Oedipus

Adam Phillips, in Terrors and Experts, says: 'Oedipus is so important in psychoanalysis because he does something that can be found out, something he can know about ...' [9] But it's not the doing, it's the desiring to do that's important psychoanalytically. Experiencing a desire, or orienting one's subjectivity along the lines of force of a desire, is hardly a doing ...

He goes on: 'the Oedipus plays would be a very different theatrical experience if everybody was walking around the stage completely baffled all the time (how would it end?)'

Well ... duh. How would it end? With death, of course. 'If everybody was baffled all the time'? The complexity and variety of critical responses to Sophocles shows that, in a deep sense, we are baffled; we have always been baffled; being baffled is kind of the point ...