Did Sophocles intend for his play, "Oedipus the King," to mean what we think it means? Did he intend to enact what Freud called the "Oedipal desire" to kill the father and sleep with the mother so that the audience could experience catharsis by witnessing the realization of an unconscious shared deisre and then work through the attendant feelings of guilt in a therapeutic way?
We cannot know and therefore probably should not care (about Sophocles' or any other author's intentions, I would argue). However, I suspect that, since the Greeks were not privy to Freud's theory of the unconscious, Sophocles did not intend for the play to have that meaning and would be outraged if he heard it espoused.
Does that mean that the Freudian reading of Oedipus is wrong?
epigone
[This message has been edited by epigone (edited April 22, 2006).]
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