ABSTRACT
The metaphor that psychoanalysis derives from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is used to describe a set of dilemmas that are key to the construction of internal world. In recent years, Steiner has significantly extended awareness of the evasion of truth in the Oedipus story. He discusses Sophocles' Oedipus plays in terms of a movement from denial to omnipotence in the face of unbearable truth. In The Oedipus Complex (Steiner, 1989), the different contributors each emphasize the connection between working through the oedipus complex, the toleration of ambivalence in working through the depressive position, and the capacity for tolerating connections between different mental elements (thinking). Fisher (1993) discusses the influence of contemporary thinking about the oedipus complex on couple psychotherapy. Mother's own sexual feelings are aroused in what she must finally acknowledge as an impossible link. Of course, it is not literally impossible, as Oedipus and Jocasta knew.
