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Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues

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"Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and its Later Analogues" by Professor Lowell Edmunds is scholarly, erudite, and extensively researched. It starts with ancient literary sources of the Oedipus tale. There is no mention of "Oedipus and Akhnaton" by Immanuel Velikovsky. It is followed by the texts of the endless analogues from Medieval and Modern Europe, Slavic, the Near East, Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. Let's not overlook that Oedipus by Sophocles or Oedipus by Seneca are both analogues. The core of the legend is of parricide and incest. The book tries to show why Oedipus the drama is so compelling.

The author gives his interpretations of the interpretations from Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Propp, and Levi-Strauss as to the origin and nature of the legend. Freud's interpretation is psychoanalytic. Propp's is historical. Levi-Strauss is structural.

Freud stands on the shoulders of Darwin, Robertson Smith and James Frazier with his formulation. The motif of parricide and incest is the latent content, the genotypic core for Freud. The drama is the phenotypic manifest content, the symbolic representation of the "eternal recurrence" of what pre-humans had to go through to rise above their natural animal nature to become humans. Oedipus is a re-enactment of what actually occurred thru evolutionary time. The struggle these pre-humans had to endure to become humans. This "memory trace," this Lamarckian scar on our psyche to kill our father and to commit incest with our mother is still with us now embedded within the unconscious but is always ready to rear its ugly head. Individual childhood development repeats these pre-historical stages. The eventual restraint of the two deeds and the self-awareness that comes with it leads to the development of the human conscience. In psychoanalysis, the goal of a mature character configuration is the control of the "Oedipus Complex." Haeckel's "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny," is pure Freud. Other specialists except for most psychoanalysts regard Freud's interpretation reductionistic, naive, and ridiculous.

Propp's interpretation is similar to Freud's without the unconscious. Propp's view is that the story of Oedipus is a vestige of our incipient origins in pre-history when we were struggling to become a "post-hunting, herding society." Where we had to learn to inhibit our murderous desire to kill our father and wish to possess our mother. The dawn of humans when we had one foot in our animal nature and one foot in the new era of human cooperation. Oedipus is a condensed version like a dream of that history of our species where we had to slowly learn to control our instincts.

One of the ideas of "structuralism" is that a myth is a mirror image of the laws that govern how the mind works. It makes no use at all of the content of the myth. For example, the "structural" interrelationships within the Oedipus Myth between the idea of precocity, and the emphasis of kinship somehow reveals the "insight" of that culture that human beings are actually born from the union of a man and woman. Parricide and incest are "irrelevant."

Is Jack and the Beanstalk a story for children? What is the power underpinning Hamlet? What do all the myriad analogues have as the bedrock of the story? It is always identical.

The drama is powerful because it resonates and exposes in us the deepest atavistic savagery that nature forced on us. To kill our father to tear out his eyes and to commit the most unholy of unions. Then we cover it up by digressions such as perseverating into the meaning of the Sphinx, the exposure, the pain the suffering and mutilation that Oedipus suffers, not to mention the structural intellectualism as a defense not to see, not to feel, not be pulled into the maelstrom, the fire that beckons.

No one but Freud believes the core to be parricide and incest. To him the rest of the story and all of its trappings are mere distractions an attempt to shroud the evil truth; in a dream a boy plays hockey hits a puck it bleeds the boy wakes in terror realizes it is his father's head. The dream is the head not the puck. To cause to turn away from the original focus of attention or interest is what the Unconscious does best.