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Oedipus: Mothers
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The “death” of Oedipus is a reenactment of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This is Oedipus in search of a home and reminiscent of Demeter’s wanderings that brought her to a “home away from home” with the family at Eleusis. Oedipus travels back into the fold of the feminine, Demeter/Persephone, to meet his death. Just as he came from the body of the mother, now he returns to her (Gaia) in death and is met at the gate to the Underworld by Persephone and Hermes, guide of souls. Oedipus has lived out the three phases of life according to the Sphinx’ riddle.
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Overwhelmed with the knowledge of all his crimes, Oedipus rushes into the palace, where he finds his mother, his wife, dead by her own hand. Ripping a brooch from her dress, Oedipus blinds himself with it. Bleeding from the eyes, he begs Creon, who has just arrived on the the scene, to exile him forever from Thebes. Creon agrees to this request, but when Oedipus begs to have his two daughters Antigone and Ismene sent with him, Creon refuses, condemning him instead to wander alone and in darkness throughout the land for the rest of his life.
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The mutual replacement of confrontation with absence and silence occur both in the lives of Oedipus and Hamlet more or less in the same way. Reading against the grain of Freud, one can say that it is not exactly the castration fear and incest for mother drive one to deviations or transference. According to Otto Rank, a disciple and critic of Freud, the child's involvement in the life of parents can be more redemptive than regressive. The child's confrontation with the parents or his/her critical absence (silence) or presence makes them to re-think about the redemptive possibilities. Otto Rank made the commonsense observation of an "anti-Oedipal" tendency in children, namely the wish to keep their parents together when divorce threatens. "Seventy years ago Rank faulted psychoanalytic theory for ignoring nurture in human development, and for pursuing "truth" disconnected from present--real--relationship.
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French theorist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan revised the Oedipus complex in line with his structuralist attempt to combine psychoanalysis and linguistics. Lacan claimed that the position of the father could never be held by the infant. On the one hand the infant must identify with the father, in order to participate in sexual relations. However the infant could ... never become the father as this would imply sexual relations with the mother. Through the dictates on the one hand to be the father and on the other not to, the father is elevated to an ideal. He is no longer a real material father, but a function of a father.
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