Oedipus Complex - Background

Background

Oedipus refers to a 5th-century BC Greek mythologic character Oedipus, who unwittingly kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta. A play based on the myth, Oedipus Rex, was written by Sophocles, ca. 429 BC.

Modern productions of Sophocles' play were staged in Paris and Vienna in the 19th century and were phenomenally successful in the 1880s and 1890s. The Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), attended. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams first published in 1899, he proposed that an Oedipal desire is a universal, psychological phenomenon innate (phylogenetic) to human beings, and the cause of much unconscious guilt. He based this on his analysis of his feelings attending the play, his anecdotal observations of neurotic or normal children, and on the fact that the Oedipal Rex play was effective on both ancient and modern audiences (he also claimed the play Hamlet was effective for the same reason).

Freud described the man Oedipus:

His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours — because the Oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.

A six-stage chronology of Sigmund Freud's theoretic evolution of the Oedipus complex is:

• Stage 1. 1897–1909. After his father's death in 1896, and having seen the play Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles, Freud begins using the term "Oedipus".
• Stage 2. 1909–1914. Proposes that Oedipal desire is the "nuclear complex" of all neuroses; first usage of "Oedipus complex" in 1910.
• Stage 3. 1914–1918. Considers paternal and maternal incest.
• Stage 4. 1919–1926. Complete Oedipus complex; identification and bisexuality are conceptually evident in later works.
• Stage 5. 1926–1931. Applies the Oedipal theory to religion and custom.
• Stage 6. 1931–1938. Investigates the "feminine Oedipus attitude" and "negative Oedipus complex"; later the "Electra complex".