Narrative interpretation of psychoanalytic theory implies that the story of a life grows out of stories that have not been recounted and that have been repressed in the direction of actual stories which the subject could take charge of and consider to he constitutive of his personal identity. It is the quest of personal identity which assures the continuity between the potential or virtual story and the explicit story for which we assume responsibility (P. Ricoeur, 1991).
What is the driving force of Sophocles' Oedipus? Why has it had such power in shaping trends of Western thought? Many since Freud have examined the tragedy of Oedipus and I refer to some of their interpretations in this paper. Taking Ricoeur's viewpoint, the story of Oedipus is that of a man caught up in a quest for personal identity. He is torn between the explicit story in which he believes and the potential or virtual story he is compelled to unravel.
The argument of the paper develops interpretations of the tragedy by Kanzer (1950) and Stewart (1961) who focus on Sophocles' portrayal of the role of Jocasta as woman. She is the pivot of the play; the loved and loving wife and mother with the Sphinx monster-woman as her other side. Jocasta knowingly marries her son in a self-centred Narcissistic completion. The revelation of how he has been used destroys Oedipus' fragile belief in the "actual story" on which his personal identity is founded. He cannot bear to see the truth of his mother's deception. She cannot survive the shame of her exposure. No continuity is possible between the explicit story they have lived by and the virtual story which has come to light. The tearing apart of this continuity of the heart of personal identity (1'arrache-coeur) is intolerable for each of them, for different reasons. The paper touches on Freud's difficulties in understanding the nature of women and their inherent problems in their relations with husbands, sons and daughters. It finds roots for the drama in biology as well as psychoanalysis.
Instinct and Mythology: Security and Shock
Shared themes of destiny and choice link biology, psychoanalysis, mythology and drama. In this paper 1 look once more at Sophocles' tragedy King Oedipus, in its demonstration of a particular aspect of this link.
The power and persistence of Greek Tragedy lie in the development of themes of narrowing of choices interlocked with compulsive searching. Typically Tragedy is dramatised in terms of a heroic but doomed struggle against intergenerational destiny, with madness or death becoming equated with Fate.
Freud's early classification of the instincts (S.E. 14: 111) was based on questions of survival, firstly of species ill their own right, secondarily of the individuals who compose them. Sexual structures and instinct(s) are shaped towards the survival of the species. We now know that they are written into the genetic code unequivocally. They call change only slowly through evolutionary processes.
In contemporary computer jargon they are written into the genetic code ill "read-only" (ROM) form. In contrast to this species rigidity, to cope with the immediacy of a real and variable world, every individual (phenotype) is gifted with possibilities of choice within an expectable environment. Evolution has provided the individual with a map and a range of responses. The information has a "random-access" (RAM) quality.
However, at the limits of these in-built expectations and possibilities, choice becomes increasingly limited for the individual. Qualities of compulsion or obsessiveness, representing the insistence of the species instinct, manifest themselves. With chronic frustration the capacity to make use of choice itself is damaged and the individual becomes locked into compulsive repetitions. The blind pressure towards survival at the species level perversely threatens the survival of the individual and indirectly the species itself. In this way life turns against itself.
Approaching this point from a different direction, perceptual closure and the epochal nature of thought are drawn always towards the familiar, towards the construction of a world that is continuous and full and hence predictable. The threatened rupture of this grasp of a predictable, full and continuous world is the threat of death or madness. The compulsive attraction of repetition, however unpleasant or unreal, rests on an insistent equation of survival and the familiar. But the search for the familiar and its promise of security may lead to a deathly trap. I shall argue that the impasse of Oedipus involves this search.
Lovejoy (1936) in a classic study of the history of an idea, The Great Chain of Being, showed how the illusion of a full and continuous world was sustained for centuries in Western thought patterns. This comforting illusion is central to 18th and 19th century positivistic philosophies and deeply influences their derivatives. The illusion of the ‘great chain of being’ expresses the necessity that there be a world that is complete without gaps or absences; in infantile terms that mother's beneficent and containing presence is always with me – without breaks or unpredictabilities.
The infantile necessity is that mother should be, should exist for oneself, and that one should know steadily and constantly where mother is. The knowledge of mother's whereabouts is the hinge of security in the predictable protection of a plentiful mother’s presence. From this follows a conviction not only that we must know but that we must know everything and completely.
There must be a closure of ‘Knowing’ set against a definite exclusion of the threat of 'Notknowing.’ ‘Not-knowing’ must be walled off. There must be an exclusion of 'Not-knowing’. This is Bion's (1962) discovery, signified by the terms (+K) and (-K), approached from a somewhat different direction. A further step (a ‘sliding of the signifier,’ in Lacan's words), usually taken in adolescence, results in the experience of ‘Closure’ in itself being valued, becoming essential. As long as one is certain about something, about anything, one is safe.
In terms of attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969), the experience of compulsion or necessity can be understood in terms of the baby's need for close attachment to the mother. Certainty of attachment means safety, the possibility, or rather probability, of survival at the most primitive level. Threats to the feeling of closure of attachment, are experienced as incipient panic.
This theme is exemplified in Oedipus Rex. Oedipus must know where and who his mother is – he must know the truth as something full, continuous and absolute. Described from one direction as ‘omnipotent narcissism’ from another direction this need, this necessity, can be seen as an expression of tile basic instinctual programme for the survival of the individual.
Life and danger are inseparable. Surprise or shock (Reik, 1936) threatens to destroy the thread of continuity around which the pattern our lives is woven. It is the essence of traumatic experience. The only thing absolutely predictable is death. There is thus a haunting attraction about death and its certainty.
However, immediately recoverable surprise or shock creates a vital moment of escape from the attraction of predictability, of certainty, of death. This recoverability, this escape, is the essence of humour in general, of a joke in particular. Thus surprise or shock provides the hinge for dramatic, ironic or tragic emphasis both in writing and the theater.
A creative dimension of the irrational, in a confrontation with death or madness, may find expression not only in tragic, ironic and humorous drama per se but via mythology in the formulation of mutative psychoanalytic interpretations.
Fantasy and Oedipus
Jung (1953) commented that ‘Fantasy is ... a natural expression of life which we can at most seek to understand but cannot correct ... Fantasy is the natural life of the psyche, which at the same time harbours ill itself the irrational creative factor’ (p. 527).
Hillman (1997) relates the life of fantasy back to the myths Freud explored:
By returning family back to mythical figures, Freud . . . reimagined our desires, our phobias, our childhoods.... Oedipus collapses into Hansi down the street, [and] there glinuners through little lians the radiance of Oedipus, Sophocles, Greece, and the Gods (p. 98- 9)
... none of it can be taken at only ... one level of historical fact. Not what happened in childhood, not your recollection of lust and hatred, not even what is recalled or not recalled but buried, nor your parents as such – all these emotions and configurations are ways in which we are remythologized . . . They arc doors to Sophocles and Sophocles himself a door. Their importance rises not from historical events but by mythical happenings that . . . never happened but always are, as fictions.
For the same reason Freud's basic theory still dominates and will. It too is myth.
What holds us to Freud . . . is not the science in the theory but the myth in the science (ibid. P.101).
To find new aspects of ourselves as we are now, ill the everemergent present, we have to challenge accepted versions of a myth, Freud's myth, again and again.
Sophocles' trilogy of plays around the character of Oedipus (brilliantly condensed into a single three act play by Stephen Spender, 1985) gives its a synoptic moment of clarity within the labyrinthine confusions of the Greek myths. Browsing through Graves (1955) and Lempriere (1984), in search of story lines, one can pick up possession, lust, rivalry, deceit, and revenge as drives energising the fantasies of mankind. There seems little else that is constant, outside the binding function of tragic themes almost always in relation to some exiled soul. The myths appear to demonstrate that these drives are our common lot, this is the usual, the statistically normal, picture of man. We are caught between compulsion (expressed as Fate) and obsessiveness shown by the limitation of choices. The myths often find final expression ill murder or suicide or ill the act of blinding. These are extreme forms of turning away from the unacceptable. The softer side, for example the love and steadfastness of Antigone, is simply uncut hay for the chaff-cutter,
the material and not the form of life. The power of Sophocles' trilogy (Kitng Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) is that it condenses this dismaying picture of ourselves into a gripping emotional epitome.
In literary interpretation, classicists warn us of the ‘documentary fallacy,’ the impulse to treat fiction as if it recorded real events or characters from whom inferences can be drawn which have no basis in the text itself. This applies obviously when the events and characters are solely the invention of the author. The situation is more ambiguous when the characters and events are continuous with stories preceding the text which reflect aspects of human nature in itself. The Greek. audiences for whom Sophocles was writing would have been versed in the pre-history of his plays from a common knowledge of the myths and from other plays which pre-dated those of Sophocles. Accounts of the characters involved in the myths, their genealogy and relationships, their interaction with the gods would be more or less familiar to them. In this setting the ‘documentary fallacy’ has the force of a cautionary warning rather than a prohibition.
Sophocles (King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone ) is that it condenses this dismaying picture of ourselves into a gripping emotional epitome. In literary interpretation, classicists warn us of the 'documentary fallacy', the impulse to treat fiction as if it recorded real events or characters from whom inferences can be drawn which have no basis in the text itself. This applies obviously when the events and characters are solely the invention of the author. The situation is more ambiguous when the characters and events are continuous with stories preceding the text which reflect aspects of human nature itself. The Greek audiences for whom Sophocles was writing would have been versed in the pre history of his plays from a common knowledge of the myths and from other plays which predated those of Sophocles. Accounts of the characters involved in the myths, their genealogy and relationships, their interaction with the gods would be more or less familiar to them. In this setting the 'documentary fallacy' has the force of a cautionary warning rather than a prohibition.
Oedipus: the Story-line
In this paper 1 shall discuss only King Oedipus, the key play in Sophocles' trilogy. This play introduces the series although it was in fact written after Antigone but before Oedipus at Colonus. Although I have inserted some important details from Watling's translation and from Lempričre, what follows, in the main, closely paraphrases Graves' account of the story line associated with Oedipus:
Laius, son of Labdacus, married Iocaste, and ruled over Thebes. Troubled by his homosexuality and childlessness, he secretly consulted the Delphic Oracle, which informed him that this seeming misfortune was a blessing, because any child born to Iocaste would become his murderer. He therefore put Iocaste away, though without offering any reason for his decision, which caused her such vexation that she made him drunk and inveigled him into her arms again as soon as night fell. When, nine months later, as a result of this rape, locaste was brought to bed of a son, Laius snatched him from the nurse's arms, pierced his feet with a nail and, binding them together, exposed him on Mount Cithaeron ...
Corinthian shepherd found him, named him Oedipus because his feet were deformed by the nail wound, and brought him to Corinth. [Another version says that he was discovered in a basket on a river bank, like Moses.]. Oedipus became the loved foster son of the ruler of Corinth, King Polybus and his wife Periboea (or Merope) whom he supposed to be his true parents.
One day, taunted by a Corinthian youth with not in the least resembling his supposed parents, Oedipus left Corinth and went to ask the Delphic Oracle what the future held for him. ‘Away from the shrine, wretch!’ the Pythoness cried in disgust. ‘You will kill your father and marry your mother!’ Since Oedipus loved Polybus and Merope ... he at once decided against returning to Corinth. But in the narrow defile between Delphi and Daulis, in the place called Phocis, he happened to meet Laius who ordered him roughly to step off the road and make way for his betters ... Oedipus retorted that he acknowledged no betters except the gods and his own parents. ‘So much the worse for you!’ cried Laius, and ordered his charioteer Polyphontes, to drive on.
One of the wheels bruised Oedipus' foot and, transported by rage, he killed Polyphontes with his spear. Then, flinging Laius on the road entangled in the reins, Oedipus whipped up the team and saw Laius dragged to his death.
The theme emphasised by the Chorus is that Oedipus, as the central character, is burdened by a curse. No matter how he struggles to avoid it, he will end up killing his father and sexually mating with his mother.
Laius, Jocasta and the Sphinx as Riddle
We have been told that Oedipus, in effect, was in flight from the prediction made by the Oracle of Delphi, not knowing where he was going. Let us look now at the other characters. What was Laius doing on the road to Delphi? What of his wife Jocasta and the Sphinx? We need to fill out this part of the story, also with the aid of Graves and Lempričre.
Before the story of Oedipus Rex begins, Laius' abduction and rape of the boy Chrysippus had led the goddess Hera (or Juno) to send the Sphinx to punish Thebes. The Sphinx symbolises the revengeful, negative, destructive side of Hera as prototypical female. The Sphinx asked every Theban wayfarer a taught her by the three Muses: What being, with only one voice, walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening and is weakest when it has the most?' Those who could not solve the riddle the Sphinx throttled and devoured on the spot. Apparently Hera/Juno was bent on making all and sundry pay for Laius' twin crimes of male sexual preference and rape; her revengeful weapons being asphyxiation and cannibalism. These are risks feared by infants and children with good reason (de Mause, 1974).
Laius set off to ask the oracular Pythoness at Delphi how to deal with this monster which, in a suitable symbolic melange, had a woman's head and torso, a lion’s body, a serpent's tail and eagle's wings. This image of woman may explain Laius' refuge in homosexuality and apparent flight from Jocasta. In his first visit to the Oracle Laius had been warned that it was fated that his son would kill him. On this second occasion, unwittingly he was travelling through Phocis in his chariot to fulfil the Oracle's prediction. Thus it came about that he met Oedipus, in a narrow defile, and ordered him off the road to make way for his betters. As we have seen, in the anger and confusion that followed, Oedipus killed Laius without knowing him as his father.
In the way of myths, there is a condensed time interval between Oedipus' unwitting murder of his father and his approach to Thebes where he meets the Sphinx and intuitively answers her misleading, and childish riddle with the equally trivial reply: ‘Man, because he crawls on all fours as an infant, stands firmly on his two feet in his youth, and leans upon a staff in his old age.’
Oedipus allows himself to be diverted from the real riddle, which is the Sphinx herself, the riddle of the complexity of being Female, of being Woman, of being Mother. As a symbol, the Sphinx stands for an 'agglutinated inner object' in Bleger's sense generating unresolvable attachment and erotic ties (Blomfield, 1992). 'Homosexual and heterosexual, sadistic and masochistic trends overlap, inextricably blended' (Reik, 1920). Even at the most immediate level, her actions stand for a distorted maternalistic urge to treat 'approaching wayfarers' as children, to exercise control by mystification and to deal out ruthless punishment. She is 'the terrible mother', the destructive phallic mother. The portrayal of neurotic motherhood continues when the Sphinx, apparently narcissistically wounded by Oedipus' success, throws herself over a convenient cliff. At this, the grateful Thebans acclaim Oedipus king, and offer him Jocasta as queen. Surprise! Surprise! Jocasta is really the 'good' side of the Sphinx (Reik, 1920; Jung, 1956; Bross, 1984).
We need to look at this sudden transformation more closely. It is obvious now that the 'Sphinx's riddle' is different from the 'riddle of the Sphinx'. The trivial riddle offered, one might say contemptuously, by the Sphinx appeals to Oedipus' vanity and allows him to fall prey to his mother's erotic, narcissistic need. The Sphinx's riddle is a push-over but the riddle of the Sphinx is quite beyond him; he is insulated from it by disavowal. At the narcissistic level, Oedipus and his mother pander to each other's self conceit with the game of riddles. If the answer at this level is ‘Man’ then the answer to the more difficult enigma posed by the Sphinx herself is ‘Woman.’
The Search
At a deeper level of truth, Oedipus embarks on an insistent, compulsive, search to uncover the real relationship with his mother and to discover her nature. His self blinding at the conclusion of the play is a vain attempt to undo the terrible answer and to restore the initial state of unknowing.
Steiner (1985) has pointed out, following Vellacott (1971), an apparent collusion between the Chorus, representing the people of Thebes, Jocasta and Oedipus. In this interpretation, all of them 'turn a blind eye' to the pressing evidence that she must be his mother. The interpretation I am following in this paper is that of Stewart (1961) and Bross (1984) who both draw attention to evidence in the text that Jocasta was well aware that Oedipus was her son but was dissimulatingIn either case, Sophocles wrote into the play a picture, not only of complex sexual interactions in themselves, but also of how they were interwoven with group, political and religious life; the latter forming the backdrop to attempted infanticide, parricide and, on the mother's side, conscious incest.
The incestuous marriage between Oedipus and Jocasta, a fruitful symbiotic union, had continued for seventeen years when the play Oedipus Rex begins. Like all symbioses it was bound together and sustained by the primary processes of uncritical displacement and condensation. But things have gone wrong; there is a plague in Thebes. The city is polluted. Behind the introduction of a moral issue symbolised by pollution, the opening of the play rests on a transition of emphasis from the concreteness of the primary processes and associated projective organisation into the secondary process of linear logical thought, more flexible in one way, more rigid in another. This mirrors Jaynes (1976) theme of historical emergence from the 'bicameral mind' in the transition from concrete projected belief in the interfering power of gods to the internalised control of superego function.
Oedipus' actions now illustrate secondary process thought contaminated by compulsion. He follows insistently the path of binary reasoning which leads inexorably to his and Jocasta's doom. 'I must', he says 'I cannot leave the truth unknown'.
A search for truth is usually seen as a noble enterprise. Was there anything noble about Oedipus' search? What sort of a search was it really?
Jocasta and the Sphinx
The theme of survival as against death, or the fear of death, is central. The English poet, Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1892) wrote:
He who has once been happy is for aye
out of destruction's reach. His fortune then
holds nothing secret, and Eternity,
which is a mystery to other men,
has like a woman given him its joy.
Time is his conquest. Life, if it should fret,
has paid him tribute. He can bear to die.
'He who has once been happy' implies the establishment of primary love in Balint's (1968) sense and basic trust as Erikson (1982) conceives it.
The central character of Oedipus Rex survived mutilation, deprivation and rejection as an infant. He was left with an impaired capacity for the development of basic trust and hence any possibility of sustained happiness. He cannot bear to die. His life has an open wound of uncertainty which he struggles to close. Like so many adoptive children he is caught up in a compulsive search to discover the truth about his real parentage. He must live only for this. Feder (1974) examines the manifest Oedipus myth against a clinical study of the trauma suffered by adopted children, who often flee from the adoptive parents (or the analyst) impelled by the fear that they will discover that they have not been entirely wanted. They may feel compelled to search for their natural parents even though the separation occurred at birth. Like Oedipus this may result in devastating shock. But first we must try to understand the role of the other protagonists more fully.First Laius, The curse that he would be killed by his son was put on Laius. To save his life, Laius ordered his son's death. The plot thus has its origin in attempted infanticide. Parricide is a secondary result. Hillman (1987, p. 115) comments:
In fact, Oedipus left Corinth so as not to kill his father. But Laius wished to kill, tried to kill his son. Freud emphasises parricide, both in regard to the Oedipal urge and to the primal horde, where sons kill the father. He says less about infanticide, about fathers killing sons. This desire in the father to kill the child we ignore to our peril, especially since psychoanalysis descends from fathers. If this myth is foundational to depth psychology, then infanticide is basic to our practice and our thought. Our practice and our thought recognize infanticide in the archetypal mother, its desire to smother, dissolve, mourn, bewitch, poison, and petrify. We are aware that inherent to mothering is bad' mothering. Fathering too is impelled by its archetypical necessity to isolate, ignore, neglect, abandon, expose, disavow, devour, enslave, sell, maim, betray the son motifs we find in biblical and Hellenic myths as well as folklore, fairytales, and cultural history.
The interpretation of Oedipus Rex given by Stewart (1961) summarises Oedipus' origins:
Laius ... abducted the youth Chrysippus before his marriage to Jocasta, and a curse was proclaimed on him by Hera, the Mother Goddess, as a punishment for his homosexuality. The curse was that if Laius had a son, the child would kill him and marry his wife in his place ... Laius refused Jocasta ... children until, eventually, she raped him when he was drunk, and this led to the birth of Oedipus ... (who in the play proclaims himself) sinful in my beginning'.
Stewart points to evidence in the text that, while Laius decided to get rid of the baby Oedipus by exposure on Mt. Cithaeron, it was Jocasta herself who handed the child to the shepherd.
Jocasta (p. 45; line719) in telling Oedipus of the fate of the child born to her and Laius says:
As for the child.
It was not yet three days old, when he cast it out(By other hands, not his) with rivetted ankles
To perish on the empty mountainside.
But later in the play (p. 58; line 1171-78) the shepherd, unequivocally, tells Oedipus that the 'other hands' were those of Jocasta herself.
Oedipus: She gave it you?
Shepherd:Yes, master.
Oedipus:To what purpose?
Shepherd:To be destroyed.
Oedipus: The child she bore?
Shepherd:Yes, master. They said
'twas on account of some wicked spell.
Oedipus: What spell?
Shepherd: Saying the child should kill its father.
Stewart poses the question, why did Jocasta hide from Oedipus her husband, her actions with Oedipus, her infant?
Earlier, Jocasta in telling Oedipus of the servant who had been a witness of the scuffle and murder at the cross roads, had said (p.49, line 742):
When he came back,
And found you king in his late master's place,
He earnestly begged me to let him go away
Into the country to become a shepherd,
Far from the city's eyes. I let him go
Poor fellow, he might have asked a greater favour;
He was a good slave.
Stewart asks: 'Why did he not wish to serve under the new king and Why might he have asked a greater favour? This implies that he has performed some special service to Jocasta ...' Bross (1984) emphasises the inconsistency in Jocasta saying that the slave returned after Oedipus became king when she had previously said that he was the sole survivor of Laius' party who came home with the news of his murder. Sophocles obviously intended that Jocasta be seen as starting to become flustered and contradicting herself.Stewart, from his close analysis of the text, comes to the conclusion that Jocasta, while appearing to go along with Laius in getting rid of the baby, in fact passes the baby for safe-keeping to the shepherd who takes him to Corinth. Other textual evidence suggests that Jocasta must have known who Oedipus was, when he returned as a young man - even that she may have been present with Laius at the cross roads. In any case she was well aware that she was marrying her son. It appears that Sophocles intended that Jocasta be seen as playing a duplicitous role. Psychoanalytically, one would say that she consciously used her son, in his unresolved symbiotic attachment to her, as her own fantasy-penis in self-fertilisation to produce four children. Shame at the uncovering of this deceit leads her to kill herself just as her disowned destructive-self, represented by the Sphinx, had done.
Stewart's wide ranging interpretation shows Jocasta fulfilling her instinct to have a baby, in a sterile marriage, by tricking her homosexual husband and then taking steps to give the baby the best chance of survival against the threat of murder. The murder of Laius is a double dividend. She gets rid of a sterile partner and revenges the loss of her baby.
The symbiotic union with Oedipus is restored on his return as a young adult. He completes her as baby/penis. Regained fecundity in the symbiotic union with Oedipus offsets any difficulties with deceit. Jocasta's 'crimes' are understandable biologically. She is woman'. Through her the diachronic organisation of the species (sexual) instinct provides the theme of Fate, presented in the play as intergenerational destiny. The Sphinx is her ‘dark’ side.
The genealogy of the Sphinx makes a backdrop to the play. She was a daughter of Echidna (a monster/beautiful maiden above /hideous serpent below) who in turn was born of Gaia (All Mother/Mother Earth). Gaia conceived Echidna with Tartarus (the personification of the underworld). Echidna became the mother of all terrors, the Chimera, Scylla, the Gorgon; Cerberus, the eagle that devoured the liver of Prometheus; one son was the dog Orthrus, the dog of the monster Geryon (slain by Hercules). With this dog, her own son, Echidna incestuously begat the Sphinx (Jung 1956, p. 182). Thus ambiguity, the theme of monstrosity and incestuous seduction by the mother enter into the background of Sophocles' play with the image of the Sphinx; they continue in the life of Jocasta.
Oedipus and the Truth
The case being madc in this paper is that the devastating shock suffered by Oedipus, was suddenly to see Jocasta as caring only for a part of herself narcissistically, and not in any sense for him, either as son or husband.
The horrible truth that Oedipus uncovers, and attempts to undo by blinding himself, is that of his mother's fraudulence. With his own unconscious collusion, she had used him treacherously in an imposture which denied his separate identity and threatened to undo entirely the life work of individuation separation implied in identity formation. The blinding disclosure of her imposture dislocates his fragile sense of being.
On the other hand, the unbearable shock for Jocasta was, suddenly, to find herself exposed. Her self image, to be found in the eyes of others, was brutally transformed from that of loving Queen and Mother, once again, to that of the monstrous and devouring Sphinx. She kills herself by the same mode as that used by the Sphinx - asphyxiation. Oedipus, an adopted child who had found again, and married, his natural mother, blinds himself with the twin brooches supporting her dress. At the same moment he exposes her breasts and destroys his sight.
I have followed a particular reading of the myth of Oedipus. Many other readings have been made many others are possible. In exploring the drama of instinct from the biological to the mythological we find ourselves faced by ever widening possibilities of signification. In terms of narrative theory (Ricoeur, 1991) Oedipus was tom between the ‘actual story’ which constituted and sustained his personal identity as husband, father and King and the repressed but virtual story of his origins, the deadly truth of which he was compelled to seek. Elsewhere, Ricoeur (1970, p. 512-24) has shown that different readings of a text indicate stages of an exegesis which reveals an immanent process constantly shaping the understanding (Bildung). This gathering together of understanding is in itself an aspect of narcissism.
Narcissistic closure affords great satisfaction and protection from awareness of threats, doubts or destructiveness external to the ego. These are the truths that must not be known. The fabric of mutuality that enfolds, binds and defines a primary unity, that of one's mother and oneself as child, is weakened by disruptive experiences in infancy and early childhood. The psychic matrix of an imaginary symbiotic existence sustains every adult and this illusion of mutuality, this fantasy of unity, is extended to the ‘lived world’ we inhabit. Oedipus Rex shows that the sudden rupture of this narcissistic fantasy cannot easily be borne.
In summary, the quest of personal identity is a quest constrained by the demands of an inescapable antinomy; that between ‘the explicit story for which we assume responsibility’ and ‘the potential or virtual story’ which we struggle to bring to light. In this classic Greek tragedy, Oedipus struggles between the explicit story (of his origin as the son and heir of Polypus and Merope for which he strives to assume responsibility and the potential or virtual story of his identity as the unwitting murderer of his father and incestuous mate of his mother who has shamefully deceived him. He cannot live the explicit story because of its falsehood and he cannot bear to see the virtual story because, with his unconscious collusion, his mother has seduced him into a spurious and morally unbearable life. Sophocles closes the play with the words:
And none can be called happy until that day when he carries.
His happiness down to the grave in peace .
Freud as Oedipus
Freud wrote in 1897:
... the Greek myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognises because he has felt traces of it in himself. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream fulfilment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror...
Gay (1988, p. 505, fn.) quotes Schur's comment to Jones about Freud. 'Altogether there are many evidences of complicated pregenital relationships with mother which perhaps he never analysed'. Gay's own judgement reads (1988, p. 505-6):
... Freud's professions of ignorance [about the sexual development of girls] appear almost wilful, as though there were some things about women that he did not want to know. It is telling that the only emotional tie Freud ever sentimentalised was the mother's love for her son ... He characterised this maternal affection for the son as 'the most perfect, easily the most ambivalence free of all human relationships'. This sounds far more like a wish than a sober inference from clinical material ... He seems to have dealt with the conflicts that his complicated feelings towards his mother generated by refusing to deal with them.
The horror of some of Freud's infantile sexual imagery in relation to the female body can be sensed in 'the dream of Irma's injection' (Freud 1900, S.E. 4:107) and in Schur's elaboration of the related distressing episode with his patient Emma Ekstein (Schur, 1966). There is a nightmarish quality to the whole scene, the unfortunate young woman with blood gushing from her nose and mouth, surrounded by males who are at the same time intrusive and incompetent, indeed helpless; the pervasive sickening smell of the decaying iodoform gauze packing left in the wound mistakenly by the surgeon; the smell of death and her corpse like appearance. All in all it can be seen as the horrified, and horrifying, enactment of phantasy about femaleness in general, and his mother in particular, at the level of the threatening and enigmatic Sphinx, with an interwoven theme of rape, violence and death.
In the complementary defensive idealisation of his mother and a simplistic explanatory theory of penis-envy, Freud recoiled from a full realisation of the 'dark side' of femininity and interlocked male defensive aggressive destructiveness. Although he saw himself as Oedipus, solving the Sphinx's riddle, he recoiled from the riddle of the Sphinx. He wrote (Freud, SE 22, p. 133):
The difference in a mother's reaction to the birth of a son or a daughter shows that the old factor of lack of a penis has even now not lost its strength. A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships.
The inference we draw here is that the child provides a narcissistic completion for the mother in being, in phantasy, her penis. The child in turn feels adored just as he/she, in due course, adores his/her own phallus or phallic potential; in the case of the boy, obviously symbolised by his penis; in the case of the girl symbolised by her hidden power of reproduction, her secrecy. The female phallic stage is not simply and negatively arrested at the level of penis envy, as Freud thought; a daughter may be used just as well (or badly) as a son by the mother for narcissistic completion.
Freud consciously equated himself with Oedipus. He saw himself as the one who solved the Sphinx's riddle. But evidence suggests that he recoiled from the riddle of the Sphinx herself, from the antinomy presented by the nature of femaleness; from the conflict presented to himself as Son, and to all children, by the tension between Woman as the loved carer, nurturer and protector and Woman as the feared asphyxiator, devourer and mystifier; and, as a Male, between Woman as Mate and Mother.
Conclusion
Where has our exploration of some biological and mythological aspects of Oedipus Rex led us? To paraphrase Ricoeur (1991, p. 30-31): ‘Life is an activity and a passion in search of a narrative anchored in the very structure of human acting and suffering through symbolic mediation.’ This faculty of ‘narrating’ Ricoeur sees as a secondary process grafted on our ‘being-entangled-in-stories’ (p.30). ‘The cruel bite of lime ... never ceases to disperse the soul by placing in discor- dance expectation, memory and attention’ - the present of the future, the present of the past and the present of e present in Augustine’s terms. Thus life is understood only through the stories we tell about it and fiction is only completed in life. An examined life, in Socrates sense, is a life recounted (p.31). As Vanhoozer (1991) puts it: ‘... only narrative discourse can create figures of human time. Just as painting is a visual ostentation of reality which shapes or configures space, so narrative is a verbal representation of reality which shapes or configures time’ (p. 37).
In Sophocles' play, Oedipus is a figure transfixed in a misshapen configuration of the temporal representation of his life. He is caught across the intersection between knowing and not knowing just where and who his mother is - an especially painful question for a wounded, adopted child. His wish that she should correspond to the naturally perfect mother, the mother image derived from in built biological expectation, is ironically fulfilled by his marriage to Jocasta. The Sphinx, the mysterious, feared guardian of re entry to Thebes is banished. Thebes stands for reunion with mother and the attainment of power and Kingship.
But Oedipus cannot leave the truth, hidden in the temporal entanglement of his life, unknown. He compulsively pursues what he fears to know. To know his mother as a feared and desired image, an enfolding, engulfing mother who will never set him free; who will keep him locked in her image of a part of herself that she needs for completion; an image fatally attractive to his own wounded self Immediately this truth is known, he is deserted by the 'good' mother, Jocasta, whom he loves, when she kills herself. The Sphinx is revived but this time as an internal image which possesses him. He blinds himself, he destroys all external images, but he cannot destroy this image he has discovered or confirmed for it is internal.
Oedipus’ wound came not only, even primarily, from the struggle against the compulsion to kill his fathier and be caught up in a regresive mating with his mother, but from ‘the cruel bite of time’ immanent in Man’s relationship to Woman and the nature of Woman in-herself.
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