ABSTRACT
The slow unravelling of the drama of Oedipus the King begins with the failure of Polybus and Merope to tell him the truth about his birth. Little has been made of the fact that Sophocles is suggesting that if we are to account for personal suffering, then the antecedent conditions need to be known. On grain account the tragedy in which Oedipus murders his father and marries his mother is not the enactment of a universal wish within us all, but it is the playing out of a pathological fantasy that is precipitated by the failure to tell Oedipus the truth about his ancestral history. The psychoanalytic literature on the adopted child points frequently to the wish to murder the father who has inflicted unconsciously soul murder but murder is not the only desire. That is to say, he was more vulnerable to incestuous and destructive desires.
