Rank
Coworker of Freud,
broke with him about 1922-4.
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Disagreements with
Freud
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Freud made too many deductions from
working with patients who were sick and
abnormal.
Freudianism belittled the role and character
of women
Freud put too much emphasis on the sex
drive
Freud did not put enough emphasis on
human search for immortality
Freud blames too much of a child's actions
on his parents
Freud fails to notice that children work to
bring their parents together as well as to
pull them apart
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The Family
Romance
 Prophecy or dream warns father (or
father-figure) about his son
 Hero born of noble parents
 Baby exposed in a river, or in the
wilderness
 Child brought out of the wilderness (=
birth)
 Child raised by other, often lowly
parents
 Hero returns to his true parents
 Affection for real mother, hostility
real
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The Family
Romance
Applies to:
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Sargon
Moses
Karna
Oedipus
Paris
Telephus
Perseus
Gilgamesh
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Cyrus
Tristan
Romulus
Hercules
Jesus
Siegfried
Lohengrin
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Oedipus: the Relationship
Between the Play and the
Myth
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Let's start with the play …
Sophocles' Oedipus the King:
Written between 429-425 BC
Plot: Oedipus learns that he has
killed his father and married his
mother
Knox: Oidipos means "swollen
foot."
Knox: Oidi- sounds like "oida," I
know
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Outline of Sophocles'
Oedipus the King
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Pestilence at Thebes
Oedipus sends to the oracle of
Apollo to learn source of pestilence
Apollo says it results from pollution
on their state from murder of Laios
Oedipus curses the murderer (no
matter who he is)
Teiresias accuses Oedipus of being
the murderer
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Outline of Sophocles'
Oedipus the King, 2
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Oedipus accuses Kreon of
conspiracy (because he suggested
getting the advice of Teiresias)
A messenger comes from Corinth,
saying Polybos has died
The messenger assures Oedipus
that Polybos and Merope are not his
real parents
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Outline of Sophocles'
Oedipus the King, 3
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Oedipus sends for the shepherd
who is the survivor of the attack on
Laios, who turns out to be the same
man who was told to expose the
baby Oedipus on the mountainside
and didn't
Jocasta figures out that Oedipus is
her son and hangs herself
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Outline of Sophocles'
Oedipus the King, 4
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Oedipus finds out that he is the son
of Laios and Jocasta
Oedipus blinds himself
Oedipus goes into exile and leaves
Kreon in charge
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Literary Views of Oedipus, 1
Aristotle, 1
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The plot of the finest tragedies must not
be simple but complex, in which reversal
and recognition are the whole drama.
Reversal is a change of the situation into
its opposite, and this must accord with
the probable or the inevitable. So in the
Oedipus the man comes to cheer
Oedipus and to rid him of his fears about
his mother; then, by showing him who he
is, he does the opposite.
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Literary Views of Oedipus, 1
Aristotle, 2
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Recognition is the change from
ignorance to knowledge of a bond of
love or hate between persons who
are destined for good fortune or the
reverse. The finest kind of
recognition is accomplished by
simultaneous reversals, as in the
Oedipus.
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Literary Views of Oedipus, 1
Aristotle, 3
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Good men must not be seen
suffering a change from prosperity
to misfortune; this is not fearful and
pitiful but shocking. Thus, a play
must represent a man who is not
outstanding in virtue and
righteousness, who falls into
misfortune not through wickedness
and vice, but through some flaw … a
serious flaw in character.
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Literary Views of Oedipus, 1
Aristotle, 4
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In such a play, we feel pity for a man who
does not deserve his misfortune; we fear
for someone like ourselves. The story
should be so constructed that the events
make anyone who hears the story
shudder and feel pity even without seeing
the play. The story of Oedipus has this
effect … the recognition emerges from
the events themselves … the amazement
and surprise are caused by probable
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means.
Literary Views of Oedipus, 2
B. M. W. Knox, 1
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The intellectual progress of Oedipus
and Jocasta, which parallels the
intellectual progress of the [Greek]
age of enlightenment, has been
carefully set in ironic dramatic
framework where it is exposed as
wrong from the start.
However, the play does not end with
the defeat of Oedipus.
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Literary Views of Oedipus, 2
B. M. W. Knox, 2
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His resurgence in the last scene of
the play …[is] a vision of man,
superior to the tragic reversal of his
action and the terrible success of
his search for the truth, reasserting
his greatness, not this time in
defiance of the powers which shape
human life but in harmony with
those powers.
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Freud: Sophocles' Play
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The Oedipus Rex is a tragedy of
fate: its strong tragic effect depends
on the conflict between the allpowerful will of the gods and the
vain efforts of human beings
threatened with disaster;
resignation to the divine will, and
the perception of one's own
impotence is the lesson which the
deeply moved spectator is
supposed to learn from the tragedy.
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Freud: Sophocles' Play, 2
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If the Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a
modern reader or playgoer no less
powerfully than it moved the ancient
Greeks, the only possible explanation is
that the effect of the Greek tragedy does
not depend upon the conflict between
fate and human will, but upon the
particular nature of the material by which
this conflict is revealed. … [Oedipus'] fate
moves us only because it might have
been our own, because the oracle laid
upon us before our birth the very curse
which rested upon him.
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Freud: Sophocles' Play, 3
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It may be that we are all destined to
direct our first sexual impulses
towards our mothers, and our first
impulses of hatred and violence
towards our fathers; our dreams
convince us that we were.
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,
quoted by B. M. W. Knox,
Oedipus at Thebes, p. 4.
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Freud: Oedipus Complex
and Oedipus Myth, 1
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[The Oedipus complex is a ] rivalry of
sexual affections. The son, when quite a
little child, develops a peculiar
tenderness toward his mother whom he
looks upon as his own property,
regarding his father in the light of a rival
who disputes this sole possession of his;
similarly the little daughter sees in her
mother someone who disturbs her tender
relation to her father and occupies a
place which she feels she herself could
very well fill.
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Freud: Oedipus Complex
and Oedipus Myth, 2
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… In the Oedipus myth the two extreme
forms of the wishes arising from the two
wishes of the son, the wish to kill the
father and marry the mother, are realized
in an only slightly modified form. …
Closely connected with this [is] … the
castration complex, the reaction to that
intimidation in the field of sex or to that
restraint of early infantile sexual activity.
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Freud: Oedipus Complex
and Oedipus Myth, 3
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Other people's ability to do this is very
limited. The true artist has more at his
disposal. … The artist opens out to
others the way back to the comfort and
consolation of their own unconscious
sources of pleasure …
from Freud's The General Introduction to
Psychoanalysis, tr. Joan Riviere, p. 184-5
(written 1909)
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Freud: Art as Expressing
the Neuroses of Everyone
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[Art ]… is a path back from fantasy to
reality. The artist … has an introverted
disposition and has not far to go to
become neurotic. [He] is … urged on by
instinctual needs which are too
clamorous. He longs to attain to honor,
power, riches, fame and the love of
women.… like any other with an
unsatisfied longing, he turns away from
reality and transfers all his interest and
libido onto the creation of his wishes in
the life of fantasy from which the way
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Freud: Art as Expressing
the Neuroses of Everyone, 2
… The way back to reality is found
by the artist. He is not the only one
who has a life of fantasy. Every
hungry soul looks to [the world of
fantasy] for comfort and
consolation.
from Freud's The General Introduction
to Psychoanalysis, tr. Joan Riviere,
p. 327-8 (written 1909)
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Freud and his followers
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Oedipus represents all of us, he is
ordinary
Oedipus is a neurotic
Oedipus is a victim of his own repressed
knowledge
The play is an allegory, reflecting the
human unconscious
The right way to look at the story is to
combine various stages of the myth
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Sophocles
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Oedipus is unique and singular
Oedipus is a king
Oedipus is a hero who stands up against
the gods
The play is about intellectual blindness. It
expresses irony as a result of Sophocles'
artistic decisions
Crafts a single version of the story that
excludes all others
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Jung
 Looks for the fundamental properties of
human nature
 Seeks universal themes in literature
 Cultural differences between stories are not
important
 Process of individuation means coming to
terms with the elements of daily life as
represented in your dreams.
 In dreams, the concrete details of life are
translated into general symbols and read as
literary texts.
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Archetypes, p. 57-58
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Mental forms whose presence cannot be
explained by anything in the individual’s
own life and which seem to be
aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes
of the human mind
The archetype is the tendency to form
such representations of a motif
Does not mean definite mythological
images or motifs
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Process of
Individuation
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Conscious coming to terms
with one’s inner center
Three parts:
Shadow
Animus/Anima
Self
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Shadow, p. 174-178
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Same-sex figure
Represents unknown or littleknown attributes or qualities of
the ego
It contains values that are
needed by consciousness but
that exist in a form that makes
it difficult to integrate them into
one’s life
This figure often makes the
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Animus/Anima
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Opposite-sex figure
Guide to Self (if positive)
Four stages:
Men: biological, romantic,
spiritual, abstract (195)
Women: jungle hero,
romantic man, bearer of the
word, wise guide to spiritual
truth (205-6)
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Self, p. 208
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Same-sex figure
Represents the inner nucleus
of the dreamer’s psyche
Can appear as a child, a wise
old man or woman, a royal
couple, a helpful animal, a
circle, or a stone, or as
“cosmic man”
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Claude Levi-Strauss
Syntagmatic Relationship
Paradigmatic Relationship
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Claude Levi-Strauss,
applied to Gilgamesh
Humbaba died for our sins
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Claude Levi-Strauss,
applied to Gilgamesh, 2
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Nature v Culture
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Gilgamesh Scale
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Gilgamesh Scale, 2
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