The scenography of trauma: a ‘Copernican’ reading of Sophocles' Oedipus the King

Abstract

This paper situates Freud's reading of Sophocles' Oedipus at a major turning point in the development of his thought, in which he gradually replaces an exogenous trauma-based theory of psychopathology with an endogenous drive-based theory of sexual development as such. Jean Laplanche has argued that in the abandonment of the model of traumatic seduction certain key elements were lost: in particular the infant's primordial relation to the adult other with an already formed unconscious and sexuality, and the traumatic temporality of human sexual development (Nachtraglichkeit). Freud's reading of the Oedipus as a model of psychic formation notoriously erases the role of the daemonic in Oedipus's encounters with the oracle of Apollo and his birth parents, substituting the internal necessity of an 'oedipal' fate imposed on the individual by 'Nature'. The essay invokes Freud's understanding of trauma in an attempt to recapture these lost dimensions of otherness through an analysis based on Thomas Gould's translation and commentary which foregrounds the play's pattern of daemonic agency at work in the encounters between Oedipus and his parents.