4: A Simple, Complex, And Far-reaching Misunderstanding
Michael O’Brien, M.A., Ed.D.
One of the most ironic things to have happened in the long sweep of western history, I think, is that an exceptionally intelligent, gifted, privileged, intellectual man, a most eloquent and engaging writer, winner of a Goethe Prize for Literature, could spend almost half a century productively writing and successfully publishing a story, a thesis, one that got the fascinated attention of millions of highly literate readers throughout most of Europe and the Americas, yet no one quite understood what it was he was writing about (cf. #1). This man, Sigmund Freud, invented a whole new language that meant something quite different than it seemed to mean. He termed it “the language of dreams.” But then, he added more profoundly, it was also the hidden language of our unconscious minds at their deepest level {1925: 45}. Understanding it would require a whole new approach.
People were fascinated and impressed. They hailed him as a genius and as an inventor of a whole new depth psychology. Then, totally out of step with his discoveries and his claims that had so engaged them, they interpreted all he wrote and thought in a most traditional and conventional manner, that is, superficially, in every respect. In interpreting his thoughts, even about the most disagreeable of subjects, they either ignored the implications of what he had written, or just didn’t comprehend them.
And Freud, on his part, was highly ambivalent. He was quite afraid to speak openly. He decided therefore to disguise what he had to say. He would dress it in a familiar language, yet give this familiar language a whole new but hidden meaning. One had to read with his larger theory of repression in mind, so as to look beyond the manifest meaning of what he was saying, and look at just the discrete elements of thought that appeared at a manifest level, separate those elements from their manifest context, and let a new meaning emerge from that process. That new meaning would represent what he was really telling them. And we should trust that, and not censor it. He explained this in a lecture on “The Manifest Content of Dreams and the Latent Dream-Thoughts” {1916–1917: 133 ff}. Since his theory was saying that a person’s “unconscious” mind was using these same means of distortion and misrepresentation, all of his conscious writing needs to be interpreted within this context.
So, while his writings are manifestly about other people, that wasn’t their real meaning. They weren’t really about them, but about himself. They were a matter of his own ego, his own psychological defense, and what he had learned from his own “self-analysis.”
Not reading him in the larger context of what his theory said, people naturally assumed that what he manifestly said was what he really meant. How unFreudian was that?
A basic confusion of course followed. We could call it a confusion of identity. For example: Who was it he was talking about? Himself? Or us? And was there no difference between his experience and ours? Were we all alike on the inside? Were all just like he found himself to be? And practically, did all people have an Oedipus Complex? Did all people need to have their Oedipus Complex analyzed and interpreted? Or just him? Nearly all his readers became confused on that central point.
Freud’s Oedipus Complex
At a key point, while planning the writing of his Die Traumdeutung, Freud alluded powerfully to a very famous figure — Oedipus, the ancient King of Thebes. Oedipus had most dramatically, before the whole world (as it turned out), permanently blinded himself — to everyone and everything around him, to all that formerly he had seen with his eyes. His inner agony was so great he couldn’t tolerate being reminded of what he had so regrettably done. He had reasoned that all he’d be able to see from that point in his life on, would now only remind himself of his own “evil,” as he put it. He could never tolerate that. Better to be blind, to not see, than to see the remaining evidences of his own evil.
In a private letter to a friend, on October 15, 1897, Freud wrote that he could see this same thing in himself”:
A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case too, being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood.… If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the objections reason raises against the presupposition of fate; and we can understand why the later “drama of fate” was bound to fail so miserably. Our feelings rise against any arbitrary individual compulsion, such as is presupposed in Die Ahnfrau… but the Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he senses its existence in himself. Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy, and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one {Freud 1985: 272}.
There is much we should note in this quote. He finds it true in his own case, and he also immediately generalizes his case to virtually everyone else. In other words, he rushes to immediately confuse himself with others, to blend in with an imagined crowd of strangers. He had direct personal evidence in his own case, the evidence of his own experience. He had absolutely had no evidence for this “same thing” being true of every else as well. This is a case of paranoid projection, which seems to have gone unnoticed by most of Freud’s readers and followers. Most of his readers and followers just uncritically accepted the manifest content of his words without thinking or looking further.
Who was Oedipus in this play, to whom Freud pointed and with whom he was identifying? Let’s look further into the dramatic context of the play.
In Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” (Oedipus Tyrannos), a messenger had arrived on stage to tell the audience what he had just witnessed:
I would blot out from my mind what happened next!
For the King ripped from.. (Jocasta’s) gown the golden brooches
That were her ornament, and raised them, and plunged them down
Straight into his own eyeballs, crying, “No more,
No more shall you look on the misery about me,
The horrors of my own doing!…
From this hour go in darkness!” … And as he spoke,
He struck at his eyes, not once, but many times;
And the blood spattered his beard,
Bursting from his ruined sockets like red hail (Sophocles 1984: p 67).
He had found his wife dead. She had hung herself in their bedroom. She was also his mother. His children, all four of them, were his brothers and sisters as well.
Eyes darkened, blood pouring forth from his hollowed eye sockets, Oedipus then appeared center stage. The Greek chorus, inquiring for the citizens of Thebes, asks him: “Oedipus, why have you done this? Did some God do this to you?”
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And he answered…
Dear children, the god was Apollo. He brought my sick, sick fate upon me. But the blinding hand was my own! How could I bear to see, when all my sight was horror everywhere?.. How fair I seemed, your child! And all the while this evil was cancerous within me! For I am sick In my daily life, sick in my origin. My own blood, spilled by my own hand… O marriage, marriage!.. Ah, the net of incest, mingling fathers, brothers, sons, with brides, wives, mothers: the last evil that can be known by men: no tongue can say how evil!…No. For the love of God, conceal me…or kill me; or hurl me into the sea, away from men’s eyes for ever {Sophocles 1949: “Exodus,” pp 70, 72}.
The “Oedipus Complex” was a family complex. And it was total horror. We can see in his speech how he felt. And Freud points to Oedipus, saying, “in my own case too.” We see here how Oedipus felt, and how Freud was feeling., in pointing so dramatically to Oedipus. He too was no longer the “fair child” of his audience. He too found himself sick — in his marriage, and in his family life. He too, we must suspect, found himself somehow sick over the terrible matter of “my own blood, spilled by my own hand.”
The question remains for us to reconstruct the matter of what this powerful allusion signified in his own experience? in his own family? with respect to his own marriage, and his own children? What was he really referring to? What did he mean? How so that his own blood had been spilled by his own hand? We need to be curious. We need to look further, and ever more closely.
Freud’s Own Defense
Freud wrote much about self-defense and how to achieve that by just alluding to something, but omitting to say to what it was, exactly, to which one was alluding. If a person could not bear to say what was actually on their mind, they could censor their own thoughts but allude to someone else’s to express their own thoughts, but doing so more safely and more bearably. We would be right to wonder whether Freud, in his own personal life in 1897, did not find himself in an analogous situation? And so could not speak of it directly. In such a case, he could speak of it hysterically, by substituting some new example for his own.
If he did so, however, that new idea would quickly become so highly laden or “cathected” with affect from the person’s own situation that it would become “super-valent,” “super-ordinate,” “excessively intense,” or “obsessional” (words Freud used to describe “obsessional ideas”).
“What was it” in his own life that Freud was so powerfully alluding to as true in his own case in the Fall of 1897? That’s a key question I asked in my first essay here (#1). We haven’t known what it was, but if we don’t, we simply don’t know what it was Freud was referring to here. We do need to know if we want to understand Freud’s thought, or gain insight into what he was writing about. We can, if we look below the surface of his writing and interpret the underlying meaning of his theory, here so cleverly and intentionally disguised.
His writings told anyone in the world who was interested just how to do that. That’s what I attempted to do in my research on the latent meaning of his theory {O’Brien 1989, 1991, 1992, 1994}.
It is not too late, however.. We can still revisit Freud, revisit his trains of thought, learn to understand the nature of his defenses and how he would distort and disguise his conscious thoughts so as to not reveal his real thoughts. We still have much to learn about his new language, his language of dreams. We need to employ his larger theory to work toward gaining insight into his repressed thoughts, his infantile memories, or what Freud had so ambivalently been trying to both conceal and reveal, using the self-same words.
© Michael T. O’Brien, M.A., Ed.D. Lincoln, MA. February 5, 2025. (revised)
References
Freud, S. (1916–17). Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis. Standard Edition, 15–16, 15:463.
Freud, S. (1925d). “An autobiographical study” [1924]. Standard Edition, 20, 7–74.
Freud, S. (1985). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (J. M. Masson, Ed. & Trans.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
O’Brien, M. T. (1989). “Freud’s Oedipus complex: A Reappraisal of its Meaning, Volumes I and II.” Dissertation, Boston University Graduate School of Education, 1989. (Proquest Dissertations And Theses, 1989, Section 0017, Part 0622. 747 pages. Publication #: 8908560).
O’Brien, M. T. (1991). “Freud’s Affair with Minna Bernays: His Letter of June 4, 1896.” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 51(2), 173–183.
O’Brien, M. T. (1992). “If Freud’s Theory Be True…” Psychological Reports, 70, 611–20.
O’Brien, M. T. (1994). “A Study of the Latent Meaning of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.” Studies in Psychoanalytic Theory, 3(2), 11–49.
Sophocles (1949). “Oedipus Rex” (D. Fitts, & R. Fitzgerald, Trans.). In Sophocles: The Oedipus Cycle (pp. 1–78). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Sophocles (1984). “Oedipus Rex” (Fagles, trans.). In Sophocles: The three Theban plays. New York: Penguin Books.
