ABSTRACT
The most famous legacy left by Freud, namely, the Oedipus complex, appears in the course of the child's development and is the central organiser of psychic life around which the individual's sexual identity is structured. In the Oedipus complex, the child is unaware of his incestuous and parricidal impulses towards his parents. Inspired by the myth, Freud began by describing a direct Oedipus complex in boys and girls, before introducing the notion of an inverted Oedipus complex, completing the direct form. The Oedipus complex "dissolves" or "disappears" in boys around the age of five. From the psychoanalytic point of view, myths not only reflect the nature of unconscious interpersonal conflicts characteristic of human nature, but they also dramatise the defences aimed at rejecting outside of consciousness the impulses that are intolerable for it.
