ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a discussion of Oedipus Rex, suggesting how and why this tragedy grounds both the psychoanalytic project and Schelling’s philosophy of freedom. Through a radical rethinking of prophecy and fate, this claim is supported through a close reading of Schelling’s most influential work, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (Freiheitsschrift). The interpretation emphasizes this text as a transitional moment in Schelling’s thought, as he moves toward a more dynamic and vital unconscious—an unconscious inextricably linked to freedom and his concept of personality that undergirds it. Here the connection between some of Schelling’s most complex metaphysical arguments and psychoanalytic therapy begins to be fleshed out in some detail, as the good of the subject is threatened from either side by the evils of self-enclosure (neurosis) and of self-dissolution (psychosis).
