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  • Chapter 6 - Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus

  • Claude Calame, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
  • Translated by Vanessa Casato, Universita Ca'Foscari, Venezia
  • Preface by Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Choral Tragedy
    Published online:
    25 April 2024
    Print publication:
    02 May 2024, pp 135-159

  • Summary

    If there is a Greek tragedy that is not often associated with choral song this must surely be Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. The play has become synonymous with the story about the young Oedipus’ fate made famous by Sigmund Freud, and as such it has been canonized as the founding myth of psychoanalysis. As Freud first put it, in the fourth of his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis: ‘The child takes both of its parents, and more particularly one of them, as the object of its erotic wishes … the child reacts to this by wishing, if he is a son, to take his father’s place, and, if she is a daughter, her mother’s … The myth of King Oedipus, who killed his father and took his mother to wife, reveals, with little modification, the infantile wish, which is later opposed and repudiated by the barrier against incest.’