Oedipus the King
A king hunts the source of a plague and finds himself. The play Freud read as the plot every child rehearses.
Thebes is dying under a plague, and the oracle names its cause: the unpunished murderer of the old king Laius. Oedipus, who once rescued the city, appoints himself investigator and swears to expose the guilty man. What follows is constructed as an inquiry, witness by witness, each testimony narrowing the field until the questioner and the object of the search prove to be one figure. Sophocles keeps the audience ahead of the protagonist, so the tension lies not in the outcome but in the speed of arrival.
Analytic thinking has drawn on the play beyond Freud's borrowing of its name. It stages a mind that holds the facts and declines to assemble them, pressing toward a truth while being begged to halt. Jocasta's plea to abandon the search, set against Oedipus's refusal, gives a clinician a compact study of resistance meeting the wish to know. Composed around 429 BCE, its decisive events all precede the opening line; the drama is their uncovering.
About the author
Sophocles
Sophocles (c. 496 to 406 BCE) was a Greek tragedian of classical Athens, one of the three whose work survives. Seven of his roughly 120 plays remain complete, among them the three Theban plays: Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus. Sigmund Freud drew the name of the Oedipus complex from Oedipus the King, and Jacques Lacan gave a close reading of Antigone in his seventh seminar. He also won repeatedly at Athens's dramatic festivals.
Details
- Greek