In listening to that same lecture set, Solomon mentions in passing that Oedipus's father had been the recipient of a curse. Somehow I had forgotten that. And so I thought, how foolish of me- in all of these myths, the ancestral patterns are relevant, why should Oedipus be any different?
In the old testament, it is said that the sins of the father are visited upon his children. The 10 commandments assure that disobeying souls will be punished 10 generations out. Native American traditions consider the implications for the 7th generation after them of any of their important choices. And yet we in the modern west continue to think that we just sprang out of nowhere with no ancestral antecedents or debts. (this is fundamentally an American delusion with our mythology of the immigrant surrendering all loyalty to Prince or Potentate, and presumably all inherited emotional baggage. Would that wishing made it so. . .).
So to look at the "fate" of Oedipus, with its apparent cruelty (as Solomon puts it), it would behoove us to look at the 'system,' i.e. the family of which Oedipus was but a unit, his centrality inflated by our attention to him and not his ancestors.
Did you know Oedipus's father was cursed? That he was cursed to bear a son that would slay him? Well that certainly takes some of the pressure off of Oedipus, no? After all, he might not have been such a bad guy if he were just acting out an arrangement made by his father and another actor.
In the stories, King Laius, Oedipus's father was a guest at the court of King Pelops. During his stay there, he became sexually intrigued by Pelops's son, Chrysippus, and in the night, abducted and raped him. (It's almost hard to believe this part of the story doesn't get more air time, what with our open embrace of pedophilia and homosexuality). Upon discovering the violation of his child, Pelops curses Laius that his son should murder him.
Well.
That certainly puts a different spin on things, doesn't it? Does the 'evil fate' of Laius, to be murdered by his son, seem slightly less brutal in this context? Does the guilt Oedipus experience as the agent of vengeance in another man's sensible call for justice seem somewhat overwrought? Maybe.
What is more, in the stories, both men try to avoid their fate- one out of selfishness, one out of selflessness. Laius, understanding his curse, exposes Oedipus in order to outwit fate. Oedipus, when learning of his own curse, *runs away from home* in order to spare his (adopted) father the curse of his own fate.
Would that Oedipus and Laius had had the council of Dr. von Franz. This is just the kind of ‘fate evasion’ practiced daily in psychologists’ offices as people try to outsmart their complexes through intellectual analysis. And so perhaps the ancients and their oracles were as foolish as we and our shrinks.
But to our original point. . . That the Oedipus myth is somehow central to our psyches is an arbitrary assertion. It can hardly be said that every young man born in the world is the son of a father who was cursed by a foreign king for raping his son. Furthermore, even for those fathers that did go down that path, some of them might have accepted the cosequences of their actions and raised the son anyway. Laius, however, decided to murder Oedipus, and so his son’s unconscious desire to kill his father is not some kind of ‘psychological predisposition.’ It is simply revenge.
And yet the notion persists. But perhaps we enjoy the avoidance of our fate as much as Laius and Oedipus – and all the others – did. Woody Allen, a psychological devotee, was in analysis for some 30 years before he married his daughter. So perhaps the psychological religion is destined to fail us as much as the Judeo-Christian one.
The Oedipus Complex has distorted our cultural sense of who we are by replacing the Judeo-Christian mono-myth with an equally preposterous, limited construct that simply does not apply in most cases. And still, in our search for meaning through the new religion of psychology, all manner of mythic conditions are referred back to the alleged primogenitor of complexes, the Oedipal.
Solomon, in his lectures, quotes Nietzsche as saying we shall not be through with God until we are through with language, since our notion of God is embedded in our everyday speech. Well the neuro-linguistic programmers, to say nothing of the GOP, are working on that. But in the mean time, getting rid of our notion of monotheism as the governing myth of mankind would set us well in the right direction.
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