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Priyanka Das

Professor Sri. Raj Kumar Barman

English Honours, CC2

15 October 2018

Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis

on Oedipal Tragedy

And a brief collective review on Oedipus Complex

Abstract. The present term-paper probes into the Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis on

Oedipal Tragedy. The review of different theoretical standpoints is given, according to

meaning and place of the Oedipus complex in human development. Although it depends on the

resolving of pre-oedipal conflicts, the conflicts of phallic phases of the psychosexual

development are universal to all human being, no matter how we call them – Oedipus, Electra

or Persephone Complex.

Index Terms. Oedipus complex, pre-oedipal conflicts, psychoanalysis, phallus, phallic,

jealousy, female-Oedipus, tragedy, sexuality, neurosis, ego, desire

“It has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is the nucleus of the neuroses, and constitutes

the essential part of their content. It represents the peak of infantile sexuality, which, through

its after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on the sexuality of adults. Every new arrival on

this planet is faced with the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so

falls a victim to neurosis. With the progress of psycho-analytic studies the importance of the

Oedipus complex has become more and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the

shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psychoanalysis from its opponents.”

Sigmund Freud,

Three Essays on Sexuality (1905)

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I. Freud and Oedipus

Fig.1. Sigmund Freud. 1856 – 1939. Photograph. In his Study, Vienna, Time Magazine:

Sigmund Freud, 1930s. Web. 10 Oct. 2018.

Developing his theory of psychosexual development, Freud believed that different

elements of sexual drive converge at the age of 5–6 in the genital organization, where the

components of pre-genital instincts (oral and anal) are subsumed under the genital domination.

The aim of all infantile wishes at that age is the sexual inter- course with a parent of the opposite

sex. The parent of the same sex becomes a dangerous rival (in 1923, Freud introduced a concept

of “the negative Oedipus Complex”.)

Freud thought that a little boy is “condemned” to follow his drives and wishes, the same

way as Sophocles’ Oedipus was condemned to do. In his opinion this is the reason why he

became involved in a strong emotional drama, which is resolved due to the castration anxiety.

The boy believes that his father, a strong rival, is the one who will castrate him, unless he
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abandons his Oedipal wishes. He finds a solution in the process of identification with his father,

constitution of the Superego structure and transferring his sexual strivings from his mother to

other female figures.

Freud named his theory after the main character in Sophocles’ drama about a Theban

king, Oedipus. For our better understanding of some new viewpoints on the Oedipus Complex,

we find it useful to refresh our memory of the myth.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud for the first time links the two heroes in print,

disclosing their affinity beyond the intimate circle of friendship and the terrifying semi-privacy

of self-analysis:

Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s Hamlet has its roots in

the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the changed treatment of the same material reveals the whole

difference in the mental life of these two widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular

advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind. In the Oedipus the child’s wishful

phantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In

Hamlet it remains repressed; and – just as in the case of a neurosis – we only learn of its

existence from its inhibiting consequences. (SE 4: 264)

Here, as in the letter to Fliess, Oedipus enters the scene of Freudian thought just a few

steps ahead of Hamlet. Oedipus functions in this couple as the clearer, more primal, more

realized version of the son’s infantile wish to marry one’s mother and kill’s one’s father;

Hamlet, on the other hand, figures for Freud the repressed and distorted replay of the same

scenario, whose motivating function in the drama is evident only negatively, in its ‘‘inhibiting

consequences.’’ Even before he learns of his father’s death from the Ghost, for example,

Hamlet is ‘‘sullied’’ by a sense of guiltiness and despair, his outlook coloured by a disgusted

fascination with his mother’s sexuality and a crippling identification not with his idealized
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father but with the grotesque figure of his uncle, the satyr-king.3 Freud attributes Hamlet’s

inability to murder the man who has killed the King and married the Queen not to hypertrophied

intellectualism, but rather to the debilitating burden of his own desire to have achieved what

Claudius has pulled off: ‘‘Hamlet is able to do anything – except take vengeance on the man

who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows

him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized’’ (SE IV: 265).

Freud’s initial foray into literary criticism responds to and reflects on the agony and

ecstasy of literary characters. It is the horrifying sight of Oedipus’s recognition, and the equally

horrifying spectre of Hamlet’s delay, that rivets the audience, fastening us in the grips of

identification. Character criticism was, and, indeed, remains, a necessary first stop in

psychoanalytic criticism – a starting point determined not only by Freud’s driving concern with

the fate of the individual subject, but also by the primacy of ethos or character in modern

tragedy, an orientation toward individual subjectivity and consistency itself emblematized by

the figure of Hamlet. Greek tragedy, as theorized by Aristotle, is a genre governed by the

organic machinery of mythos or ‘‘plot,’’ designating the clean economy of a dramatic action

in which the moment of tragic recognition cascades into a series of ironic reversals (Aristotle

1449b–1450b). For Aristotle, who, not like Freud, took Oedipus the King as an exemplar of

classical tragedy, ethos or character was always subordinate to mythos or plot. Modern tragedy

would, however, give centre stage to increasingly complex and compelling characters, a

transformation exemplified for many later theorists, critics, and writers by Shakespeare’s

Hamlet, whose ruminative magnificence is matched only by his chronic disability in the area

of dramatic action. In the modern theatre of the ego, Hamlet’s fascination with his own

subjective extravagance replaces the clarity and objectivity of classical mythos (plot) with the

libidinal and linguistic interest of ethos (character). Since tragedy itself had devolved into a

drama of character in the productions of Shakespeare and his Romantic heirs, applying the
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paradigms of psychoanalysis to characters on stage or page was, as it were, pre-scripted both

by the psychoanalytic enterprise itself and by the changes undergone by tragedy as a genre.

In the decades following the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud’s initial

analyses of Oedipus and Hamlet would be extensively excavated, remapped, and extended by

both psychoanalysts and literary critics working in a Freudian vein. In 1949, Ernst Jones

devoted an entire book, succinctly entitled Hamlet and Oedipus, to the comparative analysis of

Freud’s odd couple. Critics and analysts also drew other tragic dramas into the circuit of

psychic life, especially the Oresteia, whose father- loving Electra and mother-hating Orestes

offered important variations on the Oedipal theme (e.g., Jung 1915). Hamlet, a young man sent

away to school during the period when his mother remarries the man who has killed his father,

is certainly closer to Orestes than to Oedipus in his immediate situation. Hamlet’s revulsion

before the sexuality of his mother, flowering into a death wish against Gertrude that demands

constant self-policing by both himself and the Ghost, competes with and overshadows Hamlet’s

resolve to avenge his father. Moreover, the politics and ethics of revenge are clearly at stake in

both the Oresteia and in Hamlet, but not in Oedipus the King. Such comparisons fill out the

central Freudian insight, engaging the fuller resources of the classical canon of tragedy in order

to fathom the dramatic shape of human motivation and desire. Does this mean that Hamlet has

an ‘‘Orestes complex,’’ and that Greek tragedy provides an infinite set of templates for

mapping human desire? Far from it. In respect to Freud’s foundational reading and dialectical

mind, Hamlet’s mother-hate and father-love is best described as the ‘‘negative Oedipus

complex,’’ retaining the essential referent to the enunciation of Oedipus in the formative scene

of Freud’s self- analysis, rather than dissolving the singularity of that initial insight into the sea

of vague analogies (with women from Venus and men from Mars) that has become pop-

psychoanalysis.
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Fig 2.1. The Bodily Ego and Fig 2.2. the Unconscious. Sigmund Freud. Structural Diagram.

The mental apparatus reprinted from “The Ego and the Id” (1923) and “The Dissection of the

Psychical Personality” (1933). Web. 10 Oct. 2018.

II. Lacan and Hamlet

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Fig. 3. Jacques Lacan. 1901-1981. Photograph. Paris, The Spectator: The greatest
psychoanalyst since Freud. Web. 10 Oct. 2018.
We might recall here the Kasten memory that introduces Freud’s initial double reading

of Hamlet and Oedipus under the sign of a deeply unreliable and divided maternity (Lupton

and Reinhard 1993: 17–19). The enigmatic box formed by the Kasten (box, wardrobe, casket)

functions like an illuminated rubric in a medieval manuscript, a concentrated cipher of the

discursive text that follows. Although the father in Hamlet is most clearly split between obscene

and normative figures, the mother, too, is subject to division: is Gertrude the lustful bearer of

excessive desire, or is she the pragmatic widow who has taken the best road available to her in

a state of emergency?

Jacques Lacan, in his seminar of 1958–9, on ‘‘Desire and Its Interpretation,’’ also

emphasized the importance of Gertrude in Hamlet’s psychic state. According to Lacan, Hamlet
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is stalled because he is always at ‘‘the hour of the Other,’’ playing out even in his final moment

of achieved revenge the scripts imposed by Claudius and the Ghost.

Fig. 4. Sarah-Bernhardt (Hamlet). Photograph. London, Lafayette: Hamlet, Sarah-Bernhardt.

Web. 10 Oct. 2018.

Gertrude poses a problem to Hamlet because she embodies the purity of demand in its

contiguity with need: ‘‘His mother does not choose because of something present inside her,

like an instinctive voracity. The sacrosanct genital object . . . appears to her as an object to be

enjoyed in what is truly the direct satisfaction of a need, and nothing else’’ (Lacan 1958–9: 12–

13). This is, I would insist, the Gertrude of Hamlet’s imaginings and not the Gertrude of the
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play, who, in T. S. Eliot’s astute phrase, remains ‘‘negative and insignificant’’; no

Clytemnestra, Gertrude does not provide an adequate referent or ‘‘objective correla- tive’’ for

the intensity of Hamlet’s misogynistic revulsion.

In Hamlet, the Oedipal situation, Lacan writes, ‘‘appears in the particularly striking

form in the real’’ (51). The subjectivization that Hamlet achieves in the final ‘‘interim’’ of the

play, after his abrupt return from his English misadventure, comes about, Lacan suggests,

because he has managed to grasp the phallus in its symbolic function: ‘‘It is a question of the

phallus, and that’s why he will never be able to strike it, until the moment when he has made

the complete sacrifice – without wanting to, moreover – of all narcissistic attachments, i.e.,

when he is mortally wounded and knows it’’ (51). The phallus in its symbolic function is not

the obscene, over-present object of Gertrude’s imagined desire, but rather, Lacan says, an

ordering function of signification: ‘‘one cannot strike the phallus, because the phallus, even the

real phallus, is a ghost’’ (50). By recognizing the phallus as a symbolic function behind or

beyond rather than in or on the king – a feature of his office rather than his physical body –

Hamlet is able to achieve a degree of subjective autonomy relative to Gertrude, to Claudius,

and to the Ghost. In the final scene of the play, in the interim opened up by his rapidly

approaching mortality, Hamlet at the very least intuits a larger design in his own passivity,

wresting some kind of subjectivity from the very fact of his subjection to the games and

commandments of ghosts and counsellors, kings and queens. If he is an instrument of Claudius

– reduced to a poisoned rapier and a player-recorder in a game of blind man’s bluff scripted by

the Other – he now conceives of this instrumentalization in terms of a larger symbolic design

at work beyond the usurping policies of the satyr-king. And if Hamlet has been trapped in the

claustrophobic field of Gertrude’s imagined demands, he is able in his final speech to say

farewell to her, to separate without further incrimination: ‘‘I am dead, Horatio. Wretched

Queen, adieu!’’ (5.2.275). No longer trapped in the spectre of her sexual demands, Hamlet may
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in this final parting accept Gertrude’s desire as an indeter- minate quantity (does she or doesn’t

she love Claudius?) rather than a fantasy of realized enjoyment (‘‘honeying and making love /

Over the nasty sty,’’ 3.4.92–4).

III. The Oedipus Myth

King Laius of Thebes, otherwise a violent man who raped in a homosexual act

Chrysippas, son of his friend and master of the house, king Pelops, is told by Apollo’s oracle

at Delphi that his own son would kill him. With the permission of his wife Jocasta he pierces

the legs of his new-born baby at the ankles with a golden hook, passed a chain through the

holes and tied them together, and then left the baby to die on the mountain Cithairon. However

a shepherd found the sacrificed baby and saved it by giving it to the childless couple of king

Polybus and queen Merope of Corinth. They named him Oedipus, which in Greek means,

“swollen footed” (because of his leg deformations), and brought him up as their own child. In

his adolescence, Oedipus found out that he was adopted, and upon hearing the oracle that he

would kill his father and marry his mother, he ran away from Corinth. At a fork on the road to

Thebes, he met Laius, who started a fight with him and was the first one to take out a weapon.

Oedipus killed Laius in this fight, without knowing whom did he kill. At that time the Sphinx,

monster with the body of a lion, the head of a woman and big wings, was tormenting the citizens

of Thebes with a riddle. All those who did not know how to solve the riddle were killed.

Oedipus solved the riddle, become a hero, the liberator of the city, and as a reward he got the

throne and the king’s widow Jocasta became his wife. He had four children with her; one of

them is Antigone. After many years, a great plague broke out in Thebes, killing helpless people.

A new oracle promised that the city would be saved, when the murderer of Laius had been

found and punished. Searching for truth, Oedipus found out that he was his father’s killer and

that he married his own mother. Jocasta killed herself, and Oedipus pierced his own eyes
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becoming blind. Since that time, he roamed around, being followed by his devoted daughter

Antigone, till he died on Colonus.

We could pose a question, why did Jocasta’s words in Sophocles’ drama “Many man

had been dreaming about having intercourse with their mothers; the one who doesn’t care about

it, easier stands life?” make such an impact on Freud?

Does this have any connection with his personal family history? He was a first-born

son in his family; his mother Amalia was 20 years old at that time, and his father Jacob was

41. Freud has always been very attached to his mother, and he was her favourite child, “the

golden child”. We are familiar with a quote from a letter Freud wrote to Flies in 1897: “I have

found in my own case too, the falling in love with the mother and the jealousy of the father,

and now I regard it as a universal event of the childhood”.

How much Freud has identified with Oedipus, the decipherer of the Sphinx riddle, we

can see from conformations in his own life.

There are some statements that, after turning 40, after The Interpretation of Dreams had

been published, his father’s death and birth of his daughter Anna, his fifth child, Freud stopped

with his active sexual life, what could be interpreted as an equivalent of making oneself blind

or castrating oneself. Anna Freud has undoubtedly played a role of his Antigone, and his death

in exile in England is a parallel to the Oedipus death on Colonus.

It is obvious that in each of us these elements of myth, film and event are echoing and

are recognized by our unconscious.

We could also ask why Freud put an emphasis on the Oedipus dilemmas, neglecting

the analysis of characters of both the biological and the adoptive parents. In her analysis, Han

Groen-Prakken put much more emphasis on the ť of parents. Or we can follow Jung’s path and

his analysis of civilization and comparative religion, putting more emphasis on “mitrays cults”
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of matriarchate, as opposed to Freud who analysed patriarchy. This was a crucial moment in

the split of the relation father (Freud) to son (Jung) in the time when Freud was writing “Totem

and Taboo”. Son has chosen the mother. We could say that he anticipated the road of

development of psychoanalysis towards the mother as a central figure, the road that was lead

by women psychoanalysts.

IV. Jung and the First Splittings

Fig. 5. Oedipus and the Sphinx. Gustave Moreau. Oil Painting. New York, Metropolitan

Museum of Art: Gallery, Gustave Moreau. Web. Oct 10. 2018

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In his analysis of the Oedipus Complex and Oedipus myth, Jung dedicated full attention

to the character of Sphinx, which he assumed as a representative of the maternal image of

avenging, dangerous mother. Analysing Sphinx, Jung stressed she was a daughter of two

feminine components: Echidna serpent and Gea; so she is thoroughly feminine. On the other

hand, she is the opposite of Jocasta – while Sphinx is anthropomorphous, sterile, the destroyer

of young men, a monster, a female vampire and a virgin, Jocasta is a woman, a wife, a mother

and a grandmother, a beauty and a mistress.

At this moment we find it appropriate to remember the riddle of Sphinx: “Which creature of

earth walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three at night and is weaker

the more legs it has?”

The answer is “A man”, and only Oedipus answered correctly. And who better could discover

the solution to a riddle, which is based on, the locomotion, than the man whose greatest

suffering was connected with the locomotion, who was crippled his whole life, handicapped in

his locomotion.

In the Jung’s interpretation of the myth, the stress was put on the fact that Oedipus got

the widow’s hand in marriage only after he conquered Sphinx. Although he conquered one, he

fell in the claws of the other. In our opinion, Sphinx could today be seen as a phantasm of the

pre-oedipal, a greedy mother, who must die, from whom a child should be separated in order

to be able to enter into a fantasized triangular love relationship with the Oedipal mother. So,

considering from this point of view, we consider Jung as a forerunner of the present day

explanation of the Oedipus Complex.

Anyway, Jung was the one who suggested as a supplement expression: the Electra

Complex, as a symmetric position in girls, but at that time his suggestion was rejected. Now,
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80 years later, it is being considered again. Jung was the first one stressing that little girl’s

position does not differ solely due to the phallic organization and the cathexis of the libido on

the phallus, but also due to her previous attachment to her mother.

For a girl, the Oedipus Complex represents the reorientation from the mother to the

father as an object of love, but now she has to behave towards the mother, the one she depended

on and has symbiotically bounds, as her rival.

Therefore, Jung has stressed the problem of the symbiotic bounds towards the mother.

Freud’s breaking up with Adler and later also O. Rank was, as in the case of Jung, was based

on the central position Oedipus and sexual etiology of neurosis.

Through Abraham who was not a dissident, and who revised the theory of psycho-

sexual development particularly stressing the early, pregenital phases, we came to his analyst

M. Klein.

V. Melanie Klein and the “Early Oedipus”

She thinks that the Oedipus Complex is “on the stage” from the first year of life, that it

comes out from the depressive position and reaches its culmination in the phallic phase of

psychosexual development. She differentiates the “Oedipal situation” from the “Oedipal

Complex”. According to Melanie Klein, both a girl and a boy start with the Oedipal Complex

in its direct and in- verse form. Using the relation towards the breast as a starting point of view,

she thinks that if a boy can identify the breast as a good object, then later, he transfers a part of

these libidinal strivings to the father’s penis, which also becomes a good, creative organ. This

be- comes the basis of his inverse Oedipal Complex and makes his first homosexual position,

but, at the same time, is one of the prerequisites for the boy’s capacity to develop positive

Oedipal strivings, because he believes in the goodness of father’s and his own penis. The trust
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in a good father will later help him to confront the rivalry with father in a form of competition

rather than the destructive rivalry.

In the same way, boy’s sadistic fantasies can be transferred to father’s penis, which,

under the influence of the destructive projected strivings might sting, bite, poison or hurt. Oral,

urethral and anal fantasies in which boy with his teeth, urine and defecation attacks mother’s

body can be projected into a fear of the mother’s genitals in the form of “vagina dentate” or

“cloak”. If on the other side, the breast reactivates libidinal fantasies about the internal contents,

urine and defecation will get characteristics of good contents. The same principle is valid for

the primary scene, which could be experienced as an attack and hurting or as giving a gift in

the form of a baby. From the unconscious recognition of the creative and reparative function

of the penis, boy can get a feeling of pride, and these feelings would corroborate his separation

and individuation and help him to overcome the Oedipal Complex.

In Melanie Klein's theory the early stages of the Oedipal Complex in girls are very alike

to these stages in boys’ development; they are also oscillating between the heterosexual and

homosexual position, and between the aggressive and libidinal strivings. Further on, she

stresses the importance of the primary family triangulation, which enables the child to form

two separate connections with each parent, and confronts him with a third line in the triangle:

the connection between the parents from which the child is excluded. If a child can tolerate the

relation between the parents, it will derive from it a prototype or a model for a third kind of a

relationship with object – model in which the child is a witness and not an active participant.

In 1952, Lampl de Groot also stressed that the Oedipus Complex is developing in the

condition of early attachment to the mother, which determines relations during the Oedipal

period and later on. Disturbances in the pre-oedipal relations thus influence further

development and cause abnormal forms and weaknesses in the Oedipal constellation.
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VI. Heinz Kohut – Oedipus and Odysseus

As we can see, most of the important, “new psychoanalytic schools” started by

redefining the Oedipus Complex, and thus questioning its centrality in the human psychology.

Kohut, the inventor of self-psychology, in his latest article starts from the thesis that

Oedipus Complex is not a universal phenomenon, as is the case with the Oedipal developmental

stage.

In his development, each child has minor or major conflicts related to this

developmental stage, but this also depends on the parents and their psychical health, which, in

Kohut’s opinion, can be seen in the capacities for empathy, so that the child can pass this stage

safely and without traumas, or would not be fixed in this stage and develop a neurosis. If parents

are not “good” enough or healthy, the transgenerational sequence of pathology continues.

Though, by Kohut’s opinion, the psychoanalysts more often see the psychopathology than

health, this does not mean that psychopathology is the core of the human existence. Looking

from this point of view, the Oedipus Complex is more an artifact than essence.

Kohut contrasts the “Human of guilt” to the “Human of tragedy”, where the central

conflict lies in the fact that through the relation with others, he cannot actually realize all the

potentials of his own self.

Further on, Kohut thinks that under the Freud’s suggestive interpretation of myth, the

psychoanalysts did not recognize that Oedipus was rejected, unloved child. If a parent loves

his child, he/she is pleased with the child’s development, which is from the narcissistic position,

the extension of parent’s own self. The power of myth is as big as the Freud’s authority and

Kohut thinks that we confront the “Oedipus by Freud” by suggestively placing another myth

in the juxtaposition. For him it is the Homer’s Odysseus, a “first modern human”, someone

with whom we can easier identify, than with Sophocles’ tragic Oedipus.
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Fig. 6. Sophocles’ Mad Odysseus. Illustration. Iota: Sophocles, Odysseus Gone Mad (S.63).

Web. Oct 10. 2018.

When Greeks went off to the Trojan War, the war leaders Agamemnon, Menelaus and

Palamedes asked all the kings to join them. Young Odyssey, the leader of Ithaca, recently

married and had a baby son, did not want to go to war, so he decided to pretend to have gone

mad. He harnessed both a donkey and an ox, sowing the field with salt, wearing a strange hat

on his head pre- tending not to recognize the war leaders. Palamedes suspected he was cheating

so he threw young Telemachus on the ground in front of the plough of Odysseus. Odyssey did

not want to hurt his son, so he made a semicircle with his plough, thus confessing he was

cheating. Kohut takes this act as a metaphor of a normal, healthy relationship between the

father and the son, and named it »the semicircle of mental health«. Odyssey refused to sacrifice

his son, and this differs him from many human and god figures in the myths. With Kohut the

Oedipus Complex exists, but only as the psycho-pathology

VII. The “Female Oedipus” – Electra and Persephone

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Fig. 7. Electra, Female Oedipus. Portrait. Greek Mythology: Electra. Web. Oct 10. 2018.

Ogden brought us to the field of considering the female Oedipus Complex. Aside from

Ogden’s theory which was presented, the most interesting theories for us were the theories of

female analysts H. C. Halberstadt-Freud, and N. Kulish and D. Holzman, who substitute the

Oedipus myth with myths about Persephone and Electra. Jung was the first one who had offered

Electra as a model for the female phallic stage development conflicts. The main remark why

this myth does not correspond to the Oedipus for men lied in the fact that Electra planned for

long time to kill her mother and her mother’s lover, while Oedipus killed his father without

knowing whom he killed. This unconsciousness makes Oedipus a better model for neurotic

people, whose wish to eliminate the parent of same sex is completely unconscious, too.

The difference in myths is obvious, nevertheless thinking about pre-genital

development of relations with mother, especially in girls for whom the elimination of pre-
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genital, phallic mother is more prominent than rivalry with Oedipal mother, brought up the re-

questioning of Electra’s model once again.

Maybe the “crossroads” where the aggression and libido meet in girls and boys are not

on the same symmetric places.

In her theory H. C. Halberstadt-Freud agrees with Ogden that girl in her development

does not have to change the first object of love in order to become a female; the main field of

conflict is the oscillation between the symbiotic illusion in her relationship with mother, and

the hatred towards her. Relationship with the inner maternal imago may become the source of

strength and advance the female development, but can also be the source of the pathology. She

also thinks that girl turns to male object of love not instead of, but as addiction to the first object

of love, mother. In a healthy development, girl does not give up her internal mother, but she

gives up the fantasy of the phallic mother (pre-oedipal, dominant), allowing herself to

recognize the differences between the parents, and to restore a heterosexual wish.

The mythical character Electra was planning for many years to kill her mother

Clytemnestra, accusing her for neglecting and at the same time idealizing her distanced and

cruel father Agamemnon. Because of this strong ambivalence, hatred but dependency of

mother and the idealization of father, H. C. Halberstadt-Freud finds her a better model for the

conflict of the phallic stage in girls than Oedipus is.

The author thinks that stressed change of love from the first object of love mother,

towards father, which Freud named the Oedipus complex in women, was in fact a result of the

psychopathology. It could be applied to the hysterical structures, which seems rather logical if

we remember that Freud based his theory on his experiences with the neurotics. According to

Halberstadt-Freud’s opinion, girl is during her whole life connected with the first object of

love, mother, although these connections are often ambivalent. The separation from mother is
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often rather partial than the total one and the ambivalence in which there are contained both

love and hatred is prolonged for many years.

The pathology in solving the complex can go take two directions – either girl rejects

mother and in her hatred turns away from her, or she stays for her whole life in close, symbiotic

relationship with her. But neither of these two choices includes turning the object of love from

mother to father.

About the penis envy, author things that it does not come from the feeling of being

castrated, but it is a result of the wish for power and against the dependency. The wish to have

a child is also the authentic female wish, and not just a replacement for a penis.

VIII. Conclusion

In Freud’s method of interpretation, manifest contents (what we see, say, or hear in our

dreams; the recorded elements of the dream- text itself) carry latent or unconscious meanings,

archaic sexual wishes that have been ‘‘repressed,’’ rendered unthinkable, by the civilizing

processes that forcibly channel the polymorphous perversity of children into the regulated

heterosexuality of adult- hood. In Freud’s scheme, Oedipus the King, a play in which the horror

of father-death and mother-love is actually achieved, represents the latent content or repressed

meaning that both backlights and inhibits the thoughts and actions of Hamlet. This scheme

authorized a whole strain of psychoanalytic hermeneutics committed to unlocking the sexual

significance of literary images and symbols. At the local level of poetic analysis, this remains

a powerful interpretive and pedagogical tool today.

Aristotelian terms, psychoanalytic hermeneutics invites the critic to attend to the local

play of lexis (diction) in its relation to dianoia (thought) apart from the march of characters

across the stage. A rich bouquet of sexual significations, for instance, animates the fantastic

garlands of Ophelia, woven from ‘‘crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, / That
 Das 21

liberal shepherds give a grosser name’’ (5.1.140–1). Al- though scholars did not need Freud to

discover country matters within Ophelia’s pretty posies (what are flowers, after all, than the

sexual organs of plants?), the psychoanalytic perspective allowed these local instances of

sexual punning to insem- inate whole networks of image patterns with scenes of seduction,

desire, and loss.

The surface-depth model of hermeneutics, already pushed beyond its limits in stress

points of Freud’s own writing and thinking, underwent extensive revision under the impact of

semiotics, structuralism, and poststructuralism – furthered, for ex- ample, in the publication of

the Yale French Studies volume that introduced Lacan’s Hamlet to America. These discourses

of the sign, which placed a new, counter- hermeneutic emphasis on the rule of the signifier

over the signified, of the letter over the spirit, encouraged critics to invert the logical

relationship between Oedipus and Hamlet in Freud’s original scene of reading tragedy. If

interpretation must always begin with surface, is not Hamlet rather than Oedipus the logically

‘‘prior’’ play, its palimpsest of historical, dramatic, biographical, and editorial versions and

variants initiating Freud into the seductive dynamics of repression? In this vein, critics

emphasized the importance of the ‘‘dreamwork’’ [Trauerarbeit] itself – the forms and

mechanisms of substitution and displacement – over the meanings secreted on the far side of

the dream (e.g., Weber 1982).

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Fig. 8. Othello and Desdemona. Oil Painting. Antonio Munoz Degrain. Wikipedia Commons:

Antonio Munoz Degrain. Web. 10 Oct. 2018.

A tour de force in this area is Joel Fineman’s ‘‘The Sound of O in Othello’’; arguing

ingeniously that ‘‘Othello,’’ a name apparently of Shakespeare’s invention, derives from the

Greek ethelo¯, ‘‘ ‘wish,’ ‘want,’ ‘will,’ ‘de- sire,’ ’’ Fineman traces the catastrophic reduction

of Othello through the course of the play into a headless subject ‘‘inflated with his loss of self’’

(1991: 148). ‘‘The sound of O in Othello,’’ Fineman argued, serves ‘‘both to occasion and to

objectify in language Othello’s hollow self’’ (151), culminating in his keening cry, ‘‘O,

Desdemona dead, Desdemona dead, O, O’’ (5.2.288). Fineman’s fearless pursuit of the Greek

letter in Shakespeare’s text echoes Lacan’s aside in the Hamlet seminar, ‘‘I’m just surprised

that no one has pointed out that Ophelia is O phallus’’ (20)

For Aristotle, however, mythos was the prime mover of tragedy. Mythos can be

translated as ‘‘plot,’’ but also as ‘‘myth’’; it designates the structural and temporal element in
 Das 23

drama, the architecture of its action. For Freud, Oedipus the King staged a fundamental plot of

human desire and development, the crystalline clarity of its dramatic action bearing the

structural stamp not only of literary art, but also of ritual and archetype. Moreover, Freud

compares the diagetic or narrative sequence of Oedipus the King to the temporality of a

psychoanalysis: ‘‘The action of the play is nothing other than the process of revealing, with

cunning delays and ever-mounting excite- ment – a process that can be likened to the work of

a psychoanalysis – that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laı¨us, but further that he is the son

of the murdered man and of Jocasta’’ (SE IV: 261–2).

Fig. 9. Oedipus and Antigone. Jean Hugues. 1849-1930. Photograph. France, Alamy: Marble

Statue, Oedipus Coloneus. Web. Oct 10. 2018.

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When Lacan turns to a reading of Antigone in his seminar on the ethics of

psychoanalysis, conducted a year after his sessions on Hamlet, he refers to conversations with

Le´vi-Strauss on the play. He tells us, ‘‘To put it in the terms of Le´vi-Strauss – and I am certain

that I am not mistaken in evoking him here, since I was instrumental in having had him reread

Antigone and he expressed himself to me in such terms – Antigone with relation to Creon finds

herself in the position of synchrony in opposition to diachrony’’ (1959–60: 285). In

structuralism, synchrony refers to language as system or code, and diachrony to its historical

development.6 Antigone’s uncanny location between real and symbolic death, according to

Lacan, ‘‘suspends everything that has to do with transformation, with the cycle of generation

and decay or with history itself, and it places us on a level that is more extreme than any other

insofar as it is directly attached to language as such’’ (285). Antigone suspends diachrony,

argues Lacan, by enshrining the irreparable loss of her brother in the barest outlines of a tomb

(the pouring of dust on his corpse), a symbolic act that serves to dislodge human being from

the temporal flux of both natural and historical change. Passing Freud and Lacan, the synchrony

of mythos is projected onto the very body and being of Antigone, in three senses. First, she is

a figure of suspension and arrest, from her fixation on the singularity of her brother to the

hanging of her body in the cave of live burial. Second, Antigone materializes the incestuous

union between Oedipus and Jocasta, hence concretizing and concentrating the consequences of

the Oedipal plot within the very genealogy and substance of her being. Finally, her refusal of

a sexual relation (her choice of the dead Polynices over the living Haemon) links the hollow

space of the cave to the uncanny Kasten or cupboard of the maternal body as well as to the

disquieting question mark of feminine desire (Copjec 2002: 22).

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Works Cited

Bushnell, Rebecca. A Companion To Tragedy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005. Print.

Jakovljev, Sanja B, and Stanislav Matačić. “The Oedipus Complex in the Contemporary

Psychoanalysis”. es.scribd.com. Scribd, Inc., 2005. pdf. 13 Oct. 2018.