Scientists have debunked the Oedipus complex — but mummy’s boys shouldn’t celebrate just yet

Laurence Olivier in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in 1945. Photo / Getty Images

Why it’s time to take Freud’s disturbing theory about childhood seriously.

We all know, or think we know, the story: man inadvertently murders father; man inadvertently marries mother; man eventually discovers the truth; man gouges out own eyes. It is expressive of the tragic Greek world view: ­Oedipus is a good man; he solves the Sphinx’s riddle, he saves the city of Thebes. But he has ­always been fated to do something terr­ible, and he cannot outrun this fate: in fact, it is his very attempt to do so that leads to him meeting it.

The Oedipus myth is still going strong. Two and a half millennia since the first performance of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, often considered the high point of classical tragic drama, Robert Icke’s reimagining of the play is heading to the West End in October, starring Lesley Manville and Mark Strong; while Rami Malek and Indira Varma will perform in Ella Hickson’s adaptation at the Old Vic in January. This week, Scottish Opera is staging a promenade production of Stravinsky’s Latin-language operatic version (its libretto written by Jean Cocteau) for the Edinburgh International Festival.

Why does the Oedipus myth, more so than any other Greek tragedy, continue to exercise such a powerful hold over our imaginations? One answer might be provided by modernity’s most noted Oedipus enthusiast: Sigmund Freud. For Freud, it is a story that allegorises something that everyone (or at the very least, every man) goes through over the course of his early sexual development. The power of the Oedipus story lies in what it has to say about how we become individual human beings.

Freud’s first use of the phrase “Oedipus complex” was in a 1910 paper in which he attempted to explain why some men have what we would now call a cuckold fetish. He saw this fetish as being rooted in a fantasy of one’s mother being unfaithful to one’s father — and so gratifying the developing boy’s fantasy of the mother being unfaithful with him. But the concept had already been central to Freud’s work for some years by then. His 1909 study of “Little Hans” (the son of an early devotee of his views) des­cribes what Freud thought of as the childhood Oedipal struggle in exhaustive detail. Based on notes taken by Hans’ father, the study sought to explain the 5-year-old boy’s neurotic fear of horses. Freud traced it to the child’s envy of both his father and his younger sister’s ­relationship with his mother; the guilt his care­givers have made him feel over his experiments with masturbation; and his fear that his father might have him castrated as a result.

Hans, a “little Oedipus” in Freud’s telling, identified horses with his father because of their large genitalia; he feared being bitten by the horses — but he also feared seeing horses die. The roots of Hans’ neurosis thus lay in his fear of his own hostile feelings towards his father, who he also (despite everything) loved. Ultimately, Freud considered Hans’ Oedipal struggle to be resolved after the child told his father about his fantasy of a life in which he (Hans) had children with his mother, and his father was married to his grandmother. In the fantasy, everyone had a place in the world that Hans’ emerging libido was able to accept: his father was alive and had no reason to be angry. At the same time, Hans’ real-life fear of horses diminished.

Freud saw Hans’ Oedipal struggle as emerging at a vital stage in his development, when children first begin to understand the difference between male and female genitalia, and to ascribe to themselves a discrete sexual identity (as boy or girl). This is also the point at which children first really come to terms with the fact they are individual human beings distinct from their mothers. One of the things Freud observes as being most typical of boys of this age is the insistence — contrary to the evidence of their own eyes — that everyone has a penis, including their sisters (who they assume will grow a “proper” one in time). Little Hans even seems to have thought that having a penis was what distinguished living beings from inanimate objects. Freud was a believer in innate bisexuality: at birth, our sexual identities are inchoate, and only with socialisation do they become concrete. “Ordinary” sexual development will produce people with “normal” (ie heterosexual) identities — but there are all sorts of ways in which it can go, as Freud would see things, “wrong”.

A rehearsal of the Sophocles play Oedipus Rex at the Colosseum in Rome. Photo / Getty Images

It should, Freud believed, be the aim of the psychoanalyst to produce adults who are able to live “ordinary” sexual lives — but to his credit, he was not moralistic about this. The reason the psycho­analyst should encourage their patients to be “normal” is simply that experiencing the “wrong” sort of desire can result in neurosis, as individuals struggle to reconcile the way they wish to live with behaviour of which society is likely to approve. Hans’ course of development was, for Freud, a welcome one: the boy is seen, at points, experimenting both with feminine roles (role-playing as a mother) and homosexual love (declaring that his beloved is an older male child), but eventually learns to place himself, with his father, as a man among men — interested in pursuing love relationships with female friends, and wishing to become a “daddy” himself.

Of course, when people hear about the Oedipus complex, one obvious response is: but, I don’t. I don’t want to kill my father and marry my mother! That would be wrong — not just morally, but … ick, no. I don’t want that. Even if Freud was right about everyone else (and he wasn’t), my own lived experience is proof enough that he was wrong: the Oedipus complex cannot possibly be universal. And this, indeed, might well be why, nowadays, Freud (and psychoanalysis) can seem rather passé. Freud, one thinks, has been discredited as a scientist. His theories are largely “unfalsifiable” (they do not involve hypotheses that could be proved or disproved by an empirical test), and a lot of his evidence could quite ­easily be dismissed as suggestion — a feeling heightened by reading the Little Hans study, and discovering that at every turn, whenever their 5-year-old patient revealed anything, Freud and the patient’s father seem to have told him: you know this is really about penises, don’t you?

Psychoanalysis is now a rather niche form of therapy — surviving, as a discipline, less in medical practice than the academic humanities; on the NHS, at any rate, one is much more likely to be prescribed cognitive behavioural therapy, which apparently has a much-stronger ­evidence base for its success (this is despite the fact that, as someone who works in academia, nearly everyone I know quite likes the idea of psychoanalysis, while detecting in CBT a certain corporate peppiness).

In the 1960s, it was still possible for Freudianism to claim a certain sort of intellectual hegemony — but during the next decade, this was undermined by counter-cultural intellectuals who identified in Freud’s Oedipal theory an ultimately conservative fixation on the individual. Any vestige of the trad­itional Freudian emphasis on “normality” should be discarded, such radicals argued: “normal” development is normal only in the context of a bad, repressive society.

Sigmund Freud with his grandson, Stephan Gabiel, in 1916. Photo / Getty Images

But Freud’s point is not that every­one actually wants to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. Even as children, he thinks, we know this would be a bad thing to do — and not just because society would disapprove of it, but because (like Little Hans) we care about our fathers, too. As we grow up, we repress all knowledge we might once have had of the Oedipus complex, and are maybe left with only a vague impression of how lovely we used to find our mothers when we were little. This perhaps explains why the Oedipus story of Greek legend has such a haunting power, too. Oedipus believed he was doing all he possibly could to avoid what he saw as the grave misfortune of being fated to kill his father and marry his mother. The process of discovering that this is precisely what he had done — by leaving what turned out to be his foster home, killing his biological father as a stranger on the road, then defeating the Sphinx and assuming the throne of Thebes — is both a difficult and painful one: a serviceable-enough metaphor for the process of discovering anything unpleasant about ourselves.

Even though Freud’s own evidence for the Oedipus complex falls short of scientific standards, there is a certain pigheadedness in assuming that his work might be valu­able only as science. Yes, Freud thought of himself as a scientist, but he hardly wrote like one. The Little Hans study, for instance, is most rewarding to read as a sort of literary dialogue between Freud (in his persona commenting on the action as a “scientist”), Hans’ father (who is presented as the true “author” of much of the study) and Hans himself — the subject, whose every utterance is forced by the adults observing him into the framework of their theories. In this way, the work becomes not just a theoretical document about the Oedipus complex, about the development of the self, or about how personal development is bound up with sexuality — but a text about the ways in which ­theories both illuminate and conceal certain sorts of evidence, and our ability to know other minds.

If Freud endures, it is not as a scientist, but as, I think, an artist. The scientist seeks to provide us with knowledge through observation. The artist tells us something, too, but it is something more transformative than that. Turner, for instance, did not give us knowledge of what light is; his paintings show us something still revelatory about the role that light plays in our perception of the world. Giorgione’s portraits do not give us knowledge of what the human face is: they show us something about the way in which the human subject, the wearer of the face, fits into the world.

Oedipus Cursing His Son Polynices, by Henry Fuseli (1786). Photo / Getty Images

In an analogous way, to read Freud is already to begin psycho­analysing oneself. It doesn’t matter what the “evidence” is: Freud puts us on the couch in front of him. Read The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), for instance, and start playing at understanding everything one dreams as Freud did — as the fulfilment of some hidden wish. Read his study of Little Hans, and start wondering if maybe all of one’s irrational childhood fears were really about keeping one’s genitalia intact.

What the Oedipus complex offers us is not knowledge — it is the possibility of telling a story about how one ended up, for better or worse, as the person that one is: untangling the fate one has been given. Once you have started to do this, there is no going back. Even if we do not think Freud’s story is the best story about the development of the self, even if we acknowledge it is not the only possible one, it is hard not to be marked by him.

The Oedipus complex, then, may as well be exactly as real as the myth from which it takes its name. But real or not, we have all been shaped by myths like these.