The other day I was going through some of my old clippings and came across an article I did for Christopher Street magazine back around 1982. It was based on an essay I wrote in college about Freud’s reluctance to discuss the issue of homosexuality vis à vis his famous Oedipus Complex. I had discovered during research into the myth that Oedipus’ father was known as “the original pederast.” And upon further digging around, I uncovered various tellings of the myth of the Sphinx and of Oedipus that seriously undermined Freud’s theory. I have since learned that I was not alone in questioning Freud’s blind spot. And much of what I wrote then was naive and poorly expressed. But I still think the article is worth saving as part of my on-going archive, and I wanted to share it with my friends here in a slightly truncated version. Keep in mind that the term “pederast” in this context is not to be confused with “pedophile”. The Greeks had a word for almost everything in their world. We don’t. I wonder if I were to write this piece today whether I’d have bothered to try and explain homophobia. It seems redundant now in an age in which homophobia has become accepted as a harsh reality of society, and not just a nonce word to explain a minority’s discontent. I guess the point of this overly long essay is that it is not a minority issue at all, but a fundamental part of what makes us all tick.
Freud’s Blind Spot
One of the great errors of modern thought is that Freud, in developing the Oedipal theory, completely neglected to mention the fact that Oedipus’ father was gay. In describing Oedipus’ father, Laius, King of Thebes, I use the term “gay” because in the context of his times and the modern connotation of the word, Laius was most assuredly gay. He lived openly and proudly with a young man named Chrysippus, and it is suggested in Greek legend that he was indeed the “original pederast.” Why Laius would choose pederasty as an alternative to conjugal relations with his wife, Jocasta, is the key to breaking the mysterious secret surrounding the very odd circumstances of Oedipus’ life. For the myth of Oedipus is not only the story of a young man who kills his father and weds his mother, but the tale of a foundling whose parents tried to kill him.
The fact that Laius and Jocasta wanted to kill their newborn son has been forever overshadowed by the murder of Laius by Oedipus. How and why Oedipus becomes the victim of a curse against his parents is a story that has long been overlooked because it involves homosexuality. Freud completely ignored it because it would have undermined his entire theory of infantile sexuality which is at the heart of his science of psychoanalysis. It is time we pull Laius’ skeleton out of the closet.
The basis of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is a riddle: Who murdered Laius? The question is never resolved; the greater crime of incest overwhelms the end of the play. At first this is paradoxical. If the whole of the drama centers around the riddle of Laius’ death, then why does it become less important than Oedipus’ incestuous relationship?
Recent psychoanalysts have raised the matter that since Sophocles’ play contains such an uncensored version of the Oedipus Complex, it is probably hiding something else. Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex in the psychosexual development of the child depends entirely on the degree of repression involved: “In the Oedipus, the child’s wishful phantasy that underlies it is brought up into the open and realized as if it would be in a dream.” Freud argues that since Jocasta herself comments on our tendency in dreams to work out fantasies (”How many times have men in dreams, too, slept with their own mothers!”), the play enacts in real terms this incestuous desire for the mother. If indeed the play is a dream, the manifest content would have to be misleading, a veiling of what is implicit. Freud ignores his own precepts and extrapolates a theory from what is explicit.
The question of the murderer’s identity is never solved because the murder is symbolic of another crime, one that was even more horrible an idea than incest with the mother: incest with the father.
Why did Laius originally want to kill Oedipus? The answer to this question is obscured in the play and ignored by Freud. Yet a resolution is of central structural importance because Laius is trying to circumvent a curse that was laid upon him. During his early manhood, Laius raped and abducted the beautiful boy Chrysippus. The boy’s father, King Pelops, was infuriated and ordered a curse upon Laius. It is suggested in most versions of the story that Chrysippus was quite happy to be with Laius, but his father refused to accept the relationship. Times have not changed.
Laius’ curse was that any son born to him would live to kill him and marry his wife. It is clear from most sources that Laius nonetheless kept Chrysippus with him as his live-in lover even during his marriage to Jocasta. But Laius was careful not to risk procreation, lest the curse be enacted. He devoted his sexual energies entirely to Chrysippus. For this reason, he is known as the “original pederast.” Some historians see the story of Laius as a dramatization of the shift from a matrilineal to a patrilineal society; by adopting Chrysippus, Laius secured control over his throne through his own lineage, not Jocasta’s. Philip Elliot Slater, the author of The Glory of Hera, argues that “the tendency toward homosexuality” in Greek society is an “essential part of a total pattern of response.” The myth of Oedipus seems to have as its purpose an explication of the rise of pederasty through “diluting the mother/son pathology and providing a substitute father-son bond.”
At some point, however, Laius’ resolution fails under the influence of alcohol. It is not clear exactly how Oedipus was conceived, whether Laius simply forgot himself when drunk or whether Jocasta, hoping to have a child as a defense against the influence of her husband’s heir and lover, seduced Laius while he was drunk. That Jocasta hated Laius is well-documented. The fact that she marries Oedipus immediately after her husband’s death is ample evidence of her lack of grief and her resentment for the crime committed by her husband.
In Sophocles’ play, the murder of Laius occurs when Oedipus encounters him on the way to Thebes. Apparently, Laius is rude and Oedipus kills him. The nature of this rudeness is left open to speculation by Sophocles. Other chronicles are more explicit. In the Apollodorus, one version states that Laius tried to rape Oedipus. Another account holds that Laius and Oedipus were arguing over Chrysippus, and that Laius tried to kill Oedipus out of raving jealousy. Still another version mentions that Jocasta was with Laius and that Oedipus raped her after raping her husband.
Perhaps Sophocles dropped the murder of Laius in his play because what is more horrible to Oedipus is the realization that it was his father who sexually assaulted him. Buggery at the hands of robbers and thieves was commonplace. But one’s father? Perhaps this is why Oedipus doesn’t kill himself (as Jocasta does), but rather blinds himself in a supreme gesture of self-denial. Oedipus’s closing remarks reflect the horror. Speaking of the “narrow place of these three paths,” he asks: “Do you remember still the things I did to you? When I’d come here, what I then did once more. Oh Marriages! Marriages! One should not name what never should have been!”
Notice that Oedipus uses the plural when referring to the “things” he did to his father, and what he did “again” when he came to Thebes and married his mother. Conceivably, the term “narrow place” is a euphemism for sodomy, as “dirt road” is today. He also speaks of “marriages” in the plural. Clearly he not only married his mother, but he “married” his father. This is the horror that should never have been, the literary antecedent of “the love that dare not speak its name.”
That Laius was gay is documented. That he and Oedipus had sex is as yet unresolved. But what insight does the mere suggestion of such a liaison bring to our understanding of what Freud described as the Oedipal complex?
In his Totem and Taboo, Freud derived a theory of personality development from the Oedipus myth that he projected onto the general human condition. In his theory, he revealed the bisexual nature of children. The choice of the opposite sex as love object is a direct result of the proper passage through the Oedipus complex. Specifically, this complex refers to identification.
At the outset of infancy, a male child is incapable of distinguishing his mother from others, except as a provider. Infantile identity is entirely narcissistic, demanding those elements essential to existence and self-preservation. As soon as the infant is capable of object-relation, he takes as his first love object the mother who feeds and tends him. During the pre-genital stage of development, the child is forced to make a decision between allying with the love object, his mother, or the “other,” the super-ego, his father. Freud states that due to the fear of castration from this “other” power (in that the mother herself appears to be castrated and that identification with her would induce a similar punishment), the infant will renounce his love object relationship in favor of his father. Self-identification takes its first step toward an association between the phallus and the self.
The renunciation of his love object relationship with the mother is, however, a substitute for actual castration. Castration occurs in the psyche of the child as he adopts a feminine role toward the father. The father will dictate the development of the child’s ego. He gradually adopts the prescribed masculine role, takes pride in his penis, and wants to be like his father. He has passed through the oral and anal stages, as directed by the super-ego, his father. The struggle with sexual identity is completed by the fifth year, if development is normal and the femininity stage is passed and repressed. With the onset of puberty, the male child again takes as his love object a member of the opposite sex. His sexual persuasion stems from his repressed libidinal desires for the mother. Ambivalent feelings for the father, however, are and remain severely repressed.
Clearly, then, by not investigating the matter of Laius’ overt homosexuality — a sexuality he practiced rather than repressed — Freud ignores the significant issue of the etiology of homosexuality in the child. The choice of the father as love object may not occur only out of a fear of castration, but through the inducement of the father.
Essentially, Freud perceives homosexuality as a fixation at the narcissistic stage of psychosexual development. In his essay on “Paranoia and Homosexuality,” Freud argues that the “homosexual choice of object is originally more closely related to narcissism than the heterosexual: hence, when a strong unwelcome homosexual excitation suffers repudiation, the way back to narcissism is especially easy to find.” Freud can only see homosexual urges as aberrations, when in fact an association with a non-narcissistic object — the father — determines the love object choice.
Freud focuses on the feminization of the male child in relation to his father, a feminization that is induced by fear. He imitates his mother in order to win the affections of his father. Yet the Oedipus myth demonstrates that such assumptions are false. If Freud wanted to use the dreamlike content of these myths to generalize about the human condition, he should have accepted that what would have been a natural act for a Greek child came to be regarded as an aberration in the ensuing centuries. That he extrapolates a theory of the Oedipal family without mentioning that Laius was gay throws into question all the basic tenets of the theory.
It is often argued that pederasty in ancient Greece served a purpose, that in fact it could aid a young man in discovering areas of his psychosexual self that he would never glean from adolescent heterosexual relations. Likewise, the nurturing of a son by his father would not necessarily be a feminine-masculine exchange, but rather a male bonding that could only be beneficial to the psyche of the child.
The Oedipus story shows us the fallacy and danger of repression. Freud theorizes on the nature of paranoia using the same format. He assumes that the paranoid behavior is a direct result of the emergence of latent homosexual desires: “Persecutory paranoia is the means by which a person defends himself against a homosexual impulse which has become too powerful.” Unable to deal with his monstrous thoughts, the paranoid projects them onto hallucinations and other voices that create feelings of persecution. Freud’s theory of paranoia further generates his analysis of the etiology of homosexuality: that it is basically a sexuality of fear.
Slater argues in The Glory of Hera that homosexuality developed in Greece as a “defense against hidden but incapacitating fears of the opposite sex.” Yet such theories fail to explain the presence of paranoia in the minds of confirmed homosexuals. If the fear is not being repressed, then what is this fear? The curse against Laius can be seen as a persecution complex, one that pursues him throughout his life, but it is Jocasta, not Laius, who is paranoid. As she herself states, “Never again just for some oracle will I shoot frightened glances right and left.” Since Laius was overtly homosexual, phobias of his sexuality are clearly in the minds of his enemies. It is Chrysippus’ father, Pelops (below) who enacts the curse that threatens Laius’ life, and it is the paranoid Jocasta who implements the punishment.
If paranoia is a result of the fear of one’s homosexuality, as Freud argues, then it would be useful to investigate how this “fear of homosexuality” begins. Freud doesn’t take that investigative route. He accepts as a given that one would naturally be afraid of homosexual thoughts since they have been, according to his theory, repressed through the maturation process. That anyone should be even remotely afraid of homosexuality seems to me to be an issue worth probing. Freud finds the cause of paranoia, but he doesn’t see that the cause is the paranoia that lies behind all paranoia: homophobia.
Homophobia is often a fear that requires action to alleviate it. In Oedipus, we are shown the effects of such homophobic action. Pelops invokes a terrible curse on Laius for abducting his son. Likewise Jocasta fears her homosexual husband because he does not need her sexually and because his union with Chrysippus is a threat to her rule. She will not have a son to sustain her matrilineal reign. She chooses to enact Pelops’ curse and is therefore his accomplice. It is Oedipus who actually kills Laius. We have seen how an act of seduction might have occurred at the crossroads into Thebes. Given Laius’ sexual history, he may have made advances at Oedipus. His son, in an act of homophobia, killed him. The son does not, as Freud postulates, kill the father out of jealous desire for the mother, but out of fear of the father’s desire for him.
It is no coincidence that Oedipus is also the killer of the Sphinx. After he kills his father, he meets the Sphinx, a cannibalistic monster with a woman’s head, wings, and the body of a lion. After she has sexual intercourse, she devours her lovers, usually young men.
There is a certain parallel between this sexual monster and Laius. The name Sphinx, in fact, is derived from the the same root as the word “sphincter,” and both refer to a muscular ability to swallow and envelope. It is suggested that the Sphinx killed her victims during the sexual act. If we were to examine the Oedipus myth as a dream structure in which, according to Freud, “successive episodes are differently distorted versions of the same content,” we can attach the same significance to Oedipus’ murder of his father and to his solution of the riddle and subsequent killing of the Sphinx.
To solve the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus resolves his own mystery: that man is weakest when he has four legs, i.e., when he is a child. Oedipus is that frightened crawling infant. Faced with that realization, he stabs the Sphinx with his spear. Oedipus’ violent behavior makes us question the motive of his anger. Can we really extrapolate from the experience of this child a theory that is applicable to all humanity?
The most insistent criticism of Freud’s Oedipal theory has come from feminists who complain that the Oedipus complex only represents the sexual development in the psyche of a male child. Freud’s theory simply will not explain the sexuality of the female, mainly because Freud never saw the female as much more than a castrated male. The famous source of “penis envy.” The reason his theory fails, as I see it, is because the entire complex pivots on one specific moment: the moment the child renounces his sexual desire for the father. The male child chooses identification with the penis and envisions the penis as a weapon of self-defense. The moment this phallocentric identity is threatened, the Oedipal male resorts to violence.
Oedipus is the ultimate Macho Man, hiding and bluffing behind a facade of masculine superiority. Oedipus kills the first man he meets on his way to Thebes — his father. He kills the Sphinx even though it is no longer a threat. And he marries the first woman he meets — his mother. He bullies his way to the throne of Thebes and is finally confronted by the effects of his hubris, his will to violate. In the Greek mind, hubris was specifically tied to an overbearing and sexually aggressive nature.
Oedipus’ mask is no more than a defense mechanism devised to protect him from uncontrollable fears. What Oedipus sees in the homosexual figure of the father is the very mirror of his own repressed homosexual desires. Unable to accept the presence of this “weakness” in himself, Oedipus kills his father. This symbolic murder allows him to assume a heterosexual personality. The maintenance of the heterosexual male exterior is the continuance of this archetypal murder: a constant killing of the homosexual.
One could call this homophobic reaction the Oedipus Reflex, an involuntary reaction on the part of the male that immediately represses an expected homosexual feeling. The Oedipus Reflex enables the male to swallow the impulse and to continue to regard homosexuality with disgust. Freud was a pioneer in his analysis that repression leads to guilt, but a lack of precision characterizes his creation of the Oedipal complex because he ignores the significance of Laius’ overt homosexuality. The guilt in the Oedipus complex stems from homosexual desires, but it is because of the Oedipus Reflex that the homosexual is condemned. 
