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 course of his early sexual development.
The power of the Oedipus story lies in what it has to say about how we become individual human beings. Freud’s first use of the phrase “Oedipus complex” was in a 1910 paper in which he attempted to explain why some men have what we would now call a cuckold fetish. He saw this fetish as being rooted in a fantasy of one’s mother being unfaithful to one’s father — and so gratifying the developing boy’s fantasy of the mother being unfaithful with him.
But the concept had already been central to Freud’s work for some years by then. His 1909 study of “Little Hans” (the son of an early devotee of his views) describes what Freud thought of as the childhood Oedipal struggle in exhaustive detail. Based on notes taken by Hans’ father, the study sought to explain the 5-year-old boy’s neurotic fear of horses.
Freud traced it to the child’s envy of both his father and his younger sister’s relationship with his mother; the guilt his caregivers have made him feel over his experiments with masturbation; and his fear that his father might have him castrated as a result..
