Authors: Rollo May
and his awareness that his father was innocent and that he had projected on his father rivalry of the Oedipal kind which he later came to
see was not true in fact. Hence the breakdown of this theory of parental seduction was part of the dawning of the truth of the Oedipus complex. His own personal phantasies forced him to this new conclusion. It was then that he wrote to Fliess, in 1897, to give him “the fateful news” that the seduction stories he had believed in were not literally true.
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The merging of all these elements tells us again about how memory is related to myth. The drama of father and mother and child is kept alive in a self-generating way, not just a memory of a factual phenomenon but as a dynamic, growing, active drama. The myth is always being reinterpreted, growing, changing, even adding to itself. Then when memories do come alive, they are more than memories; they have assumed the character of myth. Indeed, the cruelty of Laius in putting the infant Oedipus out to die, Jocasta hanging herself, Oedipus wrenching the secrets from old Tiresias and then gouging out his own eyes—all are part of this great myth. In this sense psychoanalysis is a reflection of the basic interpersonal patterns which have been present since the dawn of human history.
That triangular form of the perdurable relationship, hung with a thousand different shades and colors, is the ladder the child must climb as he or she grows in the world. To us it is tremendously interesting that Freud regretted this conclusion forced upon him; he regarded it as a radical loss. “In the collapse of all values only the psychological theory has remained unimpaired,”
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he wrote to Fliess. He then turned to the writing of his first and most influential book,
The Interpretation of Dreams
. His new psychology and his new understanding of mythic truth were the essential bases of this work.
By employing the language of myth, Freud, like Einstein, creates a symbolic structure—a comprehensive psychological equation—which
opens up the possibilities of further scientific knowledge and avoids any suggestion that he is setting down eternal truth.
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Feder adds these comforting words: “If we live in this paradox, we can enjoy our existence on this planet.”
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Freud came to the conclusion that myths show a “conscious ignorance and an unconscious wisdom.” Those who believe our modern culture has gone “beyond myth” had best ask themselves: Are we not showing precisely this “conscious ignorance and an unconscious wisdom”?
Most impressive of all in Freud’s mythology is his description of the eternal conflict between Eros, the myth of love, and Thanatos, the myth of death. The former draws people together, leads to friendship, interdependence, and all the constructive aspects which make for unity with our fellow men and women. The fact that we can live with some joy and pleasure, some sense of intimacy with our fellows, is an expression of the myth of Eros, as Freud put it. This is the positive, the upbuilding, the warmth of life—which we will see cropping up in many ways, like the cultural creativity of Faust in Goethe’s last section, and in the experiences of Peer Gynt as he struggles over oceans and mountains till he at last comes to terms with his love for Solveig. Freud uses Eros as a catchall for the powers in us to rise to a struggle the likes of which are not found as the product of any other force. Out of this conflict of Eros against Thanatos comes the civilizing force which seeks to tame the primitive destructive tendencies of the human creature.
This struggle of Eros, we have said, takes place against its antagonist Thanatos, the myth of death. Just as there are many gradations of Eros, so Thanatos includes many phases, including
illness, fatigue, and all of what Paul Tillich called non-being. The forces that tear us apart, the dread of finitude, all that which fights against Eros, is included in the myth of Thanatos. This conflict between love and death, said Freud, is the “battle of the giants which nursemaids try to appease with their lullaby about heaven.”
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Out of this continuous struggle civilization is wrought
. Works of art are produced, great poetry is written, ideas spring up, all from the conflict of Eros and Thanatos. There is no creativity without this struggle. Eros by itself would be insipid, childish, uninteresting, indeed, as irrelevant as the little boy “Cupid” as he appears in so many paintings of the Italian Renaissance.
The great things in civilizations come from Eros struggling against Thanatos. Thanatos without Eros would be an emptiness beyond even cruelty. But as these two great forces struggle against each other, we see the paradox of normal life; we see, for an example which contains both myths, the beauty and the magnificence of cathedrals at the same time as their gargoyles mock the human viewers down below.
Freud’s positing of the war between Eros and Thanatos was stark, dramatic, tragic…. Human beings are caught in the endless conflict between these two poles. The eternal warfare within us creates the sense of guilt which continually torments us: it is the price we pay for civilization, which results only when man’s deepest aggressive instincts are curbed.
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THE TRAGEDY OF TRUTH ABOUT ONESELF
When we read the actual drama of Oedipus, as it came to Freud and comes to us from the pen of Sophocles, we are surprised to see that the myth has nothing to do with conflicts about sexual desire or killing one’s father as such. These are all done long in the past before the drama begins. Oedipus is a good king (“the mightiest head among us all,” he is called) who has reigned wisely and strongly in Thebes and has been for a number of years happily married to Queen Jocasta. The only issue in the drama is whether he will recognize and admit what he has done. The tragic issue is that of seeking the truth about oneself; it is the tragic drama of a person’s passionate relation to truth.
Oedipus’ tragic flaw is his wrath against his own reality.
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Thebes is suffering under another plague as the curtain rises
on the actual drama. Word has been brought from the oracle that the plague will be lifted only when the murderer of the previous King Laius is discovered. Oedipus calls the old blind prophet, Tiresias, and thereupon proceeds a gripping and powerful unfolding step by step of Oedipus’ self-knowledge, an unfolding replete with rage at the truth and those who are its bearers, and all other aspects of our human struggle against recognition of our own reality. It is interesting that Freud, after watching the drama on the stage, cried out, “Ach, it is a psychoanalysis!”
Tiresias’ blindness symbolizes the fact that one can more insightfully grasp
inner
reality about human beings—gain
in
sight—if one is not distracted by the impingement of external details.
Tiresias at first refuses to answer Oedipus’ questioning as to who is guilty with the words:
How terrible it is to know …
Where no good comes from knowing! Of these matters
I was full well aware, but let them slip….
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In response to Oedipus’ new demands and threats, he continues,
… Let me go home;
… So shalt thou bear thy load most easily.
…Ye
Are all unknowing; my say, in any sort,
I will not say, lest I display my sorrow.
The drama then unfolds as the progressive revelation of Oedipus to himself, the source from which the truth proceeds being not Oedipus himself but Tiresias.
Thus Tiresias is the psychoanalyst
The whole gamut of reactions like “resistance” and “projection” is exhibited by Oedipus as he fights the more
violently against the truth the closer he gets to it. He accuses Tiresias of planning to betray the city; is this why he will not speak? The old seer replies,
I will not bring remorse upon myself
And upon you. Why do you search these matters?
Then in a burst of angry projection Oedipus accuses Tiresias of having killed Laius himself. And when the king is finally told the truth by the goaded prophet that he, Oedipus himself, is the murderer of his father, Oedipus turns upon Tiresias and his wife’s brother, Creon, with the charge that these words are part of their strategy to take over the state.
Jocasta, Oedipus’ wife, tries to persuade him not to place any weight on the seer’s accusation and bursts out in a very human tirade,
Listen and learn, nothing in human life
Turns on the soothsayer’s art.
Jocasta, the mother whom he has married, now herself becomes aware of the terrible knowledge that awaits Oedipus. She tries desperately to dissuade him:
... But why should men be fearful,
O’er whom Fortune is mistress, and foreknowledge
Of nothing sure? Best take life easily,
As a man may. For that maternal wedding,
Have no fear; for many men ere now
Have dreamed as much; but he who by such dreams
Sets nothing, has the easiest time of it.
When Oedipus still proclaims his resolve to face the truth, wherever it may lead, whatever it may be, she cries,
Don’t seek it! I am sick, and that’s enough.…
Wretch, what thou art O mightst thou never know!
Oedipus is not dissuaded but insists that he must know who he is and where he came from.
He must know and accept his own reality, his own myth, and his fate
.
I will not hearken—not to know the whole,
Break out what will, 1 shall not hesitate….
The old shepherd who rescued the infant Oedipus from death on the mountainside is finally brought, the one man who can provide the final link in the fateful story.
“O, I am in horror, now, to speak!” the shepherd cries. And Oedipus answers, “And I to hear. But I must hear—no less.”
When Oedipus does learn the final, tragic truth, that he has killed his father and married his mother, he pulls out his eyes, the organ of
seeing
. His punishment is first
exile
, imposed by himself but later, as in
Oedipus in Colonus
, the second drama, imposed by Creon and the state. The tragedy has now come full circle. He was originally exiled when he was a few days old on his father’s order, and now, an old man, he will be again in exile.
This exile is a fascinating symbolic act from our modern psychoanalytic viewpoint, for we have held in earlier chapters that the greatest threat and greatest cause of anxiety for an American near the end of the twentieth century is not castration but
ostracism
, the terrible fate of being exiled by one’s group. Many a contemporary man castrates himself or permits himself to be castrated because of fear of being exiled if he doesn’t. He renounces his power and conforms under the great threat and peril of ostracism.
We now turn to the drama which reveals the healing, integrative aspects of the Oedipus myth, namely
Oedipus in Colonus
. The old blind Oedipus is led by the hand of his daughter Ismene to Colonus, which is a grove of trees a few miles from Athens. There the old man pauses to contemplate his problems and to find some meaning in these horrible experiences he has endured.
There is very little “action” in this drama. It is almost entirely
a man meditating on his tragic suffering and what he has learned from it. So far as I know, this drama is never mentioned in psychoanalytic literature in America, an amazing fact in itself. One reason for its neglect is that discussion of the integrative functions of myths in general tend to be omitted in psychoanalytic discussions. But, more specifically, a consequence of the literalistic interpretation of the myth as having to do with sex and killing the father requires that we stop when these are worked through, punishment meted out, and the situation accepted, as at the conclusion of
Oedipus Rex
.
But viewing the myth as the presentation of the human struggle, the truth about oneself, we must indeed go on, as Sophocles does, to see how a person comes to terms with the
meaning
of these acts which Oedipus has committed. This subsequent drama is Oedipus’ stage of reconciliation with himself and his fellow men in the persons of Theseus and the Athenians, and it is a reconciliation with the ultimate meaning in his life. “For the gods who threw you down sustain you now,” as his daughter Ismene phrases it.
Since it was written by Sophocles when he was an old man of eighty-nine, this drama can be supposed to contain the wisdom of his old age as well.
The first theme we find in Oedipus’ meditation at Colonus is
guilt
—the difficult problem of the relation of ethical responsibility to self-consciousness. Is a man guilty if the act was unpremeditated, done unknowingly? In the course of his probing old Oedipus comes to terms with this; the answer is responsibility but not guilt.
Creon has come from Thebes, having heard the prophecy that the city which has Oedipus’ body will always have peace, to persuade old Oedipus to return. But the old man defends himself indignantly against the brash accusations of guilt with which Creon attacks him:
If then I came into the world—as I did come—
In wretchedness, and met my father in a fight,
And knocked him down, not knowing that I killed him
Nor whom I killed—again, how could you find
Guilt in that unmeditated act? …
As for my mother—damn you, you have no shame,
Though you are her own brother—
...........................................
But neither of us knew the truth; and she
Bore my children also—…
While I would not have married her willingly
Nor willingly would I ever speak of it.
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Again, about his father he cries out that he has
A just extenuation. This:
I did not know him; and he wished to murder me.
Before the law—before God—I am innocent!
It is clear that Oedipus accepts and bears his responsibility. But he insists that the delicate and subtle interplay of conscious and unconscious factors (as we could call them) makes any legalistic or pharisaic imputation of guilt inaccurate and wrong. It is a truism since Freud that the
problem of guilt is not within the act but within the heart
, as indeed Jesus said four centuries after Sophocles wrote this drama. The drama holds that the sins of meanness, avarice, and irreverence of Creon and Polynices are “no less grave than those sins of passion for which Oedipus was punished, that in condemning them to the merciless justice soon to descend, Oedipus acts thoroughly in accord with a moral order which his own experience has enabled him to understand,”
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