ABSTRACT
Moving from his revolutionary self-analysis to his clinical psychoanalytic experience and considering both culture and myth, Freud took the oedipus complex to be central to human life. However, questioning that drastic inference has never disappeared from the front lines of analytic debate. While the specifics of any individual’s oedipal constellations can deviate vastly from the abstracted norm, far from Psychology 101 simplistic models, essential aspects of that infinitely varied human life that we also call oedipal may nonetheless indeed is universal, even inevitable. Nonetheless, the manifest myth that best captures one person’s life and times may not be most apt as the metaphor for another person’s life. Indeed, humanity has created many myths precisely because individual constellations of experience and psychology are numberless. With this, the possibility of therapeutic psychoanalysis was born, a new form of drama wherein one’s own stories can be played out with play and player examined, all at the same time. The odeon became the couch.
