James Leggio
On or about August 1899 human character changed. For in that month Sigmund Freud completed the middle chapters of The Interpretation of Dreams — containing his theory of what became known as the “Oedipus Complex” — and sent them off to the printer.
Sophocles’s ancient play Oedipus the King, like many other things, would never be the same. Once Oedipus became not just a fictional character, but a complex; not only a tragic figure in a play, but also a paradigm for the psychosexual dynamics of the family, stagings of the work would be burdened by Freud’s influential theory and have to take it into account, one way or another. To the tragedy’s already heavy load of complicated philosophical themes and unnerving plot twists now were added the supposedly hidden, incestuous, and parricidal wellsprings of human sexuality (or, at least, heteronormative male sexuality).
Moreover, Oedipus was further burdened by becoming an analogy for the very process of psychoanalysis. Sophocles starts the play with a “symptom” (the plague affecting Thebes), and then has the title character proceed with a minute investigative analysis of his own life and behavior to date, especially his forgotten experiences as an infant, until the underlying causes — parricide and matriphilia — of the symptom are revealed, and the principal enlightened about his true nature. And then the city’s disease, Oedipus himself, is cured by his banishment from Thebes. In his self-analysis and inward, retrospective journey (though not, of course, in his banishment), he becomes an emblem of what Freud himself was trying to accomplish as a physician with his patients.
So thoroughly do Oedipus and modern psychoanalysis infiltrate and “explain” each other that you may want to ask: is there a point at which a play can be too full of content, excessively overdetermined, and begin to groan under the weight of its own vast significance? If there is, then Oedipus the King got there early in the twentieth century.
We might remember, though, what Karl Marx famously wrote: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The Freudianized Oedipus appears “first” as a new level of meaning in a renowned tragedy, in the play’s enlarged range of psychological significance during the modernist era, which was partly shaped by Freud. A subject found so surprisingly explanatory of human behavior, and so long hidden in plain sight, could now scarcely be avoided. As Frederick Crews has unkindly written in Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017, p.627):
The twentieth-century Freud radiated a sense of world-historical mission. This was the man who, without having made a single corroborated discovery, would compare himself to Copernicus and Darwin. He really seems to have felt that he had visited the mental underworld, retrieved memories from an impossibly early age, perceived in a flash how these memories illuminated everyone else’s mind as well as his own, and undergone a gnostic vision of how our species had formed its familial and social bonds. . . . It wasn’t Prometheus, however, but Oedipus who had become the key mythological figure for Freud.
Even so, it was possible to take the “second,” or farcical, view of Oedipus, especially among holdouts against the new orthodoxy. In 1929, James Thurber and E.B. White brought out their pseudo-handbook Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do. In his introduction, written in 1950 for a later reprint, Thurber described the inciting factors for the two young authors in 1929: “The Freudian concept had been accepted quite generally. Doctors, psychiatrists, and other students of misbehavior were pursuing sex to the last ditch, and the human animal seemed absorbed in self-analysis.” Their book mocks all that with its own made-up psychobabble (“Diversion Subterfuge,” “Osculatory Justification,” “Schmalhausen Trouble”) and its team of pedantic shrinks with funny names. In a gratifyingly ironic twist, just as Sigmund Freud had written elsewhere, humor became a deflating “defense mechanism” — in this case, against Freud himself.
A token of this emerging “second” view is perhaps also noticeable among heavyweight writers, for example in the way James Joyce archly refers in Finnegans Wake (1939) to a fat, gluttonous tyrant as “adipose rex,” a term that turned out to be prescient, since it has nowadays become a familiar internet trope.
Beyond these occasional sallies, in the postmodern era actual full-length rewrites of Oedipus the King in a farcical mode have become an established thing. They amount almost to an alternative tradition unto themselves, by tweaking the Freudian script. Some suggestive examples, discussed here, may tell us something about farce as well as tragedy.
Tiresias Wearing Two Masks
To begin, let’s look at some versions of the seer Tiresias, the first character in the play to put the King’s identity in doubt. The first two versions are “straight” translations of Oedipus the King. The third is in the mode of farce.
In a highly regarded BBC production of Oedipus in 1986, directed by Don Taylor, John Gielgud in his old age brought great authority to the role of Tiresias. In this clip, the noble, sustained tone of his lofty delivery matches the high seriousness of the text, as he alludes to, but does not state outright, the secret of the King’s crimes.
Also relatively straight is W.B. Yeats’s translation, first performed in 1926. As Yeats wrote in his preface: “The one thing I kept in mind was that a word unfitted for living speech, out of its natural order, or unnecessary to our modern technique, would check emotion and tire attention.” Eschewing artful poetry, Yeats rendered the same speech of Tiresias in deceptively simple language. (In the video of the 1957 Tyrone Guthrie production, the scene in question begins at the 17-minute mark.)
I will go: but first I will do my errand. For frown though you may you cannot destroy me. The man for whom you look, the man you have been threatening in all the proclamations about the death of Laius, that man is here. He seems, so far as looks go, an alien; yet he shall be found a native Theban and shall nowise be glad of that fortune. A blind man, though now he has his sight; a beggar, though now he is most rich; he shall go forth feeling the ground before him with his stick; so you go in and think on that, and if you find I am in fault say that I have no skill in prophecy.
Although the idiom is crystal clear, Tiresias maintains a fine ambiguity. To the great man who solved the riddle of the Sphinx he now speaks in another kind of riddle, which Oedipus will be able to solve only through the self-investigation that will doom him. For the plague afflicting Thebes can be lifted only by Oedipus’s solving the new riddle posed by tantalizing phrases like “that man is here . . . a native Theban.” Tiresias underscores his own role as riddler by alluding — in the phrase “he shall go forth feeling the ground before him with his stick” — to the Sphinx’s riddle: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?”
Compare these two straightforward translations of the play to what John Barth makes of the same scene, in the form of a farce. In his epic 710-page comic novel Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Barth introduces, in chapter 4, a complete Oedipus the King in a funky sixties translation all his own. Here, Tiresias wears the mask of Comedy rather than Tragedy. (In the novel, the name Oedipus is changed to Taliped, and Tiresias to Gynander.)
GYNANDER: Let me once
again declare, more clearly than before,
the ugly answer to your problems: You’re
the wretch you want. You’ll see, when Scene Four’s done,
that you’re your daughter’s brother, your own stepson
and foster-father, uncle to your cousin,
your brother-in-law’s nephew, and (as if that wasn’t
enough) a parricide — and matriphile!
Bye-bye now, Taliped. You call me vile,
but your two crimes will have us all upchucking:
father-murdering and mother —
TALIPED: Ducking
out won’t save you! You’ll hear from me!
GYNANDER: You killed your daddy.
TALIPED: No!
GYNANDER: You shagged your mommy.
Whereas in our previous examples Tiresias spoke in such veiled terms that his speech amounted to a set of riddles, Barth’s version simply blurts everything out, in a blunt street taunt: “You shagged your mommy.” Satire always gets straight to the point.
Barth also has the gall to go beyond Sophocles, who largely limited the description of the King’s relationship to his children as the incongruity of his being also their half-brother. But relying on the comic device of over-elaboration, beyond “your daughter’s brother” Barth piles it on with the hilarious “your own stepson and foster-father,” and “as if that wasn’t enough,” keeps going with the weirdly arcane “uncle to your cousin, your brother-in-law’s nephew” — turning the wording of the tragedy’s scandalous inversions and paradoxes of bloodline into the schtick of an insult-comic, like Don Rickles, hosting a celebrity roast.
And yet the further familial detail is to the point: the cruelly twisted lines of genealogy are the crux of Sophocles’s play, part of the spiderweb the fates have woven for the King. Likewise, the familiar terms of affection “mommy” and “daddy” bring their relations down from the mythic to the earthly.
While all this is going on, the artfully rhymed couplets lend a further sense of faux-highbrow ridiculousness to the proceedings.
And as his masterstroke, Barth later sums up the tragic folly of a detective-like investigation of one’s own mortal state with the memorable phrase, printed in all capital letters, “SELF-KNOWLEDGE IS ALWAYS BAD NEWS.” Aristotle could not have said it better, or more succinctly.
In the end, the comic version sheds a different, if oblique, light on the tragedy.
Tiresias in Psychoanalysis
The figure Tiresias completes the picture of Oedipus the King as an analogy for the scene of psychoanalysis. As Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams:
The action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement — a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-analysis — that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laïus, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta.
That’s a very big “likened,” meaning that the Oedipus story is a mere analogy or simile for the process of psychoanalysis, not a logical or laboratory proof of it. (More on that analogy at the end of this essay.)
In Freud’s presentation here of the Oedipus Complex, there’s good reason to suspect that in the analyst-analysand relationship, while Oedipus is “likened” to the analysand, slowly brought to a new understanding of himself, the analyst is in fact “likened” to Tiresias. It is Tiresias who is summoned to the site of illness, holding the awful biological explanation, which he is unwilling to state outright, and speaking in riddles that the analysand must unravel in order to achieve his self-enlightening cure. Like Freud, with his at the time outlandish-sounding assertions, Tiresias spouts a lot of seemingly obscene nonsense (in Freud’s phrase, “repugnant to morality”) about Oedipus’s primal, hidden relations to his mother and father and tells the King to figure it out, as he once figured out the Sphinx.
Tiresias is thus a thinly disguised stand-in or likeness for Freud himself, just as Oedipus is a stand-in or likeness for the patient. With his unique insight, Tiresias challenges and coaxes the King to understand himself. In pursuing their relationship, it is almost as if Freud himself displays what I would like to call a “Tiresias Complex” — a compelling drive to goad his patients into a self-knowledge radical, therapeutic, and also deeply unpleasant, based on his special knowledge of the true nature of hidden things, whether the patients like it or not.
Partly this is because as a seer, a knower of the past and future, Tiresias has what no one else at the outset of the play possesses: a clear understanding of the step-by-step way that Oedipus’s life has unfolded, in chronological order, from his birth until now. This is important, but perhaps not self-evident. We need to remind ourselves that Oedipus starts in medias res, with the King long in power and with a public backstory in Thebes that includes overcoming the Sphinx years ago, marrying the Queen, and fathering children. The play is therefore not simply an analysis, but a retrospective one, searching back over his life to find the secret cause of the city’s present illness. Tiresias’s unique knowledge of the full chronology, in the correct order, puts him at a level only a step below the gods in his diagnostic omniscience.
A charming graphic novel by Yvan Pommaux (Oedipus: Trapped by Destiny, 2016) helps make the point. To render the tangled, retrospectively-told detective story more readily understandable to a young audience, Pommaux untwists the serpent, so to speak, and tells the convoluted tale of Oedipus in strictly linear, chronological order. First readers see Oedipus’s birth, then his exposure on the mountain, then his finding by the shepherd, and so on, plodding along, incident by incident, until it all blows up at the very end. It’s a bit of a shock to see the narrative events lined up so mundanely, step by step, if only because we lose almost all sense of revelatory drama, or what Freud called “cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement.” The sequence of scenes seems not only distractingly improbable when seen in flat chronological order, but also perhaps a bit silly or too much like a soap opera, overly dependent on heavily stage-managed coincidences masquerading as Fate.
Nonetheless, the graphic novel proves a valuable exercise: who would have thought the mystery story could be so vulnerable to disenchantment when told in a plain linear exposition, even though that’s precisely the kind of explanation the King himself was seeking? Since Tiresias possesses the secret history of Oedipus, the hidden narrative plot points by which he got to the present crisis, he knows Oedipus better than Oedipus knows himself. He is therefore the ideal Freudian analyst.
•
There are further ways to think about Tiresias’s role. Notably, some writers focus on the mythological Tiresias’s being transgender, having experienced life as both a man and a woman. As Ovid recounts in Metamorphoses, Book 3:
. . . the story goes that Jupiter once, well-flushed with nectar, laid his worries aside and, as Juno was none too busy, he casually cracked a joke. “Now listen,” he said, “I bet you women enjoy more pleasure in bed than ever we men do.” When Juno disputed the point, they agreed to ask the opinion of wise Tiresias, since he’d experienced love from both angles. How so? When a pair of enormous snakes in the leafy forest were coupling together, a blow from his staff disrupted their congress. Tiresias then was somewhat amazingly changed from a man to a woman for seven years. In the eighth, however, he saw the very same snakes again and said, “If cudgeling you has the power to alter the sex of the person who deals you the wallop, here is a second blow for you!” With that he struck at the snakes and promptly recovered the figure and bodily parts he was born with. That’s why he was chosen to settle this playful argument. Jupiter won his bet, but Juno unfairly resented Tiresias’s verdict. They say that in disproportionate fury she sentenced her judge and condemned his eyes to perpetual blindness. What of almighty Jove? As the gods are never allowed to undo each other’s work, for the loss of Tiresias’s sight he awarded the gift of clairvoyance and high prestige to console him.
Aside from the casual jokiness of the gods, and their petty vindictiveness, the episode is most remarkable in that Tiresias’s powers of prophecy grew, if indirectly, out of his change of gender and the unique understanding of sexuality this afforded him/her. Someone therefore with insights to be envied by the working psychoanalyst.
For example, in an article in the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, titled “Tiresias and Psychoanalysis with/out Oedipus” (2017), Sheila L. Cavanagh seeks to “theorize transgender (trans) subjectivity” in these terms:
If Antigone (in the Sophocles play by the same name) challenges heteronormative kinship structures as Judith Butler (2010) claims, and Tiresias — the Theban diviner in both Antigone and Oedipus the King — challenges cisgender norms of psycho-sexual development as I argue in what follows, these characters can push psychoanalytic theorizing beyond a normalizing frame. Oedipal dramas are not the only psychic struggles enacted on stage and the collateral damage done by the negation of an Other sex difference under the auspices of Oedipal psycho-sexual development is increasingly well established. It is incumbent upon psychoanalysis to invest in other non-Oedipal characters and myths, particularly those involving trans characters. As Patricia Gherovici (2011) writes in her discussion of transsexuality and the clinic, “Psychoanalysis needs a sex change” (p.3).
It was Jacques Lacan who, in his Seminars (Book 10: Anxiety) of 1962‒63, called Tiresias “the one who ought to be the patron saint of psychoanalysis.” Still, this fascinating turning point in the future of analysis involves a little bit of textual sleight-of-hand, for any trace of Tiresias’s shifting gender status is difficult to find within Sophocles’s Oedipus the King as we know it. We cannot necessarily assume total recall of all of a mythical character’s manifold literary incarnations every time he or she speaks in a particular work with perhaps a quite remote context. For all a civilian can tell, cross-gender identity change is not at issue in Oedipus.
These recent developments suggest that contemporary psychiatry has developed a very different kind of “Tiresias Complex” of its own, rewriting Oedipus the King so as to bring the transgender nature of Tiresias — rather than his role as analyst-seer — to the fore, and thereby salvage legitimate professional interest in the play that Freud deemed so central. But shifting the paradigm in this way, and rewriting the play, does not entirely avoid turning Freud’s original idea into an object of remedial parody.
Yet Ovid’s sex-switching Tiresias may not contribute the desired degree of diversity to psychiatric discourse. All this character does in the episode cited from Metamorphoses is flip a binary opposition, male to female and back again, like flipping a coin, rather than exploring the plenitude of different identity permutations available within the expansive transgender landscape. In 2014, Facebook was in the news for offering users fifty-one new “gender options,” largely nonbinary, to choose from in identifying themselves to their friends. That number may now appear conservative.
Berkoff and Turnage
Note at this point the odd fact that in a dazzling version of the Oedipus tale by playwright and actor Steven Berkoff, called Greek (1980), the figure of Tiresias is eliminated. Berkoff’s cast is made up of only four actors, who double and triple to cover the various required roles. Within this restricted economy, Tiresias’s role as teasing riddler is displaced back onto the Sphinx, the other great riddler mentioned in the original play, who makes an appearance here, though dead and gone for something like seventeen years at the time of Oedipus the King’s stage action, and thus not normally enacted.
Berkoff’s Sphinx articulates the hero’s tragic situation much as Tiresias would, but now from the standpoint of a powerful, challenging female — a lion’s body with a human woman’s head:
. . . you are the plague / where are you looking when you should be looking at the ghastly vision in the mirror / the plague is inside you.
As part of Berkoff’s undoing of Oedipal orthodoxy, this is pretty damning, for it casts the agent of Freudian analysis as the cruel, man-eating Sphinx rather than the far-seeing, all-knowing Tiresias. Berkoff thus attacks psychoanalysis at its originary core, seeing Freud as an aggressive, accusatory problem rather than a solution. I’m guessing that the European Journal of Psychoanalysis might have seen this coming.
The act of undoing can also be seen in the opera version of Berkoff’s Greek composed by Mark-Anthony Turnage in 1986–88. For here, the scene in which Eddy (Oedipus) meets and falls in love with his true if as-yet-unknown mother, already intense in the spoken play, in the opera becomes a rapturous love duet of compelling lyrical force. The duet makes their love seem not like a horrible, ironic accident but rather like the romantic result of their being made for each other.
As if that were not enough, the play/opera has a happy ending of sorts. In the final scene, after the funeral march, Eddy springs back to life, and speaks eloquently in favor of loving his mother, in these words, with Berkoff’s heady mixture of original metaphor and cockney slang:
Bollocks to all that! Yeah, I wanna climb back inside my Mum. What’s wrong with that?. . . It’s love I feel, it’s love. . . . What matter what form it takes, it’s love. I feel for your breast, for your nipple twice sucked, for your belly twice known, for your hands twice caressed, for your breath twice smelt, for your thighs twice known, loving source of your being. Exit from Paradise, Entrance to Heaven!
Berkoff goes beyond parody, to something like a soft-on-incest rebuttal of a psychoanalytic baseline, as well as of present-day social norms (at least the norms in effect outside the viewership of Jerry Springer). If anything, his ending is more scandalous than the original one in Oedipus the King; instead of punishment, we’re presented with a ringing, if perverse, endorsement of the non-psychiatric notion that “love conquers all” between incestuous parent and child.
Stravinsky, Taymor, and Schickele
To regain our composure after the emotional rollercoaster ride of Greek, let’s go back to a classic modernist view of Oedipus. Showing a different kind of response to the breathless intensity of the murder/incest complex, Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassical opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), composed during a period of Freudian sway, holds this primal story at a cool, clinical distance. Stravinsky tamps down the torrid phantasmagoria of blood murder and forbidden sex by recounting the plot at a considerable remove. Not only does he present the narrative through the framing device of a dispassionate, indeed somewhat pedantic and condescending, Speaker, or narrator, as if this were an undergraduate lecture course in World Classics 101. But, rather gratuitously, he also sets the characters’ speeches in Latin, making them unintelligible and uninvolving to the vast majority of concert listeners, muting the opportunities for Aristotelian fear and pity. The idea is to “preserve only a certain monumental aspect of the play,” as the Speaker says, and not necessarily produce the effect of catharsis.
The musical idiom, too, distances the action. Stravinsky does not write a through-composed music drama in some post-Impressionist idiom, as Georges Enescu would do in his opera Oedipe (1931). Nor a stripped-down expressionistic nightmare, like Carl Orff’s later Oedipus der Tyrann (1959). Nor, certainly, a late verismo opera, such as Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s Edipo Re (1919), wherein Oedipus, upon hearing that someone in Thebes knows the name of Laius’s murderer, cries out — like Canio in I Pagliacci — “Il nome! Il nome!” (At the end, you half expect him to face the audience and proclaim, “La tragedia è finita!”) Those dramatic modes would have been too openly emotional, too lacking in neoclassical cool. Instead, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex amounts to an anthology, or hodgepodge, of styles, from Bach to Handel to Mozart to Verdi and a number of other specific inspirations, keeping the focus on the composer’s display of musicological knowledge, and his incredible technical skill at creative resynthesis, while dampening any expectation of emotional involvement. The musical surround of Tiresias’s important speech is especially detached.
Being in these analytical ways a quintessentially formalist, high modernist retelling, the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex itself becomes available to later satire — sometimes unintentionally. That is, the teeming stage production of Oedipus Rex by Julie Taymor, from 1992, seems almost like an unintended parody, because it is quite plainly at odds with the clinical attitude displayed by Jean Cocteau in the Speaker’s lecture and Stravinsky in the quasi-academic nature of the musical composition. Taymor’s staging, in its time at the forefront of cultural diversity and inclusiveness — extravagantly multicultural in its design elements and cast in the form of an occult ritual — amounts almost to a sendup of the narrowly Eurocentric dead-white-guy work it brings before us. The sets, makeup, costumes, and stage action are so ostentatiously transcultural that, in view of her subsequent career, Taymor almost turns Oedipus the King into “Oedipus the Lion King.”
For an intentional parody of the Stravinsky work, turn to Peter Schickele (aka P.D.Q. Bach) and his cowboy oratorio Oedipus Tex (released on a 1990 album — with an annoying long delay in the start of the music, as on this audio clip). Stravinsky is recalled in the use here of a narrator (or, in more pretentious terms, an Evangelist, as in J.S. Bach’s Passions). And recalled even more so in the polyglot nature of the score, which, as Stravinsky did, mixes various classical compositional styles with, in this instance, country-and-western music. Obvious concert borrowings include the kind of grand opening chorus familiar from Bach’s cantatas, though now equipped with an obbligato for kazoo; the horses’ hooves clip-clop of coconut-shell percussion, from Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite (1931), which appears here in the aria “Howdy There”; glances at Mozart’s so-called Elvira Madigan piano concerto; and a humming chorus that may recall Madama Butterfly. Later on, there’s a riff on Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” The arias feature down-market lyrics like “Two Hearts Are Better than One” and “Goodbye, Cruel World,” along with accompanied spoken passages, as in Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” There’s even a commercial (“Drink Pepsi!”). It’s a rich tapestry, in its own way as polyglot as Stravinsky’s.
And like the best parodies, it has the incisiveness to pack the complexity of the Greek original into a single sentence, a succinct definition that appears in the opening chorus:
He’s gonna suffer a lot before he knows the reason why,
And that’s what makes this thing a T-R-A-G-E-D-Y.
Like Aretha Franklin in “Respect,” or cheerleaders in a high-school football fight-song, it spells out its message in no uncertain terms.
Subversive Wit
As Freud demonstrated in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), psychiatry can be funny. Jokes, wit, and humor in general may be therapeutic. Take this well-known present-day joke:
Neurotics build castles in the sky.
Psychotics live in them.
Psychiatrists collect the rent.
Why does this make us laugh? Take a hint from what Freud wrote in 1905:
Caricature, parody, and travesty (as well as their practical counterpart, unmasking) are directed against people and objects which lay claim to authority and respect, which are in some sense exalted. . . . Parody and travesty achieve the degradation of something exalted . . . by replacing either the exalted figures or their utterances with inferior ones.
The phrase “collect the rent” expresses satirical disrespect for the lofty profession of psychiatrists by lowering them to the level of landlords, making money by warehousing the mentally troubled.
Similarly, the parodies of Oedipus the King replace “exalted figures” with “inferior ones,” whether the supposed inferiors are the country-and-western star Oedipus Tex, dreamed up by P.D.Q. Bach; or the guilt-free cockney, created by Steven Berkoff; or the insult-comedian Tiresias, given an open mic by John Barth in Giles Goat-Boy.
The purpose of all this is not simply to mock a great thinker. Rather, the laughter of these parodic creative artists matches what Freud said happens when a joke hits home and reveals an uncomfortable truth: the punchline expresses, and provides brief release from, a previously repressed inhibition. Jokes provide a way of dealing with a painful condition. A parody and the laughter it induces can be as freeing as a serious expository analysis. P.D.Q. Bach may be as salutary as Igor Stravinsky.
Diagnosis by Analogy
What makes Freud vulnerable to parody in the first place, however, is a more serious matter. His statement in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1913) may come as a surprise: “Analogies, it is true, prove nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.” And yet despite his admission that they “prove nothing,” he constructed his theory of the Oedipus Complex on the inspired guess of a suspected analogy between how a young son views his parents, on the one hand, and the plot of an ancient Greek play, on the other.
The language and linkage of two paragraphs in The Interpretation of Dreams are revealing in this regard:
In my experience, which is already extensive, the chief part in the mental lives of all children who later become psychoneurotics is played by their parents. . . . It is far more probable [than their being sharply different from normal individuals] — and this is confirmed by occasional observations on normal children — that they are only distinguished by exhibiting on a magnified scale feelings of love and hatred to their parents which occur less obviously and less intensely in the minds of most children.
This discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity. . . . I have in mind the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’ drama which bears his name.
In linking the first and second paragraphs, the astonishing phrase “This discovery is confirmed by a legend” tells the tale. If analogies, even an analogy to Sophocles’s play, can “prove nothing,” how then can a legend “confirm” a scientific “discovery”? Moreover, Freud’s choice of words makes no obvious distinction here between his first-hand culling of clinical evidence from individuals, on the one hand — i.e., “confirmed by occasional observations on normal children” — and, on the other hand, something merely “confirmed by a legend.”
In passages like this, Freud does not seem overly troubled by the distinction between “true analogies,” “quasi-analogies,” and “false analogies” as understood in formal logic, the systematic study of valid inference. Rather, he delights in the safely-insoluble polyvalence of analogy in general, even though, or perhaps because, it can be so slippery (or, in some people’s view, misleading).
Later in the same book on dreams, in discussing the specialized variety of analogy he calls a symbol, he assigns the kind of one-to-one equivalence that has always put off those who question his methods. He writes that in dreams:
All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks, and umbrellas (the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ — as well as all long, sharp weapons, such as knives, daggers, and pikes.
Again, the analogue-based term “stand for” is somewhat elusive: what does it mean to say that an open umbrella is “comparable to an erection”? This looks like another convenient and unverifiable analogy, even as it ignores the simple fact that most things are, by definition, longer than they are wide. Sometimes a cigar is indeed just a cigar, and not an analogue of the male member.
Daring but unverifiable comparisons like these raise the question of how, and whether, even the most brilliant analogies actually explain anything. They sometimes leave us uncertain which of his assertions to believe, and which to laugh off with a joke. No wonder the interpretation of the dreamworld’s puzzling patterns of analogical association was left for millennia to soothsayers and seers — in other words, to supernaturally gifted individuals, like Tiresias.
Still, Freud has an impressive array of tools for verbal analysis at his disposal, to defend his evidentiary deployment of the analogue. An acute reader of texts, he is supremely resourceful at making the Oedipus parallel do explanatory work for him. Like a literary critic dissecting a masterpiece, he lays bare its hidden character motivation, unpacks the irony lurking within its key phrases, and accounts for its untoward plot twists. He takes a world-famous and seemingly well-understood classical text and reveals its meaning in a radical new way, as if he were some fin-de-siècle precursor of Harold Bloom.
For reasons such as this, some of us value Freud even more as a literary critic than as a scientist. It is, after all, literary criticism, not science, that proceeds by analyzing a work of fiction.
(January 2019)