Sophocles

"One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life. That word is love." Sophocles

One of the great Greek tragedians, Sophocles is most noted for his three tragedies concerning Oedipus, also known as The Oedipus Cycle. The cycle is comprised of three plays "Oedipus Rex," "Oedipus at Colonus," and "Antigone." They tell the story of the family of Oedipus, who in Greek mythology killed his father and married his mother without knowing that they were, in fact, his parents. Sigmund Freud adopted the theme of Sophocles plays in his famous work The Interpretation of Dreams to explain the unconscious tendency for men to develop an attachment to their mothers while growing hostile to their fathers.

If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect….is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified….It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father.

A similar theme as that of The Oedipus Cycle appears in Euripedes works which also led Carl Jung to coin the term “Electra complex” to address Freud’s theories of female development. In that play, Electra wanted her brother to avenge the death of their father by killing their mother. According to Jung, a girl is similarly attached to the mother figure early in life but, during her adolescent years, she becomes attached to the father figure and becomes more hostile toward her mother. Freud disagreed with this theory and stated that he did not consider the term useful in an article on ‘Female Sexuality’ in 1931. ‘It is only in the male child that we find the fateful combination of love for one parent and simultaneous hatred for the other as a rival.’ It is especially interesting that Freud uses the term 'love' in this instance because, regardless of the disagreements between psychoanalytic masters, the third play of The Oedipus Cycle, "Antigone," offers a more hopeful solution to all tragic visions;

O love, thou art victor in fight, thou makest all things afraid;

Thou couchest thee softly at night on the cheeks of a maid;

Thou passest the bounds of the sea, and the folds of the fields;

To thee immortal, to thee the ephemeral yields.



References

Sophocles, (1991 Repr),The Oedipus Trilogy, University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition

Freud, Sigmund, Dr., (1980 Repr), Interpretation of Dreams, Avon Press

McGuire William, (1974), The Freud-Jung letters: The correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Freud, Sigmund, Dr., (1856–1939), Collected Works; Standard Edition, XVIII, p. 155n, ‘Female Sexuality’ in 1931, XXI, pp. 225–43, at p. 229.