How The Interpretation of Dreams drew on Oedipus Rex
A documented line of influence: Sigmund Freud demonstrably engaged Sophocles’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Oedipus Rex
Sophocles · c. 429 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud · 1900
ModernRelevance
8/10
On The Interpretation of Dreams’s page
- The complex is named for a play — Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, which Freud watched staged in Vienna and never shook
- Freud quotes it directly ("It is the fate of all of us...") and reads the audience's horror as proof that the tragedy touches something universal
- Read the play first: Freud is responding to its specific power as theater, not just its plot
On Oedipus Rex’s page
- A 2,300-year-old tragedy gave a 20th-century theory its name
- Freud saw Oedipus Rex staged in the 1880s and 90s, and the play's grip on him became the seed of "the Oedipus complex"
- In The Interpretation of Dreams he names the play, quotes it — "It is the fate of all of us..." — and argues its power proves the desire is universal