MYTHOLOGICAL PERAMBULATIONS
At 5:45 a.m., as I took my morning walk, I spent a few moments reminding myself of the myth of Oedipus in preparation for this afternoon's Freud lecture. Low in the sky was Selene, the Greek moon goddess, full and resplendent, accompanied by her handmaiden Venus, the Morning Star. It was a propitious omen.
yes, but what did the entrails say?
ReplyDeleteMoments like that make life seem charmed.
ReplyDeleteAnd here's something extra-Freudian about Sophocles. In the original story (as we find it, and as Sophocles would have found it, in Odysseus's voyage to the underworld in the Odyssey), Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother, but then "the gods make it known." Sophocles rearranges things so that Oedipus himself unearths the secret -- as if he always slightly knew it. For Homer, it just happened. For Sophocles, the real story is how Oedipus came to discover the fact. Freud is entitled to say: "Why are you so shocked at what I'm saying? Read Sophocles!"
When I would teach the logical theory of relations and introduce the notions of symmetry, reflexivity and transitivity, after a little drilling on easy examples, I would then ask the class if *_parent of_* was transitive, intransitive or non-transitive. They would always go for intransitive until I dropped enough hints about Greek plays maybe having to go as far as asking if the name 'Jocasta' rings a bell...
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