Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [118]
On its own, as myth and tragic drama, the story of Oedipus is powerful stuff. But it gained a completely different currency when the term “Oedipus complex” was first used by the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud in 1900. Freud used the Greek tragedy as support for his claim that every boy fantasized about killing his father and having incestuous sex with his mother, a desire that must be repressed. Freud described the “Oedipus conflict,” or “Oedipus complex,” as a state of psychosexual development and awareness that first occurs around three and a half years of age. Freud similarly claimed that all girls wanted to have sex with their fathers, what he called the “Electra complex.”
Today, many psychoanalytic researchers and anthropologists have largely dismissed this idea. They believe that if such a complex develops, it is a result of personal factors and social environment, and is certainly not part of a universal mind-set.
Another in-vogue psychiatric term also gets its origins from Greek myth. Narcissism, often described as excessive or malignant self-love, comes from the brief tale of Narcissus. Son of a river god and a nymph, Narcissus was a boy of transcendent beauty. When his parents asked a seer if Narcissus would have a long life, they were told he would, as long as he did not see his own face. When he was grown, Narcissus loved no one until he saw his reflection in a pond. He stared at himself and reached to touch his face, falling into the pond and drowning. Ovid told a slightly different version of the myth, in which Narcissus was actually punished for his self-absorption. When he rejected the love of Echo, a nymph, she was so overcome by grief that she wasted away until only her voice remained. For his cruelty to the nymph, Narcissus was punished by drowning. After his death, Narcissus was changed into the flower that bears his name.
MYTHIC VOICES
Whoever obeys the gods, to him they particularly listen….
The Olympian is a difficult foe to oppose….
The glorious gifts of the gods are not to be cast aside….
Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth….
Thus have the gods spun the thread for wretched mortals; that they live in grief while they themselves are without cares; for two jars stand on the floor of Zeus of the gifts which he gives, one of evils and another of blessings.
—From the Iliad
Is Homer just a guy from The Simpsons?
Two long poems. One is a bloody, blow-by-blow account of men hacking at each other. The other is a tale of a lost wanderer trying to get home. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are still considered touchstones of Western culture. Yet we certainly don’t know much about the guy who supposedly wrote them almost three thousand years ago.
The man we call Homer remains a mystery, for the most part, and scholars know almost nothing about the poet who has influenced our language and literature so thoroughly and significantly. Traditionally considered a blind Greek poet, Homer is thought by some scholars to have lived in a Greek-speaking city on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea or on the island of Khios. But that is it. Beyond these meager clues, there is only the speculation of generations of readers and scholars.
For thousands of years people have argued over whether an actual Homer existed, and whether he wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. New research into writing in Greece at that time, along with extensive studies of how