Freud's Oedipus Complex

Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes Freud's fascination with the Sophocles' story "Oedipus the King" while also delving into the plot and main characters depicted in the classic Greek tragedy. The writer contends and explains why few people today are aware of the actual origins relating to Freud's Oedipus Complex. This paper details the manner in which the famed psychoanalyst recognized that the story of King Oedipus paralleled in both a literal and figurative sense his theories relating to early childhood development in which a young child falls in love with his or her opposite sex parent.

From the Paper:

"Without Sophocles's play, of course, there would be no term like "Oedipus Complex", to describe today's best-known stage of early childhood development. However, Freud's theory is also very far from the story of Oedipus and his unfortunate fate, as told by Sophocles. Therefore, to think of King Oedipus only in terms of the Oedipus Complex of Freudian fame, is to seriously distort what we know of Oedipus through Sophocles' play. Be that as it may, however, the name "Oedipus" today is recognized much more as part of the term "Oedipus Complex" than as a tragedy by Sophocles. Toward that result, Freud took considerable (psychological) license with the original Oedipus story when he wrote, in 1940 (An outline of psychoanalysis. The ignorance of Oedipus is a legitimate representation of the unconscious state into which, for adults, the whole [early childhood development experience] has fallen; and the coercive power of the oracle [i.e., fate, in today's terms] . . . a recognition of the inevitability of the fate which has condemned every son to live through the Oedipus complex."

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