Of all the fictions that Freud calls upon to render an account of the psychefrom Emperor's New Clothes in The Interpretation of Dreams to the legend of Moses in Moses and Monotheism-the drama of Oedipus is his most recurrent and insistent reference. Sophocles' protagonist provides the name for what Freud frequently presented as his major discovery. The Oedipus complex still challenges definition from contemporary analysts and theorists, and writers' interpretive stances be situated according to their characteristic uses of this one concept. With the matter of Oedipus so chronically urgent and undecided, one recent perspective in particular seems promising, one which aligns psychoanalysis with the theory of drama and theorizes a dramatic structure informing the psychic order [See Andre' Green, Un Oeil en trop. Le complexe d'Oedipe dans la tragedie (Paris: Minuit, 1969), and Philippe Locoue-Labarthe, Theatrum Analyticum, Glyph 2 (1970)]. For if a drama could signify for Freud such crucial propositions of psychoanalytic thought, then the signifying mode of drama warrants inquiry. Freud reads Oedipus: the Oedipus complex draws its specificity from the Sophoclean tragedy, rather than just from the ostensible semantic content of the Oedipus legend. To rethink Freud's concept, we ought not only to re-read its first formulation, his claim in The Interpretation of Dreams that Oedipus' unfolding can be likened to the work of a psychoanalysis,' but also to reconsider its primary source, Sophocles' version of the myth. Freud uses the drama of Oedipus to tell a story about psychic development and to describe the status of sex in human existence. Perhaps we use the drama of Oedipus to tell a story about the development of Freudian thought and to describe the status of the text in psychoanalytic thinking. We could take our cue from the initial, exemplary project of psychoanalytic investigation, The Interpretation of Dreams, and take as clue Freud's dream of solving the riddle of the Sphinxan actual dream mentioned in a letter to Fliess on May 31st, 1897. Freud was also dreaming of solving the riddle of dreams,2 and the solution written out in the Traum-