The Legend of King Oedipus · Sigmund Freud

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899, dated 1900) Freud turns to Sophocles' play while discussing dreams of the death of a parent. This is the passage in which he first set out in print the idea he later called the Oedipus complex. A long footnote, given after the text, sets Hamlet beside the Oedipus.

The translation is A. A. Brill's, of the third German edition (1913).

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The Three Theban Plays

Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics)

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Oedipus the King: A Companion Reader

Jebb's translation (1904), from RavensEdge · Paperback coming

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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 king’s 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 honour 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?”¹

The action of the play now consists merely in a revelation, which is gradually completed and artfully delayed—resembling the work of a psychoanalysis—of 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 one’s 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 recognise 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 towards our mothers, and our first hatred and violent washes towards 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 realised wish of our childhood. But more fortunate than he, we have since succeeded, unless we have become psychoneurotics, in withdrawing our sexual impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. We recoil from the person for whom this primitive wish has been fulfilled with all the force of the repression which these wishes have suffered within us. By his analysis, showing us the guilt of Oedipus, the poet urges us to recognise our own inner self, in which these impulses, even if suppressed, are still present. The comparison with which the chorus leaves us—

“... Behold! this Oedipus, who unravelled the famous riddle and who
was a man of eminent virtue; a man who trusted neither to popularity
nor to the fortune of his citizens; see how great a storm of adversity
hath at last overtaken him” (Act v. sc. 4).

This warning applies to ourselves and to our pride, to us, who have grown so wise and so powerful in our own estimation since the years of our childhood. Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that offend morality, wishes which nature has forced upon us, and after the revelation of which we want to avert every glance from the scenes of our childhood.

In the very text of Sophocles’ tragedy there is an unmistakable reference to the fact that the Oedipus legend originates in an extremely old dream material, which consists of the painful disturbance of the relation towards one’s parents by means of the first impulses of sexuality. Jocasta comforts Oedipus—who is not yet enlightened, but who has become worried on account of the oracle—by mentioning to him the dream which is dreamt by so many people, though she attaches no significance to it—

“For it hath already been the lot of many men in dreams to think
themselves partners of their mother’s bed. But he passes most easily
through life to whom these circumstances are trifles” (Act iv. sc. 3).

The dream of having sexual intercourse with one’s mother occurred at that time, as it does to-day, to many people, who tell it with indignation and astonishment. As may be understood, it is the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the death of the father. The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination to these two typical dreams, and just as the dream when occurring to an adult is experienced with feelings of resistance, so the legend must contain terror and self-chastisement. The appearance which it further assumes is the result of an uncomprehending secondary elaboration which tries to make it serve theological purposes (cf. the dream material of exhibitionism, p. 206). The attempt to reconcile divine omnipotence with human responsibility must, of course, fail with this material as with every other.²

Notes

Act. i. sc. 2. Translated by George Somers Clark. ↩
Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is founded on the same basis as the Oedipus. But the whole difference in the psychic life of the two widely separated periods of civilisation—the age-long progress of repression in the emotional life of humanity—is made manifest in the changed treatment of the identical material. In Oedipus the basic wish-phantasy of the child is brought to light and realised as it is in the dream; in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence—somewhat as in the case of a neurosis—only by the inhibition which results from it. The fact that it is possible to remain in complete darkness concerning the character of the hero, has curiously shown itself to be consistent with the overpowering effect of the modern drama. The play is based upon Hamlet’s hesitation to accomplish the avenging task which has been assigned to him; the text does not avow the reasons or motives of this hesitation, nor have the numerous attempts at interpretation succeeded in giving them. According to the conception which is still current to-day, and which goes back to Goethe, Hamlet represents the type of man whose prime energy is paralysed by over-development of thought activity. (“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”) According to others the poet has attempted to portray a morbid, vacillating character who is subject to neurasthenia. The plot of the story, however, teaches us that Hamlet is by no means intended to appear as a person altogether incapable of action. Twice we see him asserting himself actively, once in headlong passion, where he stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras, and on another occasion where he sends the two courtiers to the death which has been intended for himself—doing this deliberately, even craftily, and with all the lack of compunction of a prince of the Renaissance. What is it, then, that restrains him in the accomplishment of the task which his father’s ghost has set before him? Here the explanation offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet can do everything but take vengeance upon the man who has put his father out of the way, and has taken his father’s place with his mother—upon the man who shows him the realisation of his repressed childhood wishes. The loathing which ought to drive him to revenge is thus replaced in him by self-reproaches, by conscientious scruples, which represent to him that he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is to punish. I have thus translated into consciousness what had to remain unconscious in the mind of the hero; if some one wishes to call Hamlet a hysteric subject I cannot but recognise it as an inference from my interpretation. The sexual disinclination which Hamlet expresses in conversation with Ophelia, coincides very well with this view—it is the same sexual disinclination which was to take possession of the poet more and more during the next few years of his life, until the climax of it is expressed in Timon of Athens. Of course it can only be the poet’s own psychology with which we are confronted in Hamlet; from a work on Shakespeare by George Brandes (1896), I take the fact that the drama was composed immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s father—that is to say, in the midst of recent mourning for him—during the revival, we may assume, of his childhood emotion towards his father. It is also known that a son of Shakespeare’s, who died early, bore the name of Hamnet (identical with Hamlet). Just as Hamlet treats of the relation of the son to his parents, Macbeth, which appears subsequently, is based upon the theme of childlessness. Just as every neurotic symptom, just as the dream itself, is capable of re-interpretation, and even requires it in order to be perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit of more than one interpretation. I have here attempted to interpret only the most profound group of impulses in the mind of the creative poet. The conception of the Hamlet problem contained in these remarks has been later confirmed in a detailed work based on many new arguments by Dr. Ernest Jones, of Toronto (Canada). The connection of the Hamlet material with the “Mythus von der Geburt des Helden” has also been demonstrated by O. Rank.—“The Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: a Study in Motive” (American Journal of Psychology, January 1910, vol. xxi.). ↩