Essay about A Freudian Reading of Oedipus Rex and Antigone

A Freudian Reading of Oedipus Rex and Antigone In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud postulates that the chief source of conflict within the human psyche is between the id, ego, and superego. The id contains all of the primal urges of a person, such as rage, sex, or violence, and these drives are projected onto the ego, which is the source of rational thought. Hence, many of our conscious thoughts are affected by these urges. Since in a civilized society, many of these compulsions, such as the tendency towards violence and casual mating, are unacceptable, a mechanism is needed to keep these thoughts in check. The superego serves this function by restraining the ego, and it accomplishes this by reversing these primal drives†¦show more content†¦The third cause is the least recognized but contributes the most to human unhappiness. Here we see a parallel to the belief in Sophocles that a single cause of injustice - Oedipus being a murderer - can pollute the whole city. In modern times, this is reflected by the demands of society in straitjacketing humans, who have nowhere for their animal urges to exist peacefully and must therefore feed on their own psyche. Freud formulated a theory he called the pleasure principle, in which humans strive after happiness; they want to become happy and remain so. Later, Freud revised this principle into the reality principle, which states that humans must accept some unhappiness as it is their due. This principle is in force when a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness, and so he has no time for happy experiences because he is too busy trying to avoid suffering. This leads Freud to conclude that there must be a Death instinct in humans, as a way of achieving the most happiness possible - that is, by not existing at all, humans are in fact happier than they would be alive. This is Freuds explanation for the process of overcoming the ancient problem of humans having no control over their thoughts - even when one does happen to have a smidgen of control, most of the time it turns out to be illusory.