Freud’s Oedipus

In Laplanche and Pontalis “The Language of Psychoanalysis”, the Oedipus complex is defined as follows:

Organized body of loving and hostile wishes which the child experiences towards its parents. In its so called positive form, the complex appears as in the story of Oedipus Rex: a desire for the death of the rival – the parent of the same sex- and a sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. [...]

In Sophocles' tragedy “Oedipus Rex”, Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother. Freud violently intrudes in the story by charging Oedipus with the desire to kill his father and to marry his mother. But, how does Freud end up with the assumption that Oedipus really wants, for all these to happen? Within the 18^th and 19^th century mainstream way of thinking, the essence of being is interpreted as volition, will. Freud sees Oedipus through the eyes of his era, procrustean eyes, and presents his passions as the result of his, "unconscious" even, desire. At the same time he transcends his era and its cultural background proclaiming the “Oedipus Complex” as the ecumenical condition that was, is and will always run through family relations throughout the planet.

The image of the family in the light of the “Oedipus Complex”, where the son desires his mother as his wife, wants to kill his father, from whom he is threatened with castration, is the image of a wild battlefield, a story of possession, murder, revenge and retribution. But the “Oedipus Complex”, according to Freud, is also a chimera: we do not do what Oedipus did. We restrict ourselves to symbolic castrations and murders and to mother / father substitutes as our partners. For Freud life is a story all about compromises, substituted desires, and shadowy competitions. Stale and sour bread.

Sophocles’ Oedipus

Let’s see Oedipus’s drama through the eyes, not of a subsequent era, but of Sophocles himself. In “Antigone” Antigone’s sister, Ismini, in talking about their “infamous”, unfortunate father, she says that for him: “μητηρ και γυνη διπλουν επος” [v. 53]. “mother” and “wife”, are a double epos, “double name”. The mother is for the same person also the woman; the woman is for the same person also the mother. For the ancient Greeks the route of all evil is what we would call “confusion”. Caught in the net of such confusion flounders "δυσκλεης", “infamous” Oedipus. That is what constitutes his tragedy.

Thresholds

It belongs to the boy’s fate that his mother also represents the very first woman he meets. And how does he get to know the woman through the image of his mother? From her live example: He sees the mother, who relates to the father not as a mother, but as a woman. And again, that same woman, the very first woman he ever meets, is the only woman that cannot be his – she is his mother, but his father’s wife. For the boy she cannot be his wife as well, she cannot have a “double name”. (The opposite goes for the girl of course).

For the boy, the mother as a woman, for the girl, the father as a man, are at the same time inevitable and unreachable.

The children come to know the woman and the man in themselves, through their parents' attitude towards them, since the latter cannot see their children only as such, but also they see in the boy the man to be, in the girl they see the woman to be. Once again the prohibitive wall of the “double name” is erected: for the mother, as the son is the only man who can never be hers, for the father, as the girl is the only woman who can never be his.

The children, the boy as a man for the mother, the girl as a woman for the father, are both inevitable and unreachable.

Out of tune

The threshold of inevitable-unreachable is delicate. It is like the bell in one of Hölderlin’s poems, where a snowflake is enough to make it sound off tune. Schematically, the threshold of inevitable-unreachable is crossed in two ways:

The inevitable, as we have already pointed out, refers to the fact that the child will inevitably see the father and the mother as man and woman respectively, and the latter will also regard the child either as a developing man or a woman. However, the parents might tend to flee it by living their lives in the presence of their children like asexual beings, with the father being only dad and the mother being only mum. They violate the inevitable.

The unreachable, as already said, lies in the fact that for the mother the son is the man who will never be hers, for the father the daughter is the woman who will never be his.I am not just talking about sexual harassment here. More often than not, there is a, more or less latent, erotic disposition, a kind of flirt coming from the parent to the child of the opposite sex, or from the child to the parent of the opposite sex. They come close to each other with suggestive words and behavior. They violate the unreachable.

The above mentioned violations of the inevitable-unreachable will more than definitely take place, one way or another. Freud himself commits this violation through his interpretation of Oedipus’s passions. The matter lies on whether one will recognize such violations, will recognize the off-tuned threshold, the snowflakes that spoil the clear sound of the bell, sooner rather than later. Sometimes people recognize it soon enough. At other times they remain off-tuned, singing off-key for a lifetime. Sometimes they do not recognize it merely because they are not aware of it. In the later case something good that could happen to them would be a therapist, who would open their eyes, draw their attention to the way they are and to the way they could be.

Seconda volta: The irony of fate

Oedipus, who was living in Korinth, adopted by the kings without knowing it, learns through the Delphic oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother. In order to avoid exactly this, he leaves from Korinth and goes to Thebe, where he kills his biological father and gets married to his biological mother.

Oedipus story is comparable to a Sufi story originating from Iraq. Jean Baudrillard mentions it in his book Seduction. The relevant chapter is titled: “Death in Samarkand”.

A soldier meets Death at a crossing in the marketplace, and believes he saw him make a menacing gesture in his direction. He rushes to the king's palace and asks the king for his best horse in order that he might flee during the night far from Death, as far as Samarkand. Upon which the king summons Death to the palace and reproaches him for having frightened one of his best servants. But Death, astonished, replies: "I didn't mean to frighten him . It was just that I was surprised to see this soldier here, when we had a rendez-vous tomorrow in Samarkand.

Baudrillard continues:

Yes, one runs towards one's fate all the more surely by seeking to escape it.

It is exactly what happens in the case of Oedipus.

It is very true. We meet it most than anything else in psychotherapy: the way in which one tries to break free from his problem is the very same way that dips him further into it. That is what actually happens with the so called “demand” that people come to therapy with. It happens every single time that one aims at fighting things, at preventing any future prospects from happening. By trying to avoid them, he makes them happen. This holds true in a broader sense, too. It is shown indisputably at the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is shown through the measures that are supposed to save the planet from the environmental pollution. Wherever we turn we see the image of a turtle walking on the sand, trying to erase its trail with her tale.

During the 70’s there was in Zurich a cabaret artist named Franz Hohler. His musicals were characterised by grotesque humour, songs accompanied by the sound of his cello, and stories that he composed and narrated. One such story, as I recall it from my memory, goes as follows:

A football match begins. The teams are the alive against the dead. On the field comes first the team of the alive ones. The players start with the usual warming up exercises and when the time comes they take their places. Now comes the team of the dead. They are brought in the field heaped on a carriage and they are put one on top of the other between the goalposts. The game is on. The alive ones make their attack but their shoot hits the wall of the dead. More attacks are yet to come, even more aggressive and persistent, but the dead ones are covering the whole space not allowing the ball to get through. The halftime is coming up and now even the goalkeeper moves forward. He takes the ball, advances and unleashes a strong shoot. The ball hits with all its power on the horizontal goalpost, but with such strength that it has it hits back and straight towards the unguarded side of the alive ones and rolls into their net. The half-term is over with the score 1-0 in favour of the dead. The dead are then put on the carriage again and are being carried on the edge of the court. The alive go into the change rooms. They are tired but decisive. “In the second half-term”, they say to each other “we will try even harder”.

The “Oedipus Complex” could be naming exactly this paradox fate of ours, the paradox that follows the naive and rude fantasy that we hold our life into our hands, that being active, that the “I can” is the answer to everything happening to us. (see also Disaster)