oedipus Rex lies not in the fact that it illustrates the Oedipus
complexthat Oedipus was oedipalbut that it depicts a troubling and
seemingly universal dimension of human behavior; the way we unwittingly
create the fate we fear and abhor. Oedipus, like most of us, falls victim to what
he frantically strove to avoid. We identify with Oedipus not because we wish to
possess one parent and eliminate the other, but because we too end up precisely
where we didnt want tothe woman who was abused as a child chooses
partners who mistreat her; and the boy who was crushed by his marginal status
in his family of origin unwittingly orchestrates his life so that as an adult he is
repeatedly unseen and underappreciated. What Oedipus could teach us is how
magnetic the pull is to repeat what we desperately wish to escape.
And a reading of Oedipus Rex shaped by a contemporary psychoanalytic
understanding of human development can illuminate why. Fewer of us now
share the ancient Greek belief that human beings are the playthings of the Gods.
But increasing numbers of therapists realize that people are inextricably shaped
by the specific relational contexts in which they are raised and later inhabit. In
D. W. Winnicotts evocative words, there is no such thing as an infantthere
are only specific babies/children raised by particular caregivers. If we are not
beguiled by Freuds symptomatic misreading of the play and examine the
particular familial context of Oedipus lifehis parents abandoned him and left
him for deadthen what was done to him by his parents rather than something
innate and troublesome inside of him (the wish to sleep with his mother and kill
his father), is the real complex Oedipus labors under.
And when we greet the particular wounds and traumas we experience with the
incomparable power of human understanding, it then becomes possible for us to
comprehend and integrate what was done to us in the past instead of endlessly
repeating it.