Kilborne, p.

Oedipus and the Oedipal

Oedipus and the Oedipal. American Journal of Psychoanalysis 63(4), 2003

Benjamin Kilborne

It is often assumed that a psychoanalytic concept like Oedipal conflict or Oedipal guilt is somehow self-evident and needs no further explanation. Yet, given the present diversity of theoretical perspectives and the various notions about the centrality of drives, it seems to me particularly important that concepts such as these be re-examined in the light both of their contexts (including close readings of their literary sources, like the Sophocles play) and of clinical phenomenology.

Not only is Oedipal guilt less clear than it is assumed to be, but the concept of Oedipal shame around which this special issue is organized (and which serves as a central concept in my recent book Disappearing Persons) is, I think more central, more prominent and clearer than it might be thought to be. Using the Sophoclean tragedy as our baseline, let us see where an examination of Oedipal shame and conflict might lead.

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 2 The tragedy of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles depends upon what Oedipus does not see. Blindness is its most obvious theme, driven home by the final scene in which Oedipus takes the broach from his mothers dead body and plunges its spikes deep into his own eyes. Dynamically, the struggle shifts little by little from emphasis on a scourge without (the plague) to emphasis on a scourge within (Oedipus internal conflicts over not knowing either his fate or his identity).

What seem to be the most crucial internal conflicts of Oedipus in this play? Surely one of the most important is that between the ideal Oedipus has of himself (and which his people have of him) and the reality of who he is and is not. Whereas at the opening of the play he thinks he is a powerful king determined to protect his kingdom and his people, at the end he is disgraced, stripped of his office and driven out of Thebes, having to be led because he himself can no longer see. Oedipus is a man riven, humbled and disgraced by conflict. The process whereby his view of himself is so fundamentally changed forces upon him the conflict between appearance and what he comes to recognize as truth or reality, between his superego ideal and his personhood, between himself as kind and the self he will not know or accept. From this vantagepoint, then, the play is about superego tension, a cracking ego ideal, and a tragic inability on the part of Oedipus to know who he is because of his investment in appearance.

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 3 How and why, then, has the blindness of Oedipus, this most obviously central theme in the Sophocles play, been subordinated in the psychoanalytic tradition to guilt and aggression? And why in developing the notion of Oedipal conflict did Freud omit these dimensions of shame and blindness?

A very incomplete answer is this: as Freud turned his attention from repression and the causes of blindness [in The Studies in Hysteria and his monumental Interpretation of Dreams in which the Oedipus story appears for the first time], to the later work on instincts and the structural theory, he relied on the Sophocles play to make different points. Rather than be associated primarily with blindness, blindness with repression, and repression with shame, the play came to be associated with incest and parricide. Accordingly, its conflicts were formulated as those between a sexual drive (to possess the parent of the opposite sex), an aggressive drive (to kill the parent of the opposite sex) and the (internalized) force of human social requirements and the survival of the family (another version of the superego).

Seen from the vantage point of the Sophoclean play Oedipus Rex, there are at least two major problems with this psychoanalytic reading. First, it takes the focus away from blindness and seeing (together with their correlates, ignorance and knowledge) in the play and thereby shuts out a more open-ended reading of the role of Fate and of Oedipal conflict. Second, it unnecessarily casts the play in the mold of drive theory and, paradoxically, confuses the description of the

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 4 tragedy of Oedipus, making it less personal and internal than the main thrust of Sophocles suggests it is. For this psychoanalytic reading explains away the fact that Oedipus does not know his father is his father and his mother his mother, and so unwittingly commits both incest and parricide.

In short, the Freudian (and psychoanalytic) interpretation of the Oedipus of Sophocles would seem to downplay the role of fate and human tragedy and to affirm human powers and reason in the face of the irrational, efforts which might well seem like hubris to an ancient Greek.

Oedipus and Oedipal Guilt

In reframing the character of Oedipus, Freud paradoxically came to reply upon the concept of guilt together with its Christian overtones as original sin. If Oedipus did not see what was coming, no matter, he will be held equally responsible, and the order of family and society will be preserve. And, to demonstrate further the strength and efficacy of social sanctions, his actions can be presented as so heinous and appalling that Oedipus feels the guilt others see in him as altogether his own (not altogether unlike Adam and Eve).

If Oedipus is held responsible for behavior quintessentially representing the abrogation of social norms, his internal guilt can be correlated with the guilt others attribute to him. Individual disorder can be aligned with social disorder,

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 5 individual order with social order. The rules of society and the individual sense of defect for having broken them are thus brought into alignment. In this sense, the Freudian concept of guilt avoids painful shame conflicts present in Sophocles by giving Oedipus more unambiguous agency than he has in the play; if Oedipus is guilty, he is responsible, and if he is responsible, he is guilty; if, on the other hand, he is actually helpless, he is ipso facto innocent.

In our psychoanalytic assumptions about the nature and function of Oedipal conflict, however, there is both an emphasis on sex and aggression and a need for Victorian reassurance that the forces of repression are secure, that the threat our children might pose (as Zeus did to Chronos) need not keep us up at night or disturb our sleep. One might even argue that such a reading turns Oedipus into a freak and Greek tragedies into insufficiently moral tales, a transformation familiar to scholars of our Western Judeo-Christian tradition. As a result of Freuds emphasis, guilt (not shame) becomes the cement of society. Enough guilt can insure the social order, an argument advanced in Totem and Taboo.

Which, of course, is not to say that guilt is not a prominent feature of the play. Rather, I think, it is not the only prominent feature, nor should it obscure the others. Blindness is, it seems to me, even more prominent. Given, then, the

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 6 prominence of the theme of blindness, it is useful to ask how we can understand the guilt of Oedipus, to wonder about what makes him guilty.1

In the light of the play, what is Oedipal about guilt, and how is the guilt of Oedipus in Sophocles Oedipal? Again, a close reading of the play suggests that these are not easy questions to answer. Classicists would surely disagree substantially. One difficulty is the notion of Fate itself, how elusive it is and how our notion of guilt (read: original sin) is always getting in the way of an openended understanding of the Greek notion of Fate.

Is Oedipus most guilty of not having listened to Tieresias and the Delphic Oracle, of not having put together clues that would have implicated him? Or is he most guilty of his actions: incest and parricide with unrecognized parents? What does the prophecy of the Delphic oracle do to guilt and agency? Can there be guilt if free will seems compromised? Oedipus is guilty by birth and by destiny, or so it would seem. But if the only way he can be guilty is by not realizing how appalling and abominable his life was fated to be, is this guilt in the usual modern sense of the word?

However consonant such a definition of guilt may be with contemporary assumptions about social and individual (as well as divine) order, it was quite unknown to the Greeks. In the play of Sophocles Oedipus cannot repent or go to confession. He has no hope of redemption or salvation, a point made even more palpable in Christianity by the emphasis on Gods forgiveness. Wurmser quotes Dostoyevsky, the devil is struggling with God, and the battle is the human heart. Thus, Christianity provides more ways of representing feelings of being riven by hanging us between God and Satan, although these representations are antimonies explained away by religious categories. 10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 7

From this perspective, it would seem that Oedipus is less guilty of his actions or behavior (which were destined to be) than of his blindness. His guilt would then seem to apply more to what he sees and knows than to what he does. Implied here, therefore, is a responsibility not for changing his fate but for not knowing it. Often we assume in our contemporary world that knowledge is power and power, knowledge. This equation does not seem to hold here in the case of Oedipus for whom the power conferred on him by his office of king does not translate into knowledge, and knowledge would necessarily undermine his worldly power.

Or does it? If knowledge is construed to mean self-knowledge, and power is construed to mean power to exercise what it is given to mankind to exercise, then perhaps the equation can be pertinent. However, Oedipus, like Lear, takes the accoutrements of kingship too seriously, and believes in kingly illusions of power. As long as he relies for his power on the appearance of kingship, power requires blindness. In one way, of course, had Oedipus not been blind to his own fate he could never have become king of Thebes and the Delphic Oracle could not have been vindicated, and the possibility for a restoration of order would have been missing from the play. In this respect, order is outside human control, and the play is about the human struggle to know what is true. In the world of Sophocles, the blindness and self-delusions of Oedipus confirms the importance and truth of the oracle.

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 8

Discussions of this kind, which are amply supported by Classicists, suggest then that psychoanalysts have unnecessarily restricted the scope of what they define as Oedipal and particularly as Oedipal guilt, giving too much emphasis to guilt and aggression and thereby distorting the prominence of the theme of blindness, as well as the nature of the tragic situation in Sophocles. Moreover, the distinction itself makes the Oedipus play of Sophocles dependent upon the 19th century fear of what the English referred to as primitive promiscuity, most horrifyingly represented by incest.2 Additionally, psychoanalytic distinctions between Oedipal and pre-Oedipal further cloud the picture, since developmental assumptions in psychoanalysis commonly place shame earlier than guilt, and tie guilt more essentially to sex and aggression as well as to assumptions about superego conflicts.

Oedipus and Oedipal Shame

It would appear that the most obvious emotion associated with Oedipus horror at his fate, with his blindness, and the mortification of becoming aware (both of
2

If we assume a Judeo-Christian overlay in defining guilt, the emphasis on guilt in the psychoanalytic reading suggests that Oedipus is but one of the Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, to borrow the title of one of Jonathan Edwards Sermons. The high and mighty cannot be so high anyway, since damnation and the wrath of God will strike down the overblown. This kind of implication that God is Just, that He is the Universal Traffic Cop who establishes speed limits and traffic violation fines brings with it our entire judicial system with all its efforts to fit the punishment to the crime, a system fundamentally different from the world of Greek tragedy.

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 9 his fate and of his blindness) is shame: shame over not having seen, at not having been able to see, at Oedipus realization that blindness has brought about the very outcome he wished to avoid; shame at the miscarriage of intention and at his impotence and helplessness to change the course of events because he cannot know himself. It means that even if the Fates had decreed that he would kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus was hardly captain of his fate and master of his soul, since he misperceived the nature of his own free will.

There are other implications of the notion of oedipal shame which follow from the Sophoclean tragedy. One has to do with the feelings of an infant who cannot perform sexually as he wants to or believes his mother wants him to, or, in the case of girls, as she wants to or believes her father wants her to. All children become aware of their sexual inadequacy, which means vastly different things depending on the relationship with the parents. But this sexual inadequacy, always a potential source of shame, becomes vastly more destructive if the parents have traumatized the child, as is the case with Oedipus. In fact, the actual actions of Oedipus (incest and parricide) can be construed as reactions to the pain and humiliation of abandonment: Oedipus can deny feelings of abandonment as a child--and the humiliation of having had parents who tried to kill him while he was helpless--by acting out childhood fantasies and putting them into reality. In other words, the incest and parricide can be seen as

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 10 reactions to humiliation and injury rather than as the result of the primacy of sexual and aggressive drives.

This is not to say, however, that a drive-defense model is not suggestive in thinking about Sophocles. It is just to point out that with respect to the Sophoclean tragedy, it is not the most obvious of themes. Clearly in Sophocles, rivalry can be related both to aggression and to shame. In psychoanalytic practice, take the small boy who wants to be as big as his father but who is not. How and why he might feel shame at not being like his father taps into dynamics of identification and internalization which can be related also to feelings of competition as well as the dynamics of idealization. However, even if oedipal rivalry is cast in terms of biologically driven sex, aggression, and castration anxiety, superego conflicts abound. When psychoanalysts fail to grasp such oedipal shame superego conflicts, they miss many of the ways in which shame and rage can be linked. Even the concept of castration anxiety itself can perhaps more fruitfully construed in terms of a shame-based notion of rivalry (and superego tension) rather than an attack on the genitalia.

The Sophocles tragedy suggests additional possibilities: namely, that specific relations between parents and children can effect both the feelings of rivalry on the part of children and their intensity, and, further, that feelings of rivalry in the children can be reactions to trauma. Rather than feel bested, the child wants to attain power associated with the parents. Accordingly, Oedipal victory is

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 11 associated with guilt and aggression; Oedipal defeat with shame and loss. But, it would seem, both oedipal defeat and oedipal victory can produce shame, as both can produce guilt, rage, and aggression. Indeed, the relation between shame and rage, between shame and aggression, is far more basic than has commonly been recognized. The fury of Sophocles Ajax is driven by the horror of recognition: Ajax thought he was slaying his enemy when he was really slaughtering sheep. Both Ajax and Oedipus must deal with a defeat to which they have unwitttingly contributed through their own self-deceit. Nothing new in this, but I think that an emphasis on Oedipal shame and rage as fundamental to the Sophocles play and as necessarily conflictual might contribute to widening our understanding of Oedipal dynamics.

Oedipus and Conflict

Finally, Oedipal shame has to do with the feeling of irresolvable, intractable conflict, and therefore calls up feelings of helplessness. If we return to the Sophocles play for a moment, you will recall that at the outset of the play it is clear that there has been an Oracle which declares what is to become of Oedipus: he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. From the vantagepoint of oedipal dynamics and oedipal shame, that there is such a pronouncement about what Oedipus will do is at least as important as what is foretold. The pronouncement of his fate is one to which he is free to respond, but the course of which he is powerless to change.

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 12

Such a sense of a conflict in which mankind is but pawns of the Gods, playthings, varies substantially from the assumptions about conflicts and the way they are supposed to feel in the United States, where they are opportunities for mastery rather than occasions for humility. Both prevailing cultural ideals and the need to promote psychoanalysis as a social science in the tradition of the social sciences distanced Freud and generations of psychoanalysts after him from the Sophoclean world of tragedy, and from feelings of powerlessness and shame. Freuds emphasis on guilt and aggression narrowed the scope of psychic conflict to make it maleable in human hands; guilt and deed (or private and public guilt) come curiously packaged together; individual guilt and social guilt line up and overlap; guilt in the perpetrator becomes isomorphic with the attribution of guilt in the minds of others. But shame conflicts cannot be correlated to anything anybody else sees. And in toxic shame deep feelings of helplessness go unrecognized, which contributes to isolation and rage.

Also, our notion of guilt commonly depends upon the ability to establish the truth as real and verifiable, something in which a punishment can be seen to fit the crime. But it is often neither. Paradoxically, then, the truth of the oracle is as much in the prediction of limitation (which makes Oedipus the plaything of the gods) as in the content of that prediction (i.e., sleeping with his mother and killing his father). By focusing on guilt, Freud distorts the meanings both of the oracle and of truth. In Sophocles truth is what men cannot see by definition, just

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 13 as a door can be defined as what a dog is always on the wrong side of. In Sophocles, truth is a function of human blindness, helplessness, and limitation. In Freud, by contrast, truth is, at least in principle, a function of human reason and will, although it can be applied to irrational processes. And for psychoanalysis, truth is never conceived of as a function of human blindness, as it is in Sophocles, for whom it is human blindness that defines and makes visible human truths.

Although shame has generally been associated with pre-Oedipal dynamics, such an association unnecessarily limits our understanding of clinical phenomena in ways, which we hope we will be able to demonstrate in this issue. As we will use the concept, Oedipal shame frames inevitable unconscious conflictual dynamics dealing with the sense both of hope and of failure, of crushing defeat with respect to parents and ego-ideals.

For instance, the notion of Oedipal (Freudian not Sophoclean) victory has been written about, but its consequences have not been sufficiently explored: the shame of a son who feels he has gotten rid of his father and is now at the mercy of his mother who he cannot satisfy because he is a child (or, conversely, of a daughter who feels she has gotten rid of her mother and is now at the mercy of a father she as a child cannot satisfy). Oedipal victory in a child leads not to a sense of pride or self-respect, but rather to a sense of danger, confusion, defeat, and humiliation. And the converse of Oedipal victory, Oedipal failure, has functions

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 14 which have not really been appreciated. The son (or the daughter) can omnipotently protect a fragile parent (or a fragile relation between parents) by failing to constitute a threat or a source of competition to the same sex parent. Such a contrived failure stokes omnipotent furnaces but is necessarily experienced as defeat. Thus, it would seem, both Oedipal success and Oedipal failure in the Freudian lexicon are not what at first they might appear to be, and in fact may be misleading concepts, particularly if it is assumed that they pertain to rivalry on a level sexual playing field. Ferenczis paper The Confusion of Tongues addressed the traumatic effects on the child of such assumptions on the part of parents.

How might a Sophoclean approach to superego conflicts in Oedipus address the implicit relation between shame and tolerance? It would seem that prevailing and uncompromising ideals in the analyst would necessarily get in the way of analytic work with patients. This would include a standard of (conventionally defined) Oedipal resolution, a model for the way in which Oedipal conflicts are defined and resolved, or a definition of what is Oedipal, pre-Oedipal and postOedipal. In this sense, theory can serve as a disguise for the absoluteness which, as Wurmser writes, causes such intolerance and havoc in human lives. For example, ego strength has been used as a standard by ego psychologists, empathic understanding by Self-psychologists, relatedness by Object Relations theorists and social construction by the Interpersonalists. Every readily identifiable concept that organizes a particular theoretical orientation carries

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 15 with it dangers that it will conceal intolerance because it can be used as an absolute ideal. Therefore, it would seem, all orientations can feel intolerant to patients if their practitioners are not aware of shame dynamics.

Similarly, social ideals (e.g., of Emersonian self-reliance, individual freedom, etc.) can be used in making shame toxic and in rendering anger less recognizable, less intelligible because more easily rationalized in terms of shared ideals. Such ideals make an acceptance of human tragedy more difficult and contribute to those unspoken norms of which analysts and therapists need to be more conscious than they often are. Instead of holding out such ideals in any form (whether relatedness, individuality or authenticity) as something implicitly to be wished and strived for, analysts would do well to focus on the meanings and functions of all ideals (and of all uncompromising attitudes) in the psychic economy of each patient. Obviously, any sort of setting of goals and objectives in analysis or therapy can benefit from an appropriately analytic scrutiny of ideals and superego conflicts.

Oedipus blinded himself because he realized how miserably he had failed his own ideals of himself; how the image he held up to others, the image that made him powerful, the image to which he clung with such certainty, was the image that condemned him to ignominy, isolation and banishment. Viewed through the prism of the notion of hubris, had Oedipus realized the depth of his own tragedy, he would not have invested so mightily and arrogantly in the ideals of

10/10/09

Kilborne, p. 16 himself and his kingly power, and therefore would not have been so destructive either to himself or to others. In this sense, however shameful, however painful, an awareness of human tragedy ultimately brings with it possibilities for humanizing both attitudes towards oneself and interactions with others. I hope the concept of oedipal shame can help us as analysts widen our scope of possibility.

10/10/09