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From: Bobbie Sellers <blissInSanFrancisco@mouse-potato.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Frankenstein
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2024 17:54:25 -0700
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On 7/12/24 08:46, Paul S Person wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:45:21 -0000 (UTC), Don <g@crcomp.net> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> This is because the point of the play is that "the gods" are cruel and
> remorseless. Oedipus is their victim, not a villain. This is, after
> all, /tragedy/, not crime drama.
> 
> Robert Graves somewhere asserts that the winning plays (well, the
> tragedies) each year (and those we have were all winning plays, that
> is why they survived) were treated as /theology/. The Sophocles
> contribution to Greek pagan theology must have been very much a
> downer.
> 
>> Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus
>> Complex'.
> 
> IIRC, Freud asserted that the Oedipus myth was a /product/ of his
> complex, and so "proof" that it existed way-back-when.
> 
> When I read the volume /Freud/ in the /Great Books of the Western
> World/ collection I formed the theory that his was a formal system: if
> you replaced "sex" with, say, "eating corn flakes with milk for
> breakfast", then nothing would change except that "sex" would become a
> sublimation of "eating corn flakes with milk for breakfast", as would
> everything said to be a sublimation of sex by Freud.
> 
> IOW, I concluded that Freud's theory was founded on sex because Freud
> was obsessed by sex. And for no other reason.

	Well the patients he saw were sexual abused which because
he was very concerned about societal acceptance in Vienna of the
time he reported as the patients' fantasies


> 
> But that's just me. And very much IMHO. Feel free to disagree.
> 
> Freud himself, in /Civilization and Its Discontent/, asserted that all
> the problems he was investigating was a result of Western culture (ie,
> Victorianism). People not raised in that culture, including anyone
> below the upper middle class (which was good, as they could not
> possibly afford the fees), was free of them.
> 
> The whole production, IOW, is a result of "high culture". Which rather
> raises the issue "how stupid do you have to be to adopt a 'high
> culture' that drives you and your children insane?".

	It would be hard to find a culture, high or low,
which when it basic premises are extended far enough would
not drive its victims mad.

	Well it was just a result of the Catholic religion and its peruliar 
views of sexuality.  It was a state religion for the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire which disitegrated after WW II. But it
caused a lot of so-called religious wars in the time of
the Protestan Reformation.
	SF connection is the "Ring of Fire' series.

	Have you watched the PBS series "Vienna Blood" which
features the cooperation of a police detective with a Jewish
Physician who is a follower of Fruedian discourse.

	I happen to think it is really excellent and it depicts
the forces which will later bring the A-H Empire to an end and
which still disturb the peace of the atates which were part of
that Empire.
	
	bliss

-- 
b l i s s - S F 4 e v e r at D S L E x t r e m e dot com