Re: Frankenstein

On Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:45:21 -0000 (UTC), Don <g@crcomp.net> wrote:

In the Sopocles play, Oedipus has no desire to kill his father; in fact he's
fleeing the area where he thinks his bio parents live to avoid that fate, when
he *does* kill Laius (who he does not know is his father) in the first
recorded incident of road rage.
>
Nor does he know that Jocasta is his mother when he marries her, as a
prize for getting rid of the Sphinx.

This is because the point of the play is that "the gods" are cruel and
remorseless. Oedipus is their victim, not a villain. This is, after
all, /tragedy/, not crime drama.

Robert Graves somewhere asserts that the winning plays (well, the
tragedies) each year (and those we have were all winning plays, that
is why they survived) were treated as /theology/. The Sophocles
contribution to Greek pagan theology must have been very much a
downer.

Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus
Complex'.

IIRC, Freud asserted that the Oedipus myth was a /product/ of his
complex, and so "proof" that it existed way-back-when.

When I read the volume /Freud/ in the /Great Books of the Western
World/ collection I formed the theory that his was a formal system: if
you replaced "sex" with, say, "eating corn flakes with milk for
breakfast", then nothing would change except that "sex" would become a
sublimation of "eating corn flakes with milk for breakfast", as would
everything said to be a sublimation of sex by Freud.

IOW, I concluded that Freud's theory was founded on sex because Freud
was obsessed by sex. And for no other reason.

But that's just me. And very much IMHO. Feel free to disagree.

Freud himself, in /Civilization and Its Discontent/, asserted that all
the problems he was investigating was a result of Western culture (ie,
Victorianism). People not raised in that culture, including anyone
below the upper middle class (which was good, as they could not
possibly afford the fees), was free of them.

The whole production, IOW, is a result of "high culture". Which rather
raises the issue "how stupid do you have to be to adopt a 'high
culture' that drives you and your children insane?".
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"