WHY OEDIPUS REALLY LOVED HIS FATHER
E. James Lieberman
Since Sigmund Freud’s time, the extent to which little boys hate their fathers has been greatly exaggerated. The founder of
psychoanalysis introduced the Oedipus complex in 1910, based on an ingenious though strained interpretation of the
Sophocles drama. Freud believed that a strong–largely unconscious–hostility toward the same-sex parent coupled with
sexual longing for the other parent sets up the key conflict of human development. Supposedly the boy’s sexual and
aggressive impulses are kept in check by his fear of paternal retaliation (castration anxiety). Eventually he renounces the
forbidden wish and, ideally, identifies with the father in a positive way.
Despite the importance of Freud’s theory about incest and patricide in 20th-century intellectual history, it lacks a sound biological basis, it does not describe the principal dynamics of most families, and it stretches the Oedipus myth considerably
to fit the psychoanalytic mold. Freud challenged and enlightened his contemporaries with a dynamic and useful psychology.
But his Oedipal theory presumes a powerful, innate sexual and aggressive drive in the child and completely ignores paternal
behavior. Sophocles was more concerned than Freud with how fathers behave, and what makes them feared or loved.
In the original story, the son born to Laius and Jocasta was said by an oracle to be destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Before the child was three days old his father had him placed on a mountainside to die. Found by a shepherd, he was given to Polybus and Merope, the unsung heroes of the story, who reared their Oedipus into a splendid young man. Then Oedipus heard the same grim prophecy which had undone Laius. Horrified, the devoted son fled from home in order to sparehis father and mother. Like Laius he sought to elude fate, but, unlike his sire, Oedipus acted altruistically, protecting those he loved as best he could, at great sacrifice to himself. Sophocles leaves no doubt that Oedipus loved Polybus, the man who adopted, named and nurtured him. Oedipus speaks of “Polybus, to whom I owe my life” and acknowledges the grief he caused his father by fleeing. Oedipus did not even hate Laius: by dramatic coincidence the two men met at a crossroads and argued over the right of way. Laius struck first, and Oedipus killed him–a complete stranger who happened to be his biological father.
Applying conventional terminology, Laius would be called the real father and Polybus the adoptive father. A child psychiatrist, I accepted the terms “birth” and “real” fathers, as Lili Peller taught. Adoptive status still does not equal biological parenting though all good families must be loving as well as genetic. A real father, like Polybus, loves, nurtures and makes willing sacrifices for the child. He acknowledges his mortality and the cycle of generations in which sons replace their fathers. Freud ignored this part of the Oedipal tragedy, focused as he was on the boy as sexual rival in fear of father’s wrath. Laius, acknowledging paternity, dodged fatherhood. Insecure and selfish, he–with Jocasta’s acquiescence–decided to sacrifice his child to save himself. This seems to be in line with human sacrifice to propitiate the gods. With abstract knowledge taking over present feeling and relationships, Laius created conditions in which patricide and incest could occur unconsciously.
King Laius, a minor figure who does not appear in the drama, symbolizes patriarchs, priests, and presidents who cannot accept death but strive for immortality through masculine power, including conquests, monuments, and human sacrifice. Then and now their sons have died en masse battling each other for the everlasting glory of clan or Fatherland. They hold a hope that, by propitiating the gods or killing the enemy who seeks your death (or the son who replaces you), you can evade death itself. To some extent Freud was like Laius, authoritarian and pessimistic: he felt that behavior was driven by instinct and controlled by fear.
Biology outweighs psychology in the Freudian drama: civilized behavior is a thin veneer atop the seething unconscious, religion and altruism are fraudulent attempts to disguise our animal nature. Freud’s interpretation of Oedipus protects the father at the expense of the son. It ignores the human dimension of fatherhood which rightly takes precedence over animal paternity. Freud was preoccupied with sex, conflict, anger, deterrence, and resignation. So, evidently, was the Western world in his heyday, the first half of the 20th century.
Reinterpreted, Oedipal Rex shows that in human affairs relationship outweighs biology: good fatherhood is possible without paternity, and paternity alone is empty. Tragically, Oedipus only discovers this when his life-saving and loving adoption becomes known. Genetic paternity–which really means fate, or predestination–decides. He rejects Jocasta’s plea to let go of the fixation on genesis and get on with living. Instead he put cognitive truth above emotional connectedness, knowledge over experience and brought about the suicide of the one who loved him most, Jocasta.
Cutting off relationship to dodge fate invites tragedy. Human beings know we must die. We should not have to die
alone, in anguish, or doing something we don’t believe in. Knowledge without love is often destructive. Knowledge
can be suspended but not relationship, or we die. Jocasta knew that. Oedipus learned it finally. Laius never did. Knowing the
prophecy led to its fulflllment via estrangement, infanticide and patricide; knowing the biological facts led to suicide and exile.
The stimulus for this reinterpretation of Oedipus comes from Otto Rank, Freud’s early protege and subsequent critic. Rank made the commonsense observation of an “anti-Oedipal” tendency in children, namely the wish to keep their parents together when divorce threatens. Beginning in 1924, Rank enlarged psychoanalytic theory, which had ignored maternal nurture in human
development, and which pursued “truth” disconnected from present–real–relationship. Probably most therapists and
researchers today view affection and altruism as more important than hostility and competition in human development.
Humanistic and existential therapies like Rank’s represent a post-Freudian philosophy: the uncreative life is not worth living,
the unlived life is not worth examining.
Stricken and remorseful, Oedipus blinds himself, but goes on living. His act symbolizes the damage done by too much foresight, insight, hindsight. Knowledge disconnected from relationship cannot serve wisdom. Sophocles seems to give the nod to human feeling over perfect knowledge when the two are in conflict. We might now celebrate Polybus, the unknown father of Oedipus, the beloved adoptive one. Sadly, he could not admit that his son was adopted, but that seems a small flaw in the total picture, a forgivable concession to human feeling. Oedipus loved him dearly, for good reason.
—-
First published in The Harvard Mental Health Letter 7:12, (June) 1991. Revised January, 2010.
A wonderful but little known play, Jocasta, by Philip Freund (1909-2007)is set in the West Indies around 1890, presenting the classic theme in modern garb with touches of colonialism and race. Published in Three Poetic Plays (1973), it was premiered in 1906 in Alexandria, Virginia. Philip Freund edited an important paperback, Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings by Otto Rank (1959).