deep and universal effectiveness of these legends
can only be explained by granting a similar universal applicability to the above-mentioned assumption in infantile psychology.
i refer to the legend of King Oedipus and
the drama of the same name by sophocles.
Oedipus, the son of laius, king of Thebes, and
of Jocasta, is exposed while a suckling, because
an oracle has informed the father that his son,
who is still unborn, will be his murderer. he
is rescued, and grows up as the king’s son at a
foreign court, until, being uncertain about his
origin, he also consults the oracle and is advised
to avoid his native place, for he is destined to
become the murderer of his father and the husband of his mother. On the road leading away
from his supposed home he meets King laius
and strikes him dead in a sudden quarrel. Then
he comes to the gates of Thebes, where he solves
the riddle of the sphynx who is barring the way,
and he is elected king by the Thebans in gratitude and is presented with the hand of Jocasta.
he reigns in peace and honor for a long time
and begets two sons and two daughters upon his
unknown mother, until at last a plague breaks
out which causes the Thebans to consult the oracle anew. here sophocles’ tragedy begins. The
messengers bring the advice that the plague will
stop as soon as the murderer of laius is driven
from the country. But where is he hidden?
“Where are they to be found? how shall
we trace the perpetrators of so old a crime
where no conjecture leads to discovery?”
The action of the play now consists merely
in a revelation, which is gradually completed
and artfully delayed—resembling the work of a
psychoanalysis—of the fact that Oedipus himself
is the murderer of laius, and the son of the dead
man and of Jocasta. Oedipus, profoundly shocked
at the monstrosities which he has unknowingly
