Re: Frankenstein

On 7/12/24 08:46, Paul S Person wrote:

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.

Well the patients he saw were sexual abused which because
he was very concerned about societal acceptance in Vienna of the
time he reported as the patients' fantasies

 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?".

It would be hard to find a culture, high or low,
which when it basic premises are extended far enough would
not drive its victims mad.
Well it was just a result of the Catholic religion and its peruliar views of sexuality.  It was a state religion for the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire which disitegrated after WW II. But it
caused a lot of so-called religious wars in the time of
the Protestan Reformation.
SF connection is the "Ring of Fire' series.
Have you watched the PBS series "Vienna Blood" which
features the cooperation of a police detective with a Jewish
Physician who is a follower of Fruedian discourse.
I happen to think it is really excellent and it depicts
the forces which will later bring the A-H Empire to an end and
which still disturb the peace of the atates which were part of
that Empire.

bliss
--
b l i s s - S F 4 e v e r at D S L E x t r e m e dot com