First, a review of previously posted postulates. The Oedipus complex
manifested within Perry Rhodan's son, Thomas Cardif is a straight
forward "I want to kill my father" impulse.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
At Thora's funeral a foreshadow hints at Cardif's intentions to fully
indulge his Oedipus complex (whose usage in this context is shown below)
and kill his father. Thus the tragedy begins and metastasizes.

Freud was absolutely obsessed with changes that take place in
our minds as we move from childhood to adulthood. When we are
children, Freud suggests, we are fiercely devoted to our mothers,
because they nurture and protect us. Anything or anyone who gets
in the way of this devotional love becomes, in our irrational
baby minds, a threat that should be eliminated-even if that
threat happens to be our father.

What I've just described is a version of Freud's famous Oedipus
complex, in which a male child, echoing the actions of the tragic
Greek king Oedipus, wants to kill his father and marry his mother.

<https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-uncanny>
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next comes Priestley's thoughts on /Oedipus Rex/.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
PR's Thomas Cardif affair was treated as an /Oedipus Rex/ adaptation by
me in Lynn's recent review of 67 "Interlude on Siliko 5." And it turns
out Priestley mentions /Oedipus Rex/ in _Man and Time_. And, his words
work better than mine did:

But the reason for writing plays in this form has nothing to do
with the Time element. It is because their action works like a
coiled spring, producing an effect both of increasing tension
and dramatic inevitability. In plays of this kind (of which
perhaps the supreme example is the /Oedipus Rex/ of Sophocles)
we are made to feel that the characters are helpless victims of
fate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now for something new - a person posits how the movie _Chinatown_
contains complex components comparable to /Oedipus Rex/.

Analysis and interpretation

A modern Oedipus Rex

In a 1975 issue of Film Quarterly, Wayne D. McGinnis compared
Chinatown to Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. He suggested that a
"wasteland motif predominates in both works", in which a
character (Noah Cross in Chinatown and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex)
uses "a plague on a city" to get into public power and then
harbor corruption. McGinnis wrote that both works allude to
"a sterility of moral values in its own era": of Athens in
"a time of intellectual upheaval […] after the heroic battle
of Marathon" in Oedipus Rex and of America in the Watergate
era in Chinatown. He also argued that in the film, director
Roman Polanski splits Sophocles' Oedipus into two morally
polar figures, with the film's protagonist Detective Jake
Gittes paralleling the "good" Oedipus: the one uncovering the
source of corruption. McGinnis asserted that after "confronting
the web of evil perpetrated by Cross […] Gittes is the Oedipus
whose success, to the use the words of Cleanth Brooks and
Robert B. Heilman, 'has tended to blind [him] to possibilities
which pure reason fails to see'". McGinnis concluded that
"There is finally pity for the doomed, ignorant Gittes, just
as there is pity for the blind Oedipus in Sophocles", however,
"Gittes' real sight, like Oedipus, comes too late".

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)>

Danke,

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php
telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.

I see a difference between Freud's idea that sons
(is it just sons?) love their mother and resent their
father, and the supposed actual history of Oedipus,
whose actual father orders the kid taken away
to be abandoned to die, since he, Oedipus, is destined
to kill his father and marry his own mother (what?!)
A twist is that Oedipus instead is adopted, doesn't
know that - the adoptive parents deny it - and does
know about the destiny, so to try to protect his
not-real parents in Corinth, he heads for Thebes -
and runs into his actual father (a road rage incident)
and then his mother, and destiny takes its course.
One reading of this is that when the gods hate you
with or without good reason, this is very bad.

As far as Oedipus knew for most of his life,
he loved his father. Who was not the man, Laius,
who arranged his murder as a baby, and then drove
a cart over him in an argument at a road junction.
Laius seems to be not much of a loss, even excluding
a rewrite where he raped a male student which
apparently makes everything else fair punishment,
of Laius. But Oedipus didn't consciously resent Laius.
Perhaps he did unconsciously recognise and resent him?

Anyway, which way is it with Thomas Cardif?
He knows that Perry Rhodan is his father, and he
is against Rhodan? That's more like Mordred -
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur%27s_family>
Although Mordred's parents may be siblings -
that wasn't in the story originally, someone "sexed it up".
And then Mordred gets a prophecy and Arthur supposedly
tries to kill any child born around the given time.
You know, like Voldemort did.

Robert Carnegie wrote:
> Don wrote:
>>
>> First, a review of previously posted postulates. The Oedipus complex
>> manifested within Perry Rhodan's son, Thomas Cardif is a straight
>> forward "I want to kill my father" impulse.
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> At Thora's funeral a foreshadow hints at Cardif's intentions to fully
>> indulge his Oedipus complex (whose usage in this context is shown below)
>> and kill his father. Thus the tragedy begins and metastasizes.
>>
>> Freud was absolutely obsessed with changes that take place in
>> our minds as we move from childhood to adulthood. When we are
>> children, Freud suggests, we are fiercely devoted to our mothers,
>> because they nurture and protect us. Anything or anyone who gets
>> in the way of this devotional love becomes, in our irrational
>> baby minds, a threat that should be eliminated-even if that
>> threat happens to be our father.
>>
>> What I've just described is a version of Freud's famous Oedipus
>> complex, in which a male child, echoing the actions of the tragic
>> Greek king Oedipus, wants to kill his father and marry his mother.
>>
>> <https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-uncanny>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Next comes Priestley's thoughts on /Oedipus Rex/.
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> PR's Thomas Cardif affair was treated as an /Oedipus Rex/ adaptation by
>> me in Lynn's recent review of 67 "Interlude on Siliko 5." And it turns
>> out Priestley mentions /Oedipus Rex/ in _Man and Time_. And, his words
>> work better than mine did:
>>
>> But the reason for writing plays in this form has nothing to do
>> with the Time element. It is because their action works like a
>> coiled spring, producing an effect both of increasing tension
>> and dramatic inevitability. In plays of this kind (of which
>> perhaps the supreme example is the /Oedipus Rex/ of Sophocles)
>> we are made to feel that the characters are helpless victims of
>> fate.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> Now for something new - a person posits how the movie _Chinatown_
>> contains complex components comparable to /Oedipus Rex/.
>>
>> Analysis and interpretation
>>
>> A modern Oedipus Rex
>>
>> In a 1975 issue of Film Quarterly, Wayne D. McGinnis compared
>> Chinatown to Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. He suggested that a
>> "wasteland motif predominates in both works", in which a
>> character (Noah Cross in Chinatown and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex)
>> uses "a plague on a city" to get into public power and then
>> harbor corruption. McGinnis wrote that both works allude to
>> "a sterility of moral values in its own era": of Athens in
>> "a time of intellectual upheaval […] after the heroic battle
>> of Marathon" in Oedipus Rex and of America in the Watergate
>> era in Chinatown. He also argued that in the film, director
>> Roman Polanski splits Sophocles' Oedipus into two morally
>> polar figures, with the film's protagonist Detective Jake
>> Gittes paralleling the "good" Oedipus: the one uncovering the
>> source of corruption. McGinnis asserted that after "confronting
>> the web of evil perpetrated by Cross […] Gittes is the Oedipus
>> whose success, to the use the words of Cleanth Brooks and
>> Robert B. Heilman, 'has tended to blind [him] to possibilities
>> which pure reason fails to see'". McGinnis concluded that
>> "There is finally pity for the doomed, ignorant Gittes, just
>> as there is pity for the blind Oedipus in Sophocles", however,
>> "Gittes' real sight, like Oedipus, comes too late".
>>
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)>
>>
> I see a difference between Freud's idea that sons
> (is it just sons?) love their mother and resent their
> father, and the supposed actual history of Oedipus,
> whose actual father orders the kid taken away
> to be abandoned to die, since he, Oedipus, is destined
> to kill his father and marry his own mother (what?!)
> A twist is that Oedipus instead is adopted, doesn't
> know that - the adoptive parents deny it - and does
> know about the destiny, so to try to protect his
> not-real parents in Corinth, he heads for Thebes -
> and runs into his actual father (a road rage incident)
> and then his mother, and destiny takes its course.
> One reading of this is that when the gods hate you
> with or without good reason, this is very bad.
>
> As far as Oedipus knew for most of his life,
> he loved his father. Who was not the man, Laius,
> who arranged his murder as a baby, and then drove
> a cart over him in an argument at a road junction.
> Laius seems to be not much of a loss, even excluding
> a rewrite where he raped a male student which
> apparently makes everything else fair punishment,
> of Laius. But Oedipus didn't consciously resent Laius.
> Perhaps he did unconsciously recognise and resent him?
>
> Anyway, which way is it with Thomas Cardif?
> He knows that Perry Rhodan is his father, and he
> is against Rhodan? That's more like Mordred -
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur%27s_family>
> Although Mordred's parents may be siblings -
> that wasn't in the story originally, someone "sexed it up".
> And then Mordred gets a prophecy and Arthur supposedly
> tries to kill any child born around the given time.
> You know, like Voldemort did.

My original post inadvertently intermingles ideas.

An Oedipus complex is a psychoanalytical term. It involves a child's
hostility towards the parent of the the same sex - a son who wants to
kill his father.
My first snippet shown above pertains to psychoanalysis practice.
Thomas Cardiff suffers from an Oedipus complex and wants to kill his
father Perry Rhodan.
Mordred also suffers from an Oedipus complex. Ergo, Mordred wants to
kill his father too, King Arthur.

OTOH, /Oedipus Rex/ denotes the Athenian tragedy by Sophocles. The
second and third snippets appearing above apply to /Oedipus Rex/.

Danke,

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php
telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.

On 8/1/2023 2:54 PM, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> I see a difference between Freud's idea that sons
> (is it just sons?) love their mother and resent their
> father, and the supposed actual history of Oedipus,
> whose actual father orders the kid taken away
> to be abandoned to die, since he, Oedipus, is destined
> to kill his father and marry his own mother (what?!)
> A twist is that Oedipus instead is adopted, doesn't
> know that - the adoptive parents deny it - and does
> know about the destiny, so to try to protect his
> not-real parents in Corinth, he heads for Thebes -
> and runs into his actual father (a road rage incident)
> and then his mother, and destiny takes its course.
> One reading of this is that when the gods hate you
> with or without good reason, this is very bad.
>
> As far as Oedipus knew for most of his life,
> he loved his father. Who was not the man, Laius,
> who arranged his murder as a baby, and then drove
> a cart over him in an argument at a road junction.
> Laius seems to be not much of a loss, even excluding
> a rewrite where he raped a male student which
> apparently makes everything else fair punishment,
> of Laius. But Oedipus didn't consciously resent Laius.
> Perhaps he did unconsciously recognise and resent him?
>
> Anyway, which way is it with Thomas Cardif?
> He knows that Perry Rhodan is his father, and he
> is against Rhodan? That's more like Mordred -
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur%27s_family>
> Although Mordred's parents may be siblings -
> that wasn't in the story originally, someone "sexed it up".
> And then Mordred gets a prophecy and Arthur supposedly
> tries to kill any child born around the given time.
> You know, like Voldemort did.

Thomas Cardif did not know that he was Perry Rhodan and Thora's son
until he was grown, out of flight school, and a member of the Terran
Space Forces. He reacted very negatively to this and was deeply
resentful of both of them.

Lynn

On Tuesday, August 1, 2023 at 6:36:58 PM UTC-4, Don wrote:
> Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > Don wrote:
> >>
> >> First, a review of previously posted postulates. The Oedipus complex
> >> manifested within Perry Rhodan's son, Thomas Cardif is a straight
> >> forward "I want to kill my father" impulse.
> >>
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >> At Thora's funeral a foreshadow hints at Cardif's intentions to fully
> >> indulge his Oedipus complex (whose usage in this context is shown below)
> >> and kill his father. Thus the tragedy begins and metastasizes.
> >>
> >> Freud was absolutely obsessed with changes that take place in
> >> our minds as we move from childhood to adulthood. When we are
> >> children, Freud suggests, we are fiercely devoted to our mothers,
> >> because they nurture and protect us. Anything or anyone who gets
> >> in the way of this devotional love becomes, in our irrational
> >> baby minds, a threat that should be eliminated-even if that
> >> threat happens to be our father.
> >>
> >> What I've just described is a version of Freud's famous Oedipus
> >> complex, in which a male child, echoing the actions of the tragic
> >> Greek king Oedipus, wants to kill his father and marry his mother.
> >>
> >> <https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-uncanny>
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> Next comes Priestley's thoughts on /Oedipus Rex/.
> >>
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >> PR's Thomas Cardif affair was treated as an /Oedipus Rex/ adaptation by
> >> me in Lynn's recent review of 67 "Interlude on Siliko 5." And it turns
> >> out Priestley mentions /Oedipus Rex/ in _Man and Time_. And, his words
> >> work better than mine did:
> >>
> >> But the reason for writing plays in this form has nothing to do
> >> with the Time element. It is because their action works like a
> >> coiled spring, producing an effect both of increasing tension
> >> and dramatic inevitability. In plays of this kind (of which
> >> perhaps the supreme example is the /Oedipus Rex/ of Sophocles)
> >> we are made to feel that the characters are helpless victims of
> >> fate.
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >>
> >> Now for something new - a person posits how the movie _Chinatown_
> >> contains complex components comparable to /Oedipus Rex/.
> >>
> >> Analysis and interpretation
> >>
> >> A modern Oedipus Rex
> >>
> >> In a 1975 issue of Film Quarterly, Wayne D. McGinnis compared
> >> Chinatown to Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. He suggested that a
> >> "wasteland motif predominates in both works", in which a
> >> character (Noah Cross in Chinatown and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex)
> >> uses "a plague on a city" to get into public power and then
> >> harbor corruption. McGinnis wrote that both works allude to
> >> "a sterility of moral values in its own era": of Athens in
> >> "a time of intellectual upheaval […] after the heroic battle
> >> of Marathon" in Oedipus Rex and of America in the Watergate
> >> era in Chinatown. He also argued that in the film, director
> >> Roman Polanski splits Sophocles' Oedipus into two morally
> >> polar figures, with the film's protagonist Detective Jake
> >> Gittes paralleling the "good" Oedipus: the one uncovering the
> >> source of corruption. McGinnis asserted that after "confronting
> >> the web of evil perpetrated by Cross […] Gittes is the Oedipus
> >> whose success, to the use the words of Cleanth Brooks and
> >> Robert B. Heilman, 'has tended to blind [him] to possibilities
> >> which pure reason fails to see'". McGinnis concluded that
> >> "There is finally pity for the doomed, ignorant Gittes, just
> >> as there is pity for the blind Oedipus in Sophocles", however,
> >> "Gittes' real sight, like Oedipus, comes too late".
> >>
> >> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)>
> >>
> > I see a difference between Freud's idea that sons
> > (is it just sons?) love their mother and resent their
> > father, and the supposed actual history of Oedipus,
> > whose actual father orders the kid taken away
> > to be abandoned to die, since he, Oedipus, is destined
> > to kill his father and marry his own mother (what?!)
> > A twist is that Oedipus instead is adopted, doesn't
> > know that - the adoptive parents deny it - and does
> > know about the destiny, so to try to protect his
> > not-real parents in Corinth, he heads for Thebes -
> > and runs into his actual father (a road rage incident)
> > and then his mother, and destiny takes its course.
> > One reading of this is that when the gods hate you
> > with or without good reason, this is very bad.
> >
> > As far as Oedipus knew for most of his life,
> > he loved his father. Who was not the man, Laius,
> > who arranged his murder as a baby, and then drove
> > a cart over him in an argument at a road junction.
> > Laius seems to be not much of a loss, even excluding
> > a rewrite where he raped a male student which
> > apparently makes everything else fair punishment,
> > of Laius. But Oedipus didn't consciously resent Laius.
> > Perhaps he did unconsciously recognise and resent him?
> >
> > Anyway, which way is it with Thomas Cardif?
> > He knows that Perry Rhodan is his father, and he
> > is against Rhodan? That's more like Mordred -
> > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur%27s_family>
> > Although Mordred's parents may be siblings -
> > that wasn't in the story originally, someone "sexed it up".
> > And then Mordred gets a prophecy and Arthur supposedly
> > tries to kill any child born around the given time.
> > You know, like Voldemort did.
> My original post inadvertently intermingles ideas.
>
> An Oedipus complex is a psychoanalytical term. It involves a child's
> hostility towards the parent of the the same sex - a son who wants to
> kill his father.
> My first snippet shown above pertains to psychoanalysis practice.
> Thomas Cardiff suffers from an Oedipus complex and wants to kill his
> father Perry Rhodan.
> Mordred also suffers from an Oedipus complex. Ergo, Mordred wants to
> kill his father too, King Arthur.
>
> OTOH, /Oedipus Rex/ denotes the Athenian tragedy by Sophocles. The
> second and third snippets appearing above apply to /Oedipus Rex/.
> Danke,

In the Sopocles play, Oedipus has no desire to kill his father; in fact he's
fleeing the area where he thinks his bio parents live to avoid that fate, when
he *does* kill Laius (who he does not know is his father) in the first
recorded incident of road rage.

Nor does he know that Jocasta is his mother when he marries her, as a
prize for getting rid of the Sphinx.

Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus
Complex'.

pt

On Wed, 2 Aug 2023 06:01:41 -0700 (PDT), "pete...@gmail.com"
<petertrei@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, August 1, 2023 at 6:36:58?PM UTC-4, Don wrote:

<snippo mucho>

>> OTOH, /Oedipus Rex/ denotes the Athenian tragedy by Sophocles. The
>> second and third snippets appearing above apply to /Oedipus Rex/.
>> Danke,
>
>In the Sopocles play, Oedipus has no desire to kill his father; in fact he's
>fleeing the area where he thinks his bio parents live to avoid that fate, when
>he *does* kill Laius (who he does not know is his father) in the first
>recorded incident of road rage.
>
>Nor does he know that Jocasta is his mother when he marries her, as a
>prize for getting rid of the Sphinx.
>
>Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus
>Complex'.

IIRC, in one of the works by Freud in the final volume of the set
/Great Books of the Western World/, Freud asserts that the Oedipus
legend (embodied in the play) was the result of the Oedipus Complex
amongst the Ancient Greeks.

IOW,
Freud's OC --> Sophocles' play

And, as another post mentioned, the effect of the play is to cast
Oedipus as a victim of fate. This is hardly surprising, since the myth
(as given in Graves' /The Greek Myths/) makes it clear that that is
what he is: foretold as an infant to be fated to kill his father and
marry his mother, abandoned in the woods to die, adopted by a
childless (but nonetheless royal couple), he goes to Delphi, learns of
the prophecy and ... well, you summarized that very well above.

It remains to mention PDQ Bach's "Oedipus Tex" which, if nothing else,
shows how well known the story is.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

Lynn McGuire wrote:
> Robert Carnegie wrote:
>> Don wrote:

<snip>

>>> Next comes Priestley's thoughts on /Oedipus Rex/.
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> PR's Thomas Cardif affair was treated as an Oedipus Rex adaptation by
>>> me in Lynn's recent review of 67 "Interlude on Siliko 5." And it turns
>>> out Priestley mentions Oedipus Rex in _Man and Time_. And, his words
>>> work better than mine did:
>>>
>>> But the reason for writing plays in this form has nothing to do
>>> with the Time element. It is because their action works like a
>>> coiled spring, producing an effect both of increasing tension
>>> and dramatic inevitability. In plays of this kind (of which
>>> perhaps the supreme example is the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles)
>>> we are made to feel that the characters are helpless victims of
>>> fate.
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

<snip>

>> I see a difference between Freud's idea that sons
>> (is it just sons?) love their mother and resent their
>> father, and the supposed actual history of Oedipus,
>> whose actual father orders the kid taken away
>> to be abandoned to die, since he, Oedipus, is destined
>> to kill his father and marry his own mother (what?!)
>> A twist is that Oedipus instead is adopted, doesn't
>> know that - the adoptive parents deny it - and does
>> know about the destiny, so to try to protect his
>> not-real parents in Corinth, he heads for Thebes -
>> and runs into his actual father (a road rage incident)
>> and then his mother, and destiny takes its course.
>> One reading of this is that when the gods hate you
>> with or without good reason, this is very bad.
>>
>> As far as Oedipus knew for most of his life,
>> he loved his father. Who was not the man, Laius,
>> who arranged his murder as a baby, and then drove
>> a cart over him in an argument at a road junction.
>> Laius seems to be not much of a loss, even excluding
>> a rewrite where he raped a male student which
>> apparently makes everything else fair punishment,
>> of Laius. But Oedipus didn't consciously resent Laius.
>> Perhaps he did unconsciously recognise and resent him?
>>
>> Anyway, which way is it with Thomas Cardif?
>> He knows that Perry Rhodan is his father, and he
>> is against Rhodan? That's more like Mordred -
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur%27s_family>
>> Although Mordred's parents may be siblings -
>> that wasn't in the story originally, someone "sexed it up".
>> And then Mordred gets a prophecy and Arthur supposedly
>> tries to kill any child born around the given time.
>> You know, like Voldemort did.
>
> Thomas Cardif did not know that he was Perry Rhodan and Thora's son
> until he was grown, out of flight school, and a member of the Terran
> Space Forces. He reacted very negatively to this and was deeply
> resentful of both of them.

It's classic Oedipus complex. Cardif only resents his father Perry - a
domineering monster who traumatized Thomas and Thora, his immaculate
mother.

"Rhodan, you denied me parental love. You did it deliberately!-
now will I deny the other: filial love! Now I wish to return to
where my yellowish eyes lead me-to the seed-bed of my roots,
homeward to Arkon!"
In the luxuriously furnished room he began to pace in excited
circles. Now and again he glanced into the mirror and the mirror
showed him the face that he hated in his soul: the face of Perry
Rhodan!
His mother? Her outcry still echoed in his ears. How she must
have suffered not to be able to enclose her own flesh and blood
in her arms, only because this Perry Rhodan had forbidden it!

PR67 "Interlude on Silko 5"
               
               
There's a touch of tension and inevitability to Cardif's story - in the
style of /Oedipus Rex/ as described by Priestly above.

Danke,

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php
telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.

Paul S Person wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Aug 2023 06:01:41 -0700 (PDT), "pete...@gmail.com"
> <pete...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Tuesday, August 1, 2023 at 6:36:58?PM UTC-4, Don wrote:
>
> <snippo mucho>
> >> OTOH, /Oedipus Rex/ denotes the Athenian tragedy by Sophocles. The
> >> second and third snippets appearing above apply to /Oedipus Rex/.
> >> Danke,
> >
> >In the Sopocles play, Oedipus has no desire to kill his father; in fact he's
> >fleeing the area where he thinks his bio parents live to avoid that fate, when
> >he *does* kill Laius (who he does not know is his father) in the first
> >recorded incident of road rage.
> >
> >Nor does he know that Jocasta is his mother when he marries her, as a
> >prize for getting rid of the Sphinx.
> >
> >Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus
> >Complex'.
> IIRC, in one of the works by Freud in the final volume of the set
> /Great Books of the Western World/, Freud asserts that the Oedipus
> legend (embodied in the play) was the result of the Oedipus Complex
> amongst the Ancient Greeks.
>
> IOW,
> Freud's OC --> Sophocles' play
>
> And, as another post mentioned, the effect of the play is to cast
> Oedipus as a victim of fate. This is hardly surprising, since the myth
> (as given in Graves' /The Greek Myths/) makes it clear that that is
> what he is: foretold as an infant to be fated to kill his father and
> marry his mother, abandoned in the woods to die, adopted by a
> childless (but nonetheless royal couple), he goes to Delphi, learns of
> the prophecy and ... well, you summarized that very well above.

Dorothy L. Sayers came to the defense of the Greeks -- I think in actual response to the long-distance diagnosis by Freud -- with the theory that, had Laius not tried to be so clever in avoiding fate, then the prophesy would have turned out allegorical, with more benign effect; Oedipus eclipsing his father's reputation in history, perhaps. I admit I didn't find this alternate future completely convincing.

--
-Jack

On 8/2/2023 2:31 PM, Don wrote:
> Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>> Don wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>>>> Next comes Priestley's thoughts on /Oedipus Rex/.
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> PR's Thomas Cardif affair was treated as an Oedipus Rex adaptation by
>>>> me in Lynn's recent review of 67 "Interlude on Siliko 5." And it turns
>>>> out Priestley mentions Oedipus Rex in _Man and Time_. And, his words
>>>> work better than mine did:
>>>>
>>>> But the reason for writing plays in this form has nothing to do
>>>> with the Time element. It is because their action works like a
>>>> coiled spring, producing an effect both of increasing tension
>>>> and dramatic inevitability. In plays of this kind (of which
>>>> perhaps the supreme example is the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles)
>>>> we are made to feel that the characters are helpless victims of
>>>> fate.
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> <snip>
>
>>> I see a difference between Freud's idea that sons
>>> (is it just sons?) love their mother and resent their
>>> father, and the supposed actual history of Oedipus,
>>> whose actual father orders the kid taken away
>>> to be abandoned to die, since he, Oedipus, is destined
>>> to kill his father and marry his own mother (what?!)
>>> A twist is that Oedipus instead is adopted, doesn't
>>> know that - the adoptive parents deny it - and does
>>> know about the destiny, so to try to protect his
>>> not-real parents in Corinth, he heads for Thebes -
>>> and runs into his actual father (a road rage incident)
>>> and then his mother, and destiny takes its course.
>>> One reading of this is that when the gods hate you
>>> with or without good reason, this is very bad.
>>>
>>> As far as Oedipus knew for most of his life,
>>> he loved his father. Who was not the man, Laius,
>>> who arranged his murder as a baby, and then drove
>>> a cart over him in an argument at a road junction.
>>> Laius seems to be not much of a loss, even excluding
>>> a rewrite where he raped a male student which
>>> apparently makes everything else fair punishment,
>>> of Laius. But Oedipus didn't consciously resent Laius.
>>> Perhaps he did unconsciously recognise and resent him?
>>>
>>> Anyway, which way is it with Thomas Cardif?
>>> He knows that Perry Rhodan is his father, and he
>>> is against Rhodan? That's more like Mordred -
>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur%27s_family>
>>> Although Mordred's parents may be siblings -
>>> that wasn't in the story originally, someone "sexed it up".
>>> And then Mordred gets a prophecy and Arthur supposedly
>>> tries to kill any child born around the given time.
>>> You know, like Voldemort did.
>>
>> Thomas Cardif did not know that he was Perry Rhodan and Thora's son
>> until he was grown, out of flight school, and a member of the Terran
>> Space Forces. He reacted very negatively to this and was deeply
>> resentful of both of them.
>
> It's classic Oedipus complex. Cardif only resents his father Perry - a
> domineering monster who traumatized Thomas and Thora, his immaculate
> mother.
>
> "Rhodan, you denied me parental love. You did it deliberately!-
> now will I deny the other: filial love! Now I wish to return to
> where my yellowish eyes lead me-to the seed-bed of my roots,
> homeward to Arkon!"
> In the luxuriously furnished room he began to pace in excited
> circles. Now and again he glanced into the mirror and the mirror
> showed him the face that he hated in his soul: the face of Perry
> Rhodan!
> His mother? Her outcry still echoed in his ears. How she must
> have suffered not to be able to enclose her own flesh and blood
> in her arms, only because this Perry Rhodan had forbidden it!
>
> PR67 "Interlude on Silko 5"
>
>
> There's a touch of tension and inevitability to Cardif's story - in the
> style of /Oedipus Rex/ as described by Priestly above.
>
> Danke,

Ah, I got it wrong, Thomas Cardiff only hated his father. His mother
however was the picture of innocence in his mind. Been a while since I
read PR #67 which is Ackerman #59 (Feb 14, 2023).
https://www.amazon.com/Interlude-Siliko-Perry-Rhodan-59/dp/B0006WTFHQ/

I need to make a list of all the books that I have read in the last 60+
years. And my reviews.

Lynn