Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts - Project Gutenberg

Section II. Dream And Myth Interpretation. 35
tragedies. And such an element is indeed contained in the history
of king Œdipus. His fate touches us only because it might have
been ours, because the oracle hung the same curse over us before
our birth as over him. For us all, probably, it is ordained that we
should direct our first sexual feelings towards our mothers, the
first hate and wish for violence against our fathers. Our dreams
convince us of that. King Œdipus, who has slain his father Laius
and married his mother Jocasta, is only the wish-fulfillment of
our childhood. But more fortunate than he, we have been able,
unless we have become psychoneurotic, to dissociate our sexual
feelings from our mothers and forget our jealousy of our fathers.
From the person in whom that childish wish has been fulfilled
we recoil with the entire force of the repressions, that these
wishes have since that time suffered in our inner soul. While
the poet in his probing brings to light the guilt of Œdipus, he [039]
calls to our attention our own inner life, in which that impulse,
though repressed, is always present. The antithesis with which
the chorus leaves us
See, that is Œdipus,
Who solved the great riddle and was peerless in power,
Whose fortune the townspeople all extolled and envied.
See into what a terrible flood of mishap he has sunk.
This admonition hits us and our pride, we who have become
in our own estimation, since the years of childhood, so wise and
so mighty. Like Œdipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that
are so offensive to morality, which nature has forced upon us,
and after their disclosure we should all like to turn away our gaze
from the scenes of our childhood.” (Freud, Trdtg., p. 190 f.)
Believing that I have by this time sufficiently prepared
the reader who was unfamiliar with psychoanalysis for the
psychoanalytic part of my investigation, I will dispense with
further time-consuming explanations.