Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

202
The Poetry of Anne Sexton
prophet, and becomes not merely a tragic victim, but an embattled
seer. According to Bettelheim, the suggestiveness and referential richness
of the Oedipal story only includes the implication that little boys
want to kill the man they know is their father and marry the woman
they know is their mother. This “common and extreme simplification”
ignores the fact that Oedipus did not know what he was doing
when he killed Laius and married Jocasta, and that “his greatest desire
was to make it impossible for himself to harm those he thought were
his parents.” This crucial detail expands the story’s mythic power to
include “the child’s anxiety and guilt for having patricidal and incestuous
wishes,” and the consequences of acting on such wishes. 5
As Bettelheim reads both the Sophocles play and Freud’s adaptation
of it, the central issues are Oedipus’ guilt and his discovery of
the truth. Oedipus’ lack of initial awareness about what he has done
is reflected in psychoanalysis’s version of the story by the repression
in adulthood of both the murderous feelings toward the parent of
the same sex, and the incestuous feelings toward the parent of the
opposite sex. Oedipus behaved as he did as a consequence of his real
parents having rejected him in the most brutal and literal way possible;
he loved the parents he thought were his. “It is only our love for our
parents and our conscious wish to protect them that leads us to repress
our negative and sexual feelings for them.” 6
Bettelheim also emphasizes another portion of the story often
glossed over by theory and by practice: when he fled Corinth, Oedipus
did not fully heed the temple inscription, “Know thyself,” which
implicitly warned against misunderstandings of the oracle’s prophecies.
He was not sufficiently self-aware in his flight, and later acted out
his metaphorical blindness by literally blinding himself. So Oedipus,
truth-seeker, sought the complex truths too late; or, translated into
psychic parlance, self-knowledge requires an understanding of the
“normally unconscious aspects of ourselves.” It’s Bettelheim’s conviction
and that of psychoanalysis—and here I part company with him
and it regretfully—that knowledge really is power, that to know the
unconscious is to be able to control it, and more or less completely.
“This is a crucial part of the myth,” writes Bettelheim: “as soon as
the unknown is made known . . . the pernicious consequences of the
Oedipal deeds disappear.” 7 That is indeed the most hopeful reading
of the cease of pestilence in Thebes, but not the only one. No one,
after all, can restore Oedipus’ sight to him, and his wanderings toward