The Truth about Oedipus

Dad grabs a midnight snack.

It’s a very strange thing that nobody seems to have noticed, but Freud obviously got the Oedipus complex wrong. He claimed that every man secretly had an urge, like Oedipus, to kill his father and sleep with his mother.

But, in fact, Oedipus had no such urge. He killed his father and slept with his mother by mistake.

On the other hand, it is the exact opposite motif which dominates in Greek mythology: that of parents killing their children.

Starting with Oedipus.

"Are you my Mommy?"

Oedipus was left by his parents on a mountainside to die in his infancy. Whether or not it ended up that way, it was very much their intent to kill him.

Moreover, this practice was a standard feature of Greek culture; patricide was unheard of.

Nor is this motif confined to the Oedipus cycle. It is, arguably, the primordial Greek myth: Saturn, the original ruler of gods and men, devoured his own children as they emerged from the womb. For more examples of the motif, see Tantalus and Pelops, or Agamemnon and Iphigenia, or Romulus and Remus.

Nor is this motif confined to the Greeks. It is the story of Abraham and Isaac; it is also the central story of the New Testament, the story of God the Father and God the Son. The Hebrews inherited the land of Canaan from the Canaanites as punishment for their custom of infanticide. It seems to be the central moral issue of the entire Old Testament. Perhaps the Hebrew practice of circumcision was a sublimation. The Phoenicians, the Philistines, the Babylonians, and the Carthaginians all practiced ritual child slaughter. According to the Bible, so did the ancient Egyptians. So did the Aztecs and the Inca in the New World; infanticide was also accepted as standard practice, if not a religious ritual, in pre-modern China, India, and Japan.

Freud, they say, thought of his patients as if they were his own children.

Wikipedia: ‘Laila Williamson notes that "Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunter gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule."’

In other words, parents willing to kill their children is a familiar human experience. We see it in the political inviolability of abortion today. Children wishing to kill their parents is a rare and almost unthinkable anomaly.

Nor should this be surprising. Paternal or maternal instincts to the contrary, children necessarily represent, as they did to Kronos, the parent’s mortality, and the reality that they are not, after all, the most important thing in the universe. Not everyone is prepared to accept this.

Of course, putting all the emphasis on the latter, the idea that the child indeed wishes to supplant and kill the parent, is a useful projection, because it neatly sanctions the unholy impulses so many parents have in any case.

Which was no doubt to the great advantage of Sigmund Freud in getting his theories widely accepted in his day.