To mature, we must resolve our “Oedipus complex,” our unconscious antagonism toward the parent of our own sex and attraction to the parent of the opposite sex. Basing his theories on Oedipus Tyrannus and the myth outside the play, Sigmund Freud universalized Oedipus’s story into a familial conflict waged within a child’s psyche. Sophocles’s tragedy influenced subsequent dramas, including Seneca’s Oedipus (mid-first century CE) and Jean Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine (1934). 429-425 BCE, also called Oedipus Rex), regarded by Aristotle as a masterpiece of Athenian drama because Oedipus’s discovery of his identity coincides with his reversal of fortune. The story is best known from Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus (c. The myth of Oedipus concerns the Theban king who unwittingly murdered his father and married his mother.
