The Original: Oedipus Rex


Nov. 1978

The problem found in many critiques of Oedipus Rex is that the translators have all been briefed in Freud's theories of "libido" and can evaluate the Oedipus in no other connotation. These translators see sexual aberrations and nothing else.

The evidence they use is the play by Sophocles. The play is a step-by-step analysis of (according to various translators) a man's desire for grown-up interraction with a mother-image and a pent-up desire for his father's destruction.

However, there is more to be considered in such a story line, such as the efforts of the prophet-seer, Teresias, to shield the ruler from self-knowledge. Also notable is a very profound idealism that human destiny cannot be controlled by man using logic and reason.

If a man, like Oediupus, dared to assume he can regulate his own life, such a concept will be re-routed by the gods themselves to fulfil the destiny of said individual, however innocent he himself is of the prophecies that were pronounced.

On the basis of the above statement, who then attempted to thwart the gods, but Laïs. It was he who first heard the prophecy and he who insisted the baby must die. It was he, as a father, who could not perform the deed and relied upon his position as ruler to order a third person to do what he could not. And, it was Laïs who died at the start of the play by the hand of the son he thought he had destroyed. Thus, he fulfilled the prohecy made many years previous.

The event marks the purpose or the moral of the tale and not Oedipus' subsequent revelations.

Oedipus, in his insistence that he, and only he, using intelligence alone, answered the sphinx when he arrived at Thebes. He had no aid of any prophet or god, and it just re-emphasized the decision making policy of his dead father.

From this point in the story onward, Sophocles carefully unknoted the threads of the lives of the actors and showed us in painful detail, the manner in which the gods thwarted man's feeble (intellectual) attempts to control their own lives.

Teresias tried to avoid telling Oedipus the truth. Even Jocasta attempted to reassure Oediupus. Yet, the prophet inadvertently let the words pass his closed lips and even Jocasta found out the truth for herself.

The shepherd who had carried the babe to the mountain and later witnessed the murder of the father, even he had to admit the truth.

Yes, Freud was an excellent pychologist, who became aware of the sexual drive of mankind, but Sophocles was a better one. He appears to have been more observant that Freud and because of his ability to observe and coordinate his observations, he wrote the play that wove together the emotions, desires, and frailities of egotistic Oedipus. However, his main goal was to show the battle between reason (or logic) and pre-destination.

The message of the play was never the love/hate relationship of a child for its parents, but a lesson for all who believed that church and state could be effectively separated in one's daily life.

It was a very moving attack upon the common people who were beginning to drift away from the temples and their priests. They began, instead, to rely on the newly discovered sciences of logic, geometry and learning that had just begun to emerge in their culture.

The love/hate rlationship of a child for his parents was only the mechanism that Sophocles used to effectively warn people, that the priests and their pronouncements were a vital part of life and could not be shoved aside because of new types of knowledge.

[H.m.m.m Maybe we should look into the new computer generated knowledge also? Who knows?]