since the years of our childhood. Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that offend morality, wishes which nature has forced upon us, and after the revelation of which we want to avert every glance from the scenes of our childhood.
In the very text of Sophocles' tragedy there is an unmistakable reference to the fact that the Oedipus legend originates in an extremely old dream material, which consists of the painful disturbance of the relation towards one's parents by means of the first impulses of sexuality. Jocasta comforts Oedipus—who is not yet enlightened, but who has become worried on account of the oracle—by mentioning to him the dream which is dreamt by so many people, though she attaches no significance to it—
"For it hath already been the lot of many men in dreams to think themselves partners of their mother's bed. But he passes most easily through life to whom these circumstances are trifles" (Act iv. sc. 3).
The dream of having sexual intercourse with one's mother occurred at that time, as it does to-day, to many people, who tell it with indignation and astonishment. As may be understood, it is the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the death of the father. The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination to these two typical dreams, and just as the dream when occurring to an adult is experienced with feelings of resistance, so the legend must contain terror and self-chastisement. The appearance which it further assumes is the result of an uncomprehending secondary elaboration which tries to make it serve theological purposes (cf. the dream material of exhibitionism, p. 206). The attempt to reconcile divine omnipotence with human responsibility must, of course, fail with this material as with every other.[1]
- ↑ Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare's Hamlet, is founded on the same basis as the Oedipus. But the whole difference in the psychic life of the two widely separated periods of civilisation—the agelong progress of repression in the emotional life of humanity—is made manifest in the changed treatment of the identical material. In Oedipus the basic wish-phantasy of the child is brought to light and realised as it is in the dream; in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence—somewhat as in the case of a neurosis—only by the inhibition which results from it. The fact that it is possible to remain in complete darkness
