The Oedipus Complex of a Nation in Flux

“Reading it specifically in the context of the current societal struggles and apparently widespread cultural conflicts occurring in the United States today, the myth imbues the reader with a redoubled vigilance.”

Grown men and women fighting in the streets. The scourge of the Coronavirus (COVID-19), writ large in case counts and death tolls. Partisan conflicts, stoked by a media bent on truth-telling yet hellbent on maintaining its ability to tell that truth and tell it predominantly. The United States—and the so-called first-world—today is playing a discordant tune before a disheveled backdrop.

Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (English version by Dudley Fitts & Robert Fitzgerald, 1977, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), one generally is brought again into awareness of a foreboding-and-recollection of the potential for multifaceted social and personal crisis. Reading it specifically in the context of the current societal struggles and apparently widespread cultural conflicts occurring in the United States today, the myth imbues the reader with a redoubled vigilance.

As it has come to be commonly applied today, the myth of Oedipus, thanks in large part to Sigmund Freud’s theory (and the resulting conversations and work it has engendered), evokes from the layperson a now-collectively-latent understanding of “kill your father, marry your mother.” This is a shorthand which, in effect, is taken to mean “kill, detest, or envy your father from a desire to marry or possess your mother or her attention”; the interpretation focuses on the individual psyche, and it nearly always provokes an inferred connection of the myth to psychoanalysis. This belies the totality of the impact of the myth’s message: its applicability to the nation itself.