The Tragic Analysis Of Oedipus Rex By Sophocles

The Oedipus is essentially a tragic analysis. Everything is already there, so it needs only to be extricated.
Schiller to Goethe, 1797

We all know that Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother, and that when he discovered who he had killed and who he had married, he blinded himself. But Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex does not show us the killing or the wedding. It shows us only the process by which Oedipus discovers “who he is” and it then reports two actions consequent upon that discovery: Oedipus’ mother/wife Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus stabs out his eyes. In addition to the killing and the marrying, two other less familiar parts of Oedipus’ story form part of the background of Sophocles’ play – Oedipus’ victory over

Freud first mentioned Oedipus in 1897, in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess. There he wrote that it had occurred to him that the reason audiences were so stirred by Oedipus Rex is that “the Greek saga seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because they perceive his existence in themselves. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy.” (Hillman, 96) Freud’s focus in that remark is on Oedipal desires and conflicts. But Freud went on to talk about Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams, and there he noted that the play proceeds in a manner similar to psychoanalysis: “The action of the play consists simply in the disclosure, approached step by step and artistically delayed (and comparable to the work of a psychoanalysis) that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius.” (Hillman, 92)

Indeed, as a clinician, it is hard to read Oedipus Rex without being reminded of a psychoanalysis, with Oedipus as the patient. We see Oedipus’ omnipotence and grandiosity, his resistance and denial, his interest in a quick fix and his demand for the answer, his bullying of the seer Tiresias and the old herdsman who knows

In the passion of her grief she made fast a noose for herself from the lofty roof-beam; and for Oedipus she left behind such endless woes as a mother’s avenging spirits brings. (134)

In the passion of her rageful grief, her grief for Laius, her husband, killed as she now knows by Oedipus, and her rage (we may imagine) the son who has violated her and destroyed the façade of their current life, Jocasta enacts a violence that redounds upon Oedipus. Oedipus runs after her in a rage and breaks down the door to her rooms. But when he sees her dead, he takes her body down gently and stabs his eyes out with the pins that held her gown – pins reminiscent of course of the pins that pierced his ankles. “No more!” he cries to his eyes as he stabs them. “You will look no more at the pain I have suffered, the horrors that are my doing!”

In this act, Oedipus takes upon himself not only his own violence but also the violence of his parents toward him, and he becomes the scapegoat for the city. Oedipus the grandiose savior of Thebes had no self apart from the city. Now he assures the Chorus that they need have no fear of touching him, because he is bearing all the guilt himself. Nor does he now have a self apart from his parents’ murderous wishes for him. As scapegoat, his earnest wish is to be expelled from the city. And where does he want to go? To Citheron, the mountain where