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Pioneer psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was fascinated by the story of King Oedipus, as Sophocles depicted him within Oedipus the King, as a work of literature. Clearly, however, Freud also recognized how Sophocles's story, at least in a literal sense if not a figurative or psychological one, paralleled his particular new theory of early childhood development, that at the four-year-old stage, a child "falls in love" with the opposite sex parent and wishes, then, to kill the same-sex parent in order to destroy a rival. Freud made the name "Oedipus" far better known than it would otherwise have been.

Without Sophocles's play, of course, there would be no term like "Oedipus Complex," to describe today's best-known (theoretical) stage of early childhood development. However, Freud's theory is also very far from the story of Oedipus and his unfortunate fate, as told by Sophocles. Therefore, to think of King Oedipus only in...
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