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Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is arguably one of the best plays of all time that inspired a large portion of the modern train of thought, and literary critics gave the play the epithet “Mona Lisa�� of drama. It was certainly Aristotle’s favorite play as he stated in Poetics, naming Oedipus the perfect tragic hero. The core of the play is not what happens on the stage, but what already happened offstage, as Sophocles reveals the consequences of the acts, not the acts themselves. To understand the context of the play, one must dive into the mythology.

Oedipus genealogy
Oedipus's father, Laius, was a descendant of Cadmus, an ancient king of Thebes, and Cadmus both sister Europa and daughter Semele were raped by Zeus. Laius himself raped Chrysippus, son of king Pelops, who cursed Laius that his son would kill him. Pelops also had his trauma with his father Tantalus who sacrificed Pelops; he cooked him and offered him as a meal. Seeing what he had done, the gods brought Pelops back to life and doomed Tantalus to eternal thirst and hunger. So Oedipus' acts were a consequence of the long-standing history of rape and violence in the family tree. The direct sequence of transgenerational hatred and sacrifice in the father-son relationship finally led to its result - as in psychosexual development, oral and anal aggression preceded incest with mother.

Oedipus’s birth
Having the prophecy in mind, Laius did not want to have children, and his wife Jocasta seduced him while he was drunk. After Oedipus' birth, Laius pierced the legs of his newborn baby in the ankles and then left Oedipus to die on a mountain where shepherds saved him. Oedipus's birth is accompanied by common themes of the birth of a hero as a Divine child (Moses, Jesus) - there is an attempt of infanticide, and nature, not civilization, accepts the hero and saves him. The birth of Oedipus is a sign that he is preordained to be a hero - one who will change the current order and rules in society and bring a new element.

Oedipus and Sphinx
Later on, also not seen in the play, Oedipus saves the city of Thebes from a monster Sphinx, sent by Hera to punish Thebes for the crimes of Laius. Sphinx posed a riddle to Oedipus; What walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and three legs in the evening? Oedipus answers correctly - a man and here is the first irony - the answer is man but also Oedipus himself, and in the unity of time and place in the play of Oedipus Rex, we will see Oedipus in all three states in one day, making himself the living answer to the riddle.

The Plague
The play starts with a priest begging Oedipus for help as the city of Thebes suffers greatly because of the plague. Here is prominent the concept of pollution and bloodguilt that were of great importance in Greek society. The Greeks believed that the destructive acts of nature were the work of the gods - so they would suggest that a monumental transgression was committed that violates the order of creation, moral wrongdoing that created bloodguilt that requires purification. What drives Oedipus to knowledge is the search for meaning of suffering.
Creon suggests that the cure for the plague is to know the king's Laius murderers and execute them, or to banish them from Thebes. So, the answer to the riddle of plague is also Oedipus himself, as he is the killer of Laius. The one who saved Thebes actually destroys it and Oedipus ironically curses the murderer of Laius, not knowing he is cursing himself. To cleanse the city of Thebes and be its saviour, Oedipus will have to become a living sacrifice, mirroring the image of Jesus, a scapegoat figure that carries the sins of the collective.
All people come to psychoanalysis with the plague of their own, Freud noted - something that bothers them that actually points to deeper issues, ones that are not so easily discovered.

Search for truth, knowledge and identity
The circumstances of his birth, lineage, and life have made the art of knowing (the Greek oida, “I know��) the essential task of Oedipus’s life, which goes with the essence of Apollo and his maxima at the prophecy in Delphi - "Know thyself." Oedipus is the man of knowledge who solved the Sphinx riddle and the inherent part of the riddle is idea of man's knowledge and self-reflection. Oedipus' ruin is caused by his loyalty in resolute search for the truth which serves as a warning - being an honest seeker of truth oftentimes leads to the ugly truth about yourself - that you yourself are all the things you hate, that you yourself broke the ultimate social taboos. Freud believed that Sophocles' tragedy is an act of revelation, which emphasizes the connection between tragic recognition and psychoanalytic work. Both liberation and tragedy come through searching for yourself, as the answer to the question - ”Why is there evil and suffering?�� is: ”Because of my corrupt nature��. Sophocles poses the question; ”Is all knowledge good?�� Tiresias, the prophet that Oedipus begged to tell him the truth, refused in the beginning, but Oedipus did not respect his authority. Tiresias then has a beautiful line:

“How terrible is wisdom when / it brings no profit to the man that’s wise!��

Oedipus remains faithful to the end to his assumption that knowledge - consciousness - is superior to ignorance - illusions, and that is ultimately his demise. H. E. Grimaldi said: "It is not good to realize, it is not healthy to realize, if one realizes the entirety, it psychotisies«.
This goes against the whole core value of Greek culture - to know, embodied in Apollo, god of light, knowledge and reason. Even though Greek culture gave foundations to the modern Western civilization - much like Oedipus gave a lot of answers to fundamental questions - it collapsed and was destroyed, again like Oedipus, in the questions of flesh, flooded with bloodguilt and sexual perversions. Even with all the sacrifices we make to Apollo, at night we serve Bacchus in primordial impulses we fail to contain, because the law of Bacchus, not Apollo, is intertwined with our flesh. Oedipus and Greek culture give a universal example of a conscious man that is crucified by unconscious impulses, and collapses under them, as the gap between reason and body becomes wider, materializing the ancient cry of St. Paul; ”With the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.�� Opposite to what Greeks believed, knowledge does not bring salvation, as all the knowledge we have in Western civilization did not change the vile nature of men.

Sight and Blindness
"Oida" in Greek also means - to see. The theme of sight and blindness is prominent in Oedipus Rex. Sophocles poses a lot of contradictions; Tiresias, a prophet who was blind, could see and understand the truth at the level of Apollo and knew the whole truth about Oedipus. Oedipus, a man of knowledge, could see, but he did not know. When he finally found out, he couldn't bear to see and made himself blind. Here we can also see a warning, as Oedipus's fall is often reacted in the fall of the wise man - a man who has a great deal of wisdom is usually paradoxically completely blind to the truth about himself. Oedipus solved the question posed to civilization, but could not solve the question of his life and he did not see that these two questions are actually one. This states the important lesson - the universal question are always easier to solve than personal ones. The choir also states that they would have liked to have been blind and had not seen this - the story of Oedipus is difficult for us, as it brings us a great deal of discomfort and we sometimes wish we did not see Oedipus in ourselves.

Oedipus Complex
As Oedipus brings a great deal of discomfort to the choir, so does the Oedipus complex to the whole of humanity, a term coined by Freud that means the desire to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate the parent of the same sex. According to psychoanalytic theory, the complex appears during the Oedipal phase of libidinal and ego development that is, between the ages of three and five years. The resolution of the Oedipus complex is identifying with the father, constructing the Superego, and transmitting sexual desires from the mother to other female figures. Freud believed that the Oedipus complex must be resolved, not suppressed - otherwise, neurosis arises and reflects in the symptoms of suppressed desires, ones that we can analyze in Hamlet.

Freud’s life
What is perhaps not very much known, is that Freud’s life in a great deal mirrored Oedipus'. He was the eldest son in his family and his mother was pretty and 20 years younger than his father. Freud has always been very attached to his mother, and he was her favorite child. In the process of auto analysis, he was driven to think of the Oedipus complex. Oedipus and the mythical paradigm became the bearer of a new hypothesis and seemed to guarantee its universality. After reaching the age of 40, after the death of his father, Freud ceased his active sexual life, which could be interpreted as equivalent to blindness or castration. His daughter, Anna Freud, played the role of Antigone, and his death in exile in England parallels Oedipus' death on the Colon. In that sense, we can have a nuanced understanding of the famous quote about Oedipus from the The Interpretation of Dreams, chapter V;

“His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.��

The Murder of Father
In the patriarchal society of ancient Greece, the aversion to the murder of the father was extremely intense, as we can see in Plato's punishment for the father-killers; “For this act, he says, there can be no purification: the murderer will be killed, his body will be laid naked at a crossroads outside the city, every civil servant will throw a stone at him and curse him, and then the bloody remnant will be thrown outside the city territory and leave it unburied. ��
Freud believed that death wish aimed at our father is deep-rooted in our unconscious, as he explained in Totem and Taboo. Freud pointed out that three epochal works of literature deal with the same theme - patricide - referring to Oedipus Rex, Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov. Freud also believed that aggression towards the father is the basis for regicide, also committed by Oedipus, as well as being explored in Julius ceasar, and also the root of the murder of the prophet in the monotheistic religions and crucifixion of the Son of God.
Oedipus consciously repeats the wish to murder father by attacking the godly authority of Tiresias and the political authority of Creon, as we continually repeat our unconscious death wish aimed at father in passion with which we attack the male authority in different forms, over and over again. Is not the most hated figure of the modern world the "white man in a position of power"?
As Freud said in Reflections on War and Death; “And so, if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishful impulses, we ourselves are, like primaeval man, a gang of murderers.��

Laius complex
Georges Devereux in his essay; "Why Oedipus Killed Laius" added Laius and Jocasta's complex, pointing out the sadistic and (homo)sexual components of these complexes. This neglect of the complementary Oedipus complexes Devereux locates in the adult's need to place all responsibility for the Oedipus complex on the child and to ignore "some parental attitudes that actually encourage Oedipal tendencies in the child." Laius rapes Crispus, son of Pelops, who curses that his own son will kill him in what seems to be a protection from the aggressive and homosexual impulses of the father. Laius is not a good man but one who violates good customs, and his death is caused by his character (as Oedipus killed him in self-defense) which included his propensity for violence. His fate is a personification of character structure and its need to carry out its intra-psychological conflicts in the reality. Oedipus' aggression against his father was fueled by his father's aggression, perpetuating the cycle of hostility between the father and son, as tyrannical aspects of patriarchy add fuel to our aggression towards the symbolical father.

Longing for Mother

”Many a man has slept with his mother in dreams. He who dismisses such thoughts lives easiest.��

Incest is more destructive to life than paternal murder; one incestuous act violates the sanctity of both maternal and marital love. Christopher Rocco writes: ”In breaking the taboos against patricide and incest, Oedipus destroys the boundaries that separate the civilized city from savage nature, humanity from bestiality. By killing his father and wedding his mother, Oedipus disrupts the “natural�� succession of generations.��.
Melanie Klein, the famous theorist of psychoanalysis post-Freud, argued that sexual impulses are not vital in the relationship with the mother, as self-formation is accomplished through a complex relationship with others, not only through psychosexual maturation. She stated that longing for a mother does not consist of sexual feelings only, but stems from the relationship with the mother- which means life, care, love, play, fulfillment, pleasure - in fantasy all that a child aspires to. But Klein also observed that child has ambivalent feelings towards both of his parents, as it both loves and hates them. Dorothy Dinnerstein in her work ”Mermaid and Minotaur�� talks about the earliest experiences of an omnipotent mother that creates fear and aversion to woman and nature, as a person does not want to re-experience extreme dependence on a powerful mother, which is why he tries to control her. Here the issue of sexual attraction is seen as an attempt to establish power over an omnipotent mother, as sexualization makes a woman a less terrifying, powerful object. According to that, we can observe Oedipus's marriage with Jocasta as a will to power.
But the sexual aspect of the Oedipus complex is one thing that always troubled society the most invoking the repulsion and ridicule of Freud’s thought. At the end of the day, Oedipus did not know that Jocasta is his mother, does that makes all sexual attraction of young men to older women incestuous? Anyways, the modern phenomenon of ”MILF��, prevalent in all porn sites, speaks louder than Freud even could, confirming once again that art replicates reality.

Determinism and free will
How free was Edip from his destiny is the question that bothered the scholars for years. Did Sophocles reject individual responsibility and showed that divine forces determine crime and make people's moral instincts powerless? Certain Oedipal actions act are fatefully bound by the fulfillment of prophecy, but everything he does on stage from the first to the last he does of his own free will. Dodds argued that what makes Oedipus so attractive is "the spectacle of a man who freely chooses from the highest motives a series of actions that lead to his own downfall."

Guilt and justice
Oedipus committed paternal murder and incest; that is, he greatly offended two fundamental laws, or holiness, of human life �� was he innocent and did he deserve punishment? Can a man be guilty of something he has committed out of ignorance? Plato among the polluted people especially includes a man who actually committed an offense with his own hand even if he did what he did completely unintentionally. Someone uses his free will to unconsciously select a woman that resembles his mother - but he still has to live with the consequences of the choice. Aristotle talks about hamartia - tragic guilt - that influenced the interpretation of Oedipus greatly. Oedipus fulfills prophecy, and it is at the same time necessity and causality - the things he did, he did in complete disregard for the facts he had.

Freud stated: "Accident and prophecy here are only the materialization of inner necessity: the fact that the hero committed a crime unintentionally, even without knowing that he committed it, should be understood as a true expression of the unconscious nature of his criminal aspirations."

And that is the brilliance of Oedipus Rex play - if Oedipus killed any old man, or married any older woman the same unconscious aspirations of Oedipus complex would be at play here, ones that we ought to analyze to get to them - but the irony of the situations is that he accidentally perfectly embodied the symbolic meaning of the acts - and in his fate, the symbolical meets the factual. Oedipus's self-mutilation and self-expulsion are equally free acts of choice. Oedipus's punishment comes from himself, the Superego is the one who punishes us for our unconscious impulses.

Oedipus as a Hero
Oedipus's guilt, but also virtuosity, makes him a perfect hero. Oedipus is both a victim and a criminal, both a savior and destroyer. In the beginning, he is a model of virtue; optimistic, confident and benevolent - but when his rule is threatened, he becomes paranoid, angry, punishing and tyrannical. Oedipus embodies the pairs of opposites and all our conscious and unconscious ambivalence. Oedipus is a symbol of the triumph of light over darkness, the conscious over the unconscious, a man who was consistent and loyal to truth till the end-prepared to pay a tragic price of self-knowledge.
Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy gave the perfect commentary and conclusion to Oedipus;

”The noble human being does not sin, so this profound poet wants to tell us; every law, all natural order, indeed the moral world, may be destroyed by his actions, yet by these very actions a higher, magical circle of effects is drawn which found a new world on the ruins of the old one that has been overthrown.��