Oedipus Rex, is a Sophocles play, that according to Freud exemplifies a formative stage in a individuals psychosexual development

Authors Avatar
Jacob McClellan English 1302.001 November 21,2005 Essay #3 Oedipus Rex, is a Sophocles play, that according to Freud exemplifies a formative stage in a individuals psychosexual development. The psychosexual stages are the age related developmental periods in which sexual impulses are exerted through different bodily zones and then activities are associated with those areas in the bodily zones. These is when a young child will transfer his love object from the breast to the mother. When the child gives up the breast and moves to the mother it is known as the oral phase. The child then has the sexual desire for the opposite sex parent and will usually have hostility towards the same sex parent. During this time, the child will have a secret desire to murder the same sex parent. Freud called the childhood desire to sleep with the opposite sex parent and to kill the same sex parent Oedipus Complex. Freud describes the
Join now!
source of this complex in his introductory lectures (twenty-first lecture): " You all know the Greek legend of King Oedipus, who was destined by fate to kill his father and take his mother to be his wife, who did everything possible to escape the Oracles decree and punished himself by blinding when he learned that he had none the less unwittingly committed both these crimes."(16.330) Among those individuals that do not progress in the proper way into the genital phase, can still be playing out the psychodrama in various displaced, abnormal or exaggerated ways. Primal desires of course can be ...

This is a preview of the whole essay