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Rank. Coworker of Freud, broke with him about 1922-4. Disagreements with Freud. Freud made too many deductions from working with patients who were sick and abnormal. Freudianism belittled the role and character of women Freud put too much emphasis on the sex drive
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Rank Coworker of Freud, broke with him about 1922-4.
Disagreements with Freud • Freud made too many deductions from working with patients who were sick and abnormal. • Freudianism belittled the role and character of women • Freud put too much emphasis on the sex drive • Freud did not put enough emphasis on human search for immortality • Freud blames too much of a child's actions on his parents • Freud fails to notice that children work to bring their parents together as well as to pull them apart
The Family Romance • Prophecy or dream warns father (or father-figure) about his son • Hero born of noble parents • Baby exposed in a river, or in the wilderness • Child brought out of the wilderness (= birth) • Child raised by other, often lowly parents • Hero returns to his true parents • Affection for real mother, hostility for real father
Sargon Moses Karna Oedipus Paris Telephus Perseus Gilgamesh Cyrus Tristan Romulus Hercules Jesus Siegfried Lohengrin The Family Romance Applies to:
Oedipus: the Relationship Between the Play and the Myth • Let's start with the play … • Sophocles' Oedipus the King: • Written between 429-425 BC • Plot: Oedipus learns that he has killed his father and married his mother • Knox: Oidipos means "swollen foot." • Knox: Oidi- sounds like "oida," I know • The play is a detective story • Hero "finds himself"
Outline of Sophocles' Oedipus the King • Pestilence at Thebes • Oedipus sends to the oracle of Apollo to learn source of pestilence • Apollo says it results from pollution on their state from murder of Laios • Oedipus curses the murderer (no matter who he is) • Teiresias accuses Oedipus of being the murderer
Outline of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, 2 • Oedipus accuses Kreon of conspiracy (because he suggested getting the advice of Teiresias) • A messenger comes from Corinth, saying Polybos has died • The messenger assures Oedipus that Polybos and Merope are not his real parents
Outline of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, 3 • Oedipus sends for the shepherd who is the survivor of the attack on Laios, who turns out to be the same man who was told to expose the baby Oedipus on the mountainside and didn't • Jocasta figures out that Oedipus is her son and hangs herself
Outline of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, 4 • Oedipus finds out that he is the son of Laios and Jocasta • Oedipus blinds himself • Oedipus goes into exile and leaves Kreon in charge
Literary Views of Oedipus, 1Aristotle, 1 • The plot of the finest tragedies must not be simple but complex, in which reversal and recognition are the whole drama. • Reversal is a change of the situation into its opposite, and this must accord with the probable or the inevitable. So in the Oedipus the man comes to cheer Oedipus and to rid him of his fears about his mother; then, by showing him who he is, he does the opposite.
Literary Views of Oedipus, 1Aristotle, 2 • Recognition is the change from ignorance to knowledge of a bond of love or hate between persons who are destined for good fortune or the reverse. The finest kind of recognition is accomplished by simultaneous reversals, as in the Oedipus.
Literary Views of Oedipus, 1Aristotle, 3 • Good men must not be seen suffering a change from prosperity to misfortune; this is not fearful and pitiful but shocking. Thus, a play must represent a man who is not outstanding in virtue and righteousness, who falls into misfortune not through wickedness and vice, but through some flaw … a serious flaw in character.
Literary Views of Oedipus, 1Aristotle, 4 • In such a play, we feel pity for a man who does not deserve his misfortune; we fear for someone like ourselves. The story should be so constructed that the events make anyone who hears the story shudder and feel pity even without seeing the play. The story of Oedipus has this effect … the recognition emerges from the events themselves … the amazement and surprise are caused by probable means.
Literary Views of Oedipus, 2B. M. W. Knox, 1 • The intellectual progress of Oedipus and Jocasta, which parallels the intellectual progress of the [Greek] age of enlightenment, has been carefully set in ironic dramatic framework where it is exposed as wrong from the start. • However, the play does not end with the defeat of Oedipus.
Literary Views of Oedipus, 2B. M. W. Knox, 2 • His resurgence in the last scene of the play …[is] a vision of man, superior to the tragic reversal of his action and the terrible success of his search for the truth, reasserting his greatness, not this time in defiance of the powers which shape human life but in harmony with those powers.
Freud: Sophocles' Play • The Oedipus Rex is a tragedy of fate: its strong tragic effect depends on the conflict between the all-powerful will of the gods and the vain efforts of human beings threatened with disaster; resignation to the divine will, and the perception of one's own impotence is the lesson which the deeply moved spectator is supposed to learn from the tragedy.
Freud: Sophocles' Play, 2 • If the Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the ancient Greeks, the only possible explanation is that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend upon the conflict between fate and human will, but upon the particular nature of the material by which this conflict is revealed. … [Oedipus'] fate moves us only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him.
Freud: Sophocles' Play, 3 • It may be that we are all destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence towards our fathers; our dreams convince us that we were. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, quoted by B. M. W. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, p. 4.
Freud: Oedipus Complex and Oedipus Myth, 1 • [The Oedipus complex is a ] rivalry of sexual affections. The son, when quite a little child, develops a peculiar tenderness toward his mother whom he looks upon as his own property, regarding his father in the light of a rival who disputes this sole possession of his; similarly the little daughter sees in her mother someone who disturbs her tender relation to her father and occupies a place which she feels she herself could very well fill.
Freud: Oedipus Complex and Oedipus Myth, 2 • … In the Oedipus myth the two extreme forms of the wishes arising from the two wishes of the son, the wish to kill the father and marry the mother, are realized in an only slightly modified form. … Closely connected with this [is] … the castration complex, the reaction to that intimidation in the field of sex or to that restraint of early infantile sexual activity.
Freud: Oedipus Complex and Oedipus Myth, 3 • Other people's ability to do this is very limited. The true artist has more at his disposal. … The artist opens out to others the way back to the comfort and consolation of their own unconscious sources of pleasure … from Freud's The General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, tr. Joan Riviere, p. 184-5 (written 1909)
Freud: Art as Expressing the Neuroses of Everyone • [Art ]… is a path back from fantasy to reality. The artist … has an introverted disposition and has not far to go to become neurotic. [He] is … urged on by instinctual needs which are too clamorous. He longs to attain to honor, power, riches, fame and the love of women.… like any other with an unsatisfied longing, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest and libido onto the creation of his wishes in the life of fantasy from which the way might readily lead to neurosis.
Freud: Art as Expressing the Neuroses of Everyone, 2 • … The way back to reality is found by the artist. He is not the only one who has a life of fantasy. Every hungry soul looks to [the world of fantasy] for comfort and consolation. from Freud's The General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, tr. Joan Riviere, p. 327-8 (written 1909)
Freud and his followers • Oedipus represents all of us, he is ordinary • Oedipus is a neurotic • Oedipus is a victim of his own repressed knowledge • The play is an allegory, reflecting the human unconscious • The right way to look at the story is to combine various stages of the myth
Sophocles • Oedipus is unique and singular • Oedipus is a king • Oedipus is a hero who stands up against the gods • The play is about intellectual blindness. It expresses irony as a result of Sophocles' artistic decisions • Crafts a single version of the story that excludes all others
Jung • Looks for the fundamental properties of human nature • Seeks universal themes in literature • Cultural differences between stories are not important • Process of individuation means coming to terms with the elements of daily life as represented in your dreams. • In dreams, the concrete details of life are translated into general symbols and read as literary texts.
Archetypes, p. 57-58 • Mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual’s own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind • The archetype is the tendency to form such representations of a motif • Does not mean definite mythological images or motifs
Process of Individuation • Conscious coming to terms with one’s inner center • Three parts: • Shadow • Animus/Anima • Self
Shadow, p. 174-178 • Same-sex figure • Represents unknown or little-known attributes or qualities of the ego • It contains values that are needed by consciousness but that exist in a form that makes it difficult to integrate them into one’s life • This figure often makes the dreamer uneasy or frightened
Animus/Anima • Opposite-sex figure • Guide to Self (if positive) • Four stages: • Men: biological, romantic, spiritual, abstract (195) • Women: jungle hero, romantic man, bearer of the word, wise guide to spiritual truth (205-6)
Self, p. 208 • Same-sex figure • Represents the inner nucleus of the dreamer’s psyche • Can appear as a child, a wise old man or woman, a royal couple, a helpful animal, a circle, or a stone, or as “cosmic man”
Claude Levi-Strauss Syntagmatic Relationship Paradigmatic Relationship
Claude Levi-Strauss, applied to Gilgamesh Humbaba died for our sins
