Is the story written by Sophocles right about Oedipus Rex, or just well-knitted and abstract????...Why Freud has stressed on it?.....Was freud prey to such type of love?
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Sophocles Drew From Myth25% Voted for by Mujtaba H Zaidi, metaxy99, NeferMaatNetjer.
In writing Oedipus Rex, Sophocles was drawing from mythic sources. Rene Girard discusses the structural and practical differences between the myth, the drama, and the theory in his book Violence and the Sacred. In this ambitious work, Girard sketches some big ideas about drama, myth, ritual, and violence. The presentation of Oedipus per se is therefore a little difficult to chart, if well worth the effort.
He basically argues that fratricide and incest symbolize, in both the myth and the play, the erasure of difference. And nondifference is something like the essential source of violence in his view. (The 'big picture' of violence - i.e. that it stems from our constitutional inclination to mimesis - may have a familiar ring to readers of Lacan).
He shows that Sophocles clearly understood the problem of indifference as central to the Oedipus narrative. He goes on to suggest that Sophocles subverted the original myth, for reasons that have everything to do with the differences between ritual and drama. Where the ritual - and the myth surrounding it - demands an individual scapegoat as a means of expelling violence, the drama shows how the violence is collective and mutual and go on to deal with it on that level. Obviously, the restoration of social order is the end in each case. It is in that sense that drama is tantamount to the new ritual.
Catching us up to the modern understanding of Oedipus, Girard attempts to show (and this is provocative, if not very convincing) how Freud was on the cusp of presenting Oedipal conflict in the register of violence, even if he officially placed it in the register of desire. Basically he attemts to show that Freud understood (but couldn't quite say) that desire, when mingled with nondifferentiation as it must be according to our constitutional inclination to mimesis, tends to refract as violence. Therapy has its own means of addressing the problem. And, it is in this sense that therapy is tantamount to the new ritual.
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the Oedipus complex16% Voted for by Beena, raven shadow 13.
The Oedipus Rex story is a story. And the Oedipus complex and the Electra complex are just rare exceptions or deviations from the norm, where the son has a crush on the mother and the daughter has a crush on the father respectively. I do know of one example of an Electra complex from India. The late actress Madhubala had the Electra complex I read somewhere. For Freud to take these rare exceptions and make them look like the rule, must mean that he himself must have had the Oedipus complex. Otherwise, how can someone take some rare exception and build a thesis on it and in the process make it look like it's even the rule? Weird!
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Fiction and FreudVoted for by Obvious Child.
the story is a STORY. Freud's theory was very possibly affected by his own life: he had a traumatic childhood where he had to move from his beloved countryside home to the city, and in the middle of the rushed process he saw his mother naked. it's in his journal, and he describes the same day the way the light on the lamps flickers 'like souls in hell'. So he's pretty screwed up.
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MistakenVoted for by Dancing Doll.
oedipus Rex was mistaken, and he did not marry her mother wilfully..it was merely the irony of fate and he was not guilty of incest.
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Ya, but....Voted for by whatever1189.
he created that complex because he was one f-up kid. But it was also becuase his father had two sons with his first wife and after that wife died, he remarried a woman that was like 20 years old which was very close to how old his two sons were. This new wife gave brith to Freud and Freud grew up seeing his brothers attraction and affection (not nasty affection) towards his mother and found a story close to his reality (Oedipus).
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Complex: culture specific Myth: unfortunate guyThe complex, I would suggest, depends on the culture. A culture of overbearing mothers could produce a love interest in the mother (later in life, rather than as Freud had it early on) as the mother attempts to fill in the role of a wife.Voted for by pozo.
But, unless everyone is afflicted with this condition Oedipus DIDN'T HAVE IT. He ran away from his adoptive family (maybe repression?) and ended up killing a man he didn't know was his father and marrying a woman he didn't know was his mother. I would argue he was more of a victim of circumstance than anything else.
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May 1, 2006
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interesting view
try reading more Rene Girard(MRVR)Please register or login to comment! It's totally free