ABSTRACT
The curse on Oedipus is also upon us: 'His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him'. All of us, Freud believed, directed our 'first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father'. No wonder in Totem and Taboo, Freud posited incest and patricide as universal taboos that were common to all civilizations, indeed as the primary constituents of all civilization, the source of conscience, morality and guilt. Freud, was able to deflect from too literal a reading of the Oedipus archetype by explaining that the Oedipus complex has a merely 'symbolic' meaning: the mother in it means the unattainable, which must be renounced in the interests of civilization; the father who is killed in the Oedipus myth is the 'inner' father, from whom one must set oneself free in order to become independent.
