Oedipus Complex

1897

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex (429 BCE) is the story of Oedipus, who unwittingly kills his father, Laius, the king of Thebes, and marries his mother, Queen Jocasta. Oedipus was abandoned by his parents as an infant because an oracle had prophesied these events. As a young man, Oedipus encounters a man on the road, whom he does not recognize as his father, and kills him in a dispute over right of way. He then solves the riddle of the Sphinx: What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening? (The answer is Man.) This grants him access to Thebes and the right to marry the queen, his biological mother. The discovery that Oedipus has, in fact, fulfilled the prophecy of killing his father and marrying his mother sets off a chain of events that includes Jocasta’s suicide and his own act of blinding himself.

In 1897, while wrestling with the results of a self-analysis of his dreams after the death of his father the previous year, Sigmund Freud had the insight that the myth of Oedipus contained a fundamental truth about human psychology. He recalled a dream he had after his father’s death: he was late for the funeral because he was getting a haircut. Further dream analysis revealed to Freud that he, in fact, harbored many negative feelings about his father, including the wish that his father would die. Parallel to these hostile wishes, Freud found that he also had dreams that represented the desire to have his mother for his own gratification.

Based on his dream analysis, Freud came to believe that he was not unique: it is part of normal development that a child longs to possess the opposite-sex parent and simultaneously be rid of the same-sex parent. Freud called the constellation of impulses and wishes the Oedipus complex. It is, he argued, the crisis point of psychological development, the resolution of which determines the adult personality. The Oedipal complex has remained one of the pillars of classical psychoanalysis, but later analytic theorists have articulated other critical moments in psychological development.

SEE ALSO Hysteria (1886), Psychoanalysis (1899), The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Psychosexual Development (1905)

Oedipus Explains the Riddle of the Sphinx by French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, c. 1805.