It is a story of people who believe in oracles. The search for knowledge from above that becomes bond, terror and destiny. It is the story of a son abandoned at birth, cast out because the voice of the Pythia, the oracle of Apollo, had predicted to Laius and Jocasta that their offspring would kill them. The curse launched on Laius by the father of a young man whom he had raped was fulfilled.
Or maybe it’s the story of the “oldest road murder in history”, as the dazzling opening by Giulio Guidorizzi in the volume suggests Oedipus, on newsstands tomorrow with the «Corriere». If so, it’s a story of emotional incontinence. A young man and an old man blinded by pride and arrogance fight at a crossroads. The old Laius dies with his skull smashed by the young Oedipus, the son that he and his wife Jocasta had wounded and chased away, because, as we have said, it was a time when people believed in oracles.
It is the story of a man afflicted by the Oedipus complex, the drive to mate with one’s mother and kill one’s father that Freud placed at the foundation of the psyche and at the root of psychic suffering? Guidorizzi is sharp: “The Greek Oedipus has therefore very little of Oedipus”, the incestuous drive did not guide the protagonist of the tragedy, either because he was unaware of what happened, or because the relationship between Oedipus and Jocasta “is the furthest away from eroticism. can imagine “.
What does the psychologist read today in the lines of this tragedy? Law of damage generated by the lack of love and care. An almost linear path: parents reject the sacrifice that raising a child entails, in the name of Apollo’s response, in the name of an innate predatory instinct that knows no generosity. Then there is a son who neither mother nor father have taught the kindness that soothes the impulses, a son who becomes affected by what we call emotional dysregulation. It manifests itself in the explosive anger that leads him to beat the old man to death at the crossroads.
The psychologist reads us the power of temperament, the innate component of personality. From father to son the storm of affection passes. To modulate it, Oedipus would have needed parents present, attentive, loving: «Puppy, what do you have, are you nervous? No love, don’t do that ». And rigorous, normative: “Stop it, this is not good”. Oedipus breathed neither kindness nor steadfastness.
The processes of emotional regulation develop in context of the attachment relationship. It is the human motivation that the psychoanalyst John Bowlby has brought to the center of the scene, forever relegating the drives of life and death and the plot of the incestuous Oedipus in the pages of the history of psychopathology. The child of the distressed mammal seeks the parent and this addiction promotes brain maturation. The dependence continued over the years favors intellectual growth and symbolic capacity. This was lacking in Oedipus.
And then, in a certain sense, his involuntary reappropriation Jocasta is just a distorted return to what he would need: parental care. A mocking destiny that gives him back in a forbidden form what was denied him in the natural form. So let’s think of Oedipus read through Bowlby’s eyes: the tragic search for what was missing.
A reading that Charles Darwin might have appreciated, as much as he would have rejected that of Sigmund Freud because it contradicts the mechanisms of reproduction, whose true instinct is mixing, an incessant search for recombination. DNA that, meeting at another crossroads, intertwine and invent the new. An inexorable tendency to hybridize that the first psychoanalysis did not realize.
It is a story of people who believe in oracles. The revealed knowledge that passes from the gods to men has an archaic and frightening beauty. Oedipus suffers abandonment due to beliefs in a speaking beyond the world.
That need to rely on superior knowledge which fascinates, frightens, inspires and ultimately governs action by blinding reason. Thus the life of Oedipus ends without sight. The mythical stories are current, the oracles today people look for them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Unable to study a topic and understand it, they read the divine in the title of a post.
What is fate for the psychologist today? We understand this by observing the enormous effort we employ to rationally justify our actions. When, on the other hand, our decisions, in a very large part, are made according to automatisms. Escape from destiny, from what DNA and culture have written on us, is impossible without an incessant effort of self-awareness. Oedipus never had it, his parents before him did not.
The second volume. A tormented king in which many personalities coexist
The book comes out on 27 April on newsstands with the Corriere della Sera Oedipus. The game of fate, by the antiquist Giulio Guidorizzi, for sale at the price of e 6.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. This is the second volume of the “Great Greek Myths” series, directed by Guidorizzi himself, which offers readers a complete overview of the great narratives which nourished classical Hellenic culture: legendary stories that remain a fixed point in our collective imagination. This is particularly true for the tragic story of Oedipus, king of Thebes, which has been revised and reinterpreted often over the centuries. Guidorizzi, former professor at the Universities of Milan and Turin, notes in this regard: «Each era seeks its own specific answers because – to use Aristotle’s words – a myth tends towards the universal, history towards the particular. In this universal everything is included, there are all the possible stories and a myriad of meanings that, from time to time, are manifested, always new ”. At the center of the myth of Oedipus, Guidorizzi still observes, there are two fundamental concepts for Greek culture, “destiny and freedom”. Moreover, “Oedipus is a man in whom many other men coexist, because he himself is not one, but many: the prince and the foundling, the king and the scapegoat, the chosen one and the outcast, the solver of riddles and the one who he did not know how to see his own ». The fourth volume of the “Great Greek Myths” series is on newsstands on Tuesday 4 May: Apollo, edited by Giuseppe Zanetto. They will follow: Achille, edited by Tommaso Braccini (May 11); Dionysus, curated by Roberto Mussapi (May 18); Zeus, curated by Chiara Lombardi (May 25).
April 25, 2021 (change April 25, 2021 | 21:12)
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