“I venture to assert that if psychoanalysis could boast of no other achievements than the discovery of the repressed Oedipus complex, that alone would give it claimed to be counted among the precious new acquisitions of mankind” (Freud 1949: 61).
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) saw civilisation as the accumulation of cultural sentiment, the collective effect of individual repressions and sublimations, “a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind”(Freud 1957: 44).Freud(1954: 262) holds that the compelling force in the destiny of Oedipus, with his themes of parricide and incest and the audiences responses to Sophocles’ play is because we recognise the universality of his fate.
As Freud (1950: 37) states “It is the fate of all of us to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and of first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father.” Our dreams reaffirming this primeval wish and repression suppresses those impulses however Oedipus brings our guilt to light as Sophocles unravelled his destiny. Freud is concerned to free the individual from the guilt feelings which he holds to be the corrosive discontent of civilisation .He set about the task of dissecting the our mental apparatus into the ego, the id and the superego (Freud 1950: 37). As ancient Greece becomes the childhood of civilisation, so psychotherapy unpicks the layers of repression through its dialogue of analysis. As Freud, (1954: 261) quotes from Oedipus Rex ,“Where shall now be found the footprint, hard to trace, of the ancient guilt.”
The word psychology has its origins in Greek: psyche can be translated as soul, mind and logos means study or statement of theory. This exemplifies what psychology essentially was until the end of the nineteenth century. As a branch of philosophy it dates back to the time of Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century B C where Plato professed his Theory of Ideas, distinguishing the division of the mind between reason and instinct. He held that the world of ideas is separate from the world of substance and is the true basis of reality (Republic, Book X).Freud’s theory of the mind recognises the Platonic division of the mind being divided against of itself between the rational and the desire, into that part which governs reason and that part which governs instinct.
Freud in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1957: 16, 17) utilises the fabrics and structures of antiquity, his theories of psychoanalysis and states that “In mental life nothing which has been formed can perish…. that everything is somehow preserved...and can be brought back to light.” Freud uses the analogy of classical Rome, Roma quadrata, the first Rome and the fence settlement on the Palatine and those which followed, the phase of Septimontium, with the uniting of the colonies, followed by the Republic and the early Caesars. He states that the greatest antiquities from ancient Rome are part of the fabric of archaeology and buried beneath buildings both ruined and restored. However, while “ancient Rome [is part of] the fabric of the great metropolis [it is also] a mental entity with just as long and varied past history.”
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory relies heavily upon the notion of the unconscious mind and that personality is motivated by dynamic internal forces which control and regulate behaviour generate from past experiences .He holds that the nervous symptoms displayed by patients did not generate from pure physiological. Freud (1924: 35) holds the Oedipus complex to be the nucleus of the neurosis and that there is universality of the Oedipus complex. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud (1954: 261) made the Oedipus complex cornerstone of his psychoanalyst theory, coming down from classical antiquity and being confirmed by the universality of its power.
Freud self-analysis
Freud discovered during his own self-analysis evidence of the universality of the Oedipus complex. In his own early childhood he experienced falling in love with his mother and jealousy of his father. The compulsion of the legend everyone recognises within himself justice Oedipus and each person recoiled in horror that the dream fulfilment for Oedipus was transplanted into reality. It is only repression which separates this infantile state from the fulfilment of this primitive the impulse. The Oedipus complex is central to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and the consequence dynamic relationship between myth and life has had a profound effect on modern culture.
The Oedipus complex was so named after the Greek myth of King Oedipus, the Greek hero whose archetypal journey is the quest to find out from where he came. Oedipus was exposed as an infant to defeat the oracle who foretold that he would kill his father, Laius, King of the Thebes and marry his mother. He was rescued and raised in alien court where doubts concerning his origin provoked him to defy the oracle’s protestation again his returning to his place of origin. Destiny causes him to kill his father at a crossroads, and thence journey to Thebes where he solved the riddle sets him by the Sphinx and saved the city from plague. Unknowingly and according to the legend he marries his mother. Though he did not recognise his parents, the conditions of our civilisation inevitably doomed this conduct to a terrible fate. (Freud 1954: 260, 261)(Freud 1949: 8, 56).
Freud holds that the myth of Oedipus is “a memory trace from the prehistory of the human family” (Freud 1949: 58). He holds a fear of castration against his narcissism is reinforced from primeval sources. The threat of castration is incalculably terrifying and affects the boy’s relationship with his father and his mother and subsequently in his interactional relationships within the community of mankind. Castration has a place in the legend of Oedipus because Oedipus punishes himself with blindness as a symbolic substitute for castration after he discovers his crime. Oedipus did not know contemporaneously that it was his father whom he had killed and his mother whom he had married, hence the construction made by analysis that Oedipus is ignorance represents the unconscious (Freud 1949: 60).
As Freud (1949: 61) points out, the French philosopher, Diderot (Le Neveu de Rameau) recognised the importance of the Oedipus complex by expressing the differentiation between the primitive and the civilised world when he states “if the little savage would left to himself, keeping all his foolishness and adding to the small sense of a babe in the cradle the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would strangle his father and lie with his mother.”
The superego is heir to the Oedipus complex and emerges only after the disposal of that complex. The superego acts as an intermediate between the inner and the external world uniting the influences of the present and of the past. Freud (1949: 78) holds that the assertion made by philosophers that moral sense is not educationally acquired or acquired from social interaction but originates “from a higher source.”
Freud’s Discovery of the Oedipus Complex
Freud’s interest in Oedipus predated The Interpretation of Dreams and generated from his complex biographical determinants (Rudnytsky1987:IX)and from his classical education.
Freud was the son of his father’s second wife and he had two half-brothers who were twenty years his senior. As Bowlby (2007: 224, 225) argues the “core intergenerational Oedipal unit” challenged the stability and identity of Freud’s childhood with it’s “confusions of generations and thus identities [which is] a significant feature in Sophocles’ Oedipus.”
Freud love for antiquity originated in his classical education. Freud had grown up in nineteenth-century Vienna which was a particular moment in Austrian educational history when secondary state education at the advanced level provided a strong focus on Greek and Latin, hence Freud studied Greek and Latin intensively and compulsory. In 1873, as part of his final student examination, Freud was set the task of translating a passage from Sophocles Oedipus Rex lines 14 to 57 where the chorus of Theban elders beseech Oedipus to help banish the plague afflicting their city (Bowlby 2007: 42).Coming from an education dominated by classics and Greek and from Vienna which has a German-speaking vicinity embraced Greek idealism and culture
it seems natural that Freud to turn to an allegorical character from a Greek myth for his psychoanalytic theories, especially as Oedipus searched within himself in order to solve universal riddles.
This was at a time when study of Greek and classics was expanding in the education system to incorporate diverse social backgrounds to establish and ideological binding in struggle to form national characteristics (Goldhill2004:285, 286, 292).
Freud sustained and pursued his interest in classical subjects throughout his life as a source of intellectual interest and inspiration and he utilises his knowledge of Greek and Roman archaeology in his metaphorical models in his psychoanalytical, theories concerning the structure of the mind and memory(Bowlby 2007: 43).
His engagement with Greece was reflected in his letter writing. In 1885 Freud went to study in Paris under Charcot in a letter to Minna Bernay she referred to Paris as “A vast overdressed Sphinx who gobbled up every foreigner unable to solve her riddles” (Letters 1960: 187) (Rudnytsky1987: 9).his interest in classical archaeology revealed itself his use of classical Rome as an allegory in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1957).
Jones (1955: 15), Freud’s main biographer, describes an enticing interaction with Freud’s engagement to the Oedipus myth. He recounts an occasion in 1906 on Freud’s fiftieth birthday when a group of appearance in Vienna presented him with a medallion with the obverse side his side portrait and on the reverse a Greek design of Oedipus answering the Sphinx inscribed with the line from Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, “Who knew the famous riddles and was a man most mighty.” Jones relates how Freud had become “pale and agitated…as if he had encountered a revenant.” Freud disclosed how as a young student at the University of Vienna he fantasised seeing his bust, among those of famous professors, “actually being inscribed with the identical words he now saw on the medallion.” this indicates that Freud possessed and early identification with the Sophocles hero, Oedipus, at least from his days as a university student in the 1870s.
Freud affinity with Greek thought and his discovery of the significance and the universality of the Oedipus myth is observed in his epochal communication with Flieson on the 15th of October 1897. “I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of early childhood…if that is the case, the gripping power of Oedipus Rex…becomes intelligible” (Origins: 223). As Rudnytsky (1987: 7) states the letter to Flies presents first person discovery, while The Interpretation of Dreams, a public treaties, marks a symbolic progression of “Freud’s odyssey from the role of patient to that of physician, and the transformation of his self-analysis into psychoanalysis.”
A further indication of Freud’s profound interest in Greek and Roman archaeology and the classical past is evidence in the artefacts seen in profusion around his consulting room where he displays an extensive collection of classical objects(Bowlby 2007: 43).Freud (1936: 245) also demonstrated the significance to him of Athens in a published letter to the poet Romain Rolland
where he elucidated he is mixed feeling of pride and guilt at his achievements of having “gone further than” his uneducated father to whom classical Greece meant nothing.
How Freud Used and Reinvented the Classical Inspiration Within His Wider Cultural Context.
Freud recognises his debt to Greek thought and authority and his classical education which led to his use of the myth of Oedipus to develop his theory of psychoanalysis.
In the nineteenth and twentieth-century the German-speaking world, particularly Germany, was haunted with an obsession with the classical ideology of the Greek world and German nationalism found its ideological genesis within the glory of the ancient Greek past. The birthplace of their spirit was in Greece and from this sprang their “nationalistic myth” (Goldhill 2004: 281, 288). Hegel incorporated Greece as “the focus of light in history [and] the soil of the spirit” within his idealistic vision and had used Sophocles’ Antigone extensively. Nietzsche held “the only place one would want to be at home: the Greek world.” Wagner facilitated Greek ideals in his instantiation of music as he worked on his greatest operatic music the Ring cycle with its Leitmotifs emulating the chorus of Greek tragedy (Goldhill 2004: 282-84).
Within such a wider cultural context of the new Germany claiming old Greece as its ancestry, Freud (1954: 262) claims another ancestry from Greece within his new radical psychoanalysis of understanding within the self. He holds there must be something universal “which makes a voice within us recognise the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus …[that] the Oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.”
