Why it’s time to take Freud’s disturbing theory about childhood seriously. We all know, or think we know, the story: man inadvertently murders father; man inadvertently marries mother; man eventually discovers the truth; man gouges out own eyes. It is expressive of the tragic Greek world view : Oedipus is a good man; he solves the Sphinx’s riddle, he saves the city of Thebes.
But he has always been fated to do something terrible, and he cannot outrun this fate: in fact, it is his very attempt to do so that leads to him meeting it. The Oedipus myth is still going strong. Two and a half millennia since the first performance of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex , often considered the high point of classical tragic drama, Robert Icke’s reimagining of the play is heading to the West End in October, starring Lesley Manville and Mark Strong ; while Rami Malek and Indira Varma will perform in Ella Hickson’s adaptation at the Old Vic in January.
This week, Scottish Opera is staging a promenade production of Stravinsky’s Latin-language operatic version (its libretto written by Jean Cocteau) for the Edinburgh International Festival . Why does the Oedipus myth, more so than any other Greek tragedy, continue to exercise such a powerful hold over our imaginations? One answer might be provided by modernity’s most noted Oedipus enthusiast: Sigmund Freud . For Freud, it is a story that allegorises something that everyone (or at the very least, every man) goes through over the cour.