The Oedipus Papers (Classics in Psychoanalysis Monograph 6)

Without the heroic story of Oedipus as a point of reference, Freud may never have conceived of psychoanalysis in the form that we know it today. So assert editors George Pollock and John Munder Ross in the introduction to their groundbreaking volume, The Oedipus Papers. Collected for the first time in this anthology are all the essential psychoanalytic contributions on the Oedipus myth, each reinterpretation reflecting the changes taking place in the discipline since Freud first alluded to Sophocles' tragedy nearly a century ago. The book begins with Freud's pioneer venture into mythology and literature, proceeding from there to the efforts of his immediate disciples-among them, Ferenczi, Rank, and Reik-- and to later reinterpretations by theorists and scholars such as Devereux, Kanzer and Fromm. Today, Pollock and Ross demonstrate, the modem psychoanalyst sees in the legend of Oedipus not only an individual, inner Oedipal drama but a family tragedy involving generational conflict and pre-oedipal trauma. And thus the book concludes with some altogether new pieces on the clinical implications of this more complex perspective by researchers and theorists like James Herzog and Robert Michels. For anyone who hopes to understand clinical psychoanalysis and its dynamic history, The Oedipus Papers is essential reading.