A Greek play written by Sophocles the great tragedian. According to the story, the king and queen has a baby son, but the oracle warns them that the child will bring evil to the kingdom by killing his father and marrying his mother. The parents are distraught but agree that the best thing to do is to kill the new born. The person saddled with this grievous responsibility however takes pity on the child and lets it live. It is adopted by a couple from another city but when the boy grows into a man and finds out about the prophesy of his birth, he runs away from home and soon kills an old man in his farm. He goes into the city, solves their present problems and is made king. He marries the previous king's wife and fathers children by her only to discover later that the man he killed is his father and the woman he married is his mother.
Sigmund Freud read into this text a whole new meaning, pushing that the complex that makes Oedipus marry his mother after killing his father is a psychological thing and has little to do with the prophesy.
Scientists and psychologists have risen to debunk Freud's theories on the parent-child fixation, but it is worthy of note that we continue to see such things in our societies even today. If we say Freud was totally wrong, how come we have continued to see such happenings?
Perhaps, a good deal of men who sleep with their own daughters are indeed sexual predators who do need to be punished to the maximum. But then how much of these offspring rape cases are actual rape?
I read a newspaper article recently of a woman who is asking for help on what to do with her daughter who has basically taken her father for a lover. The father and daughter are apparently in love and are not even doing it secretly. Now I know a lot of Nigerians will attribute this kind of phenomenon to the works of the devil and the enemy. But for a minute, let's ignore religion and spirituality and spiriticism. Let's look at this from a very practical point of view, if you have a pubertal child in the house who would rather talk to her father or his mother than talk to a parent of the same sex then you would know that even though this might not be a cause for alarm, it is definitely a pointer to the potentially super dangerous nature of the Oedipus complex. When parents have squabbles and children take sides, have you noticed that female children tend to stick with their father's and male to their mother's side? That might be another pointer. Finally, if it is true that female children often find it easier to get money out of their dad's as sons are more likely to get money out of their moms, then you'll see where I'm going with this.
Recently, a young girl who was carrying a six months old pregnancy for her father was interviewed. She claimed that she was raped. Not once, not twice, not thrice. And she got pregnant and did not make any real effort to have it aborted. Plus she refused to give up the identity of the father of her child until much latter. She was fifteen years old when the sexual assault started.My question is this; why didn't she say something after the first incident. After she discovered that she was pregnant, why didn't she reveal who was responsible? Was she scared or was she protecting herself, her father and their unborn child? If she had gone public early enough, society might have prevailed on her to have an abortion, she must have known this because an average fifteen year old would know this. (not to talk of the fact that she was seventeen when she became pregnant) so why wait till it is almost impossible to have an abortion before revealing. For six months, she did not budge. She then tells the world after six months?
The Oedipus complex has been around us a lot. It is everywhere in various degrees. A healthy level of the Oedipus complex might be when a person chooses a spouse according to their perception of their opposite sex parent, but even this can be dangerous.
There is this saying; that the way a man treats his woman is a reflection of how he sees his mother. So let's say his mother was abusive and was a bad wife and mother. He might unconsciously treat his woman with that particular stereotype and vice versa. So basically, the Oedipus complex is a double edged sword that can either save you or kill you, depending on how you let it influence your decisions.
No comments:
Post a Comment