1. In a literal sense, of course, it is impossible to believe that Oedipus would not have told Jocasta the story of his life long before, just as it is impossible that he would not have learned the circumstances of Laius’s death. But such anomalies are incidental to the deeper drama.

2. It has been observed how simply watching this play, showing a man having to face up to his own guilt, can in some spectators evoke a long-repressed sense of guilt about their own lives. I recall how, during a particularly powerful production of the play at Stratford-on-Avon in the 1950s, a good many people in the audience, as the Tragedy moved towards its climax, could evidently take no more and stole out of the theatre. Although these people had not literally killed their fathers and married their mothers, the more general sense of unease the play aroused in them became too much to bear.

3. It was this pattern of course which, from his rather narrow perspective, Freud intuitively seized on to provide the basis for his theory of the ‘Oedipus complex’: the idea that the fundamental psychological problem afflicting many men lies in their inability to resolve their relationship with their mother, leaving them prey to an unconscious ‘death wish’ against their father. What he had recognised, correctly but without full understanding, was that, in the pattern of human development, a man who has not fully realised his masculinity remains frozen under the spell of the ‘Dark Mother’. He thus remains in some way a ‘mother’s boy’, in conflict with the values of ‘Father’ which represent the masculinity he is unable to develop. This in turn renders him unable properly to develop his anima, his own ‘inner feminine’. What Freud failed to recognise was the law of the ‘unrealised value’, by which the figure of the ‘Dark Father’ represents a negative version of that which the hero needs to make positive in himself in order to succeed, by achieving the full masculine-feminine balance which will allow him to become a ‘Light Father’.