Current Issue
This volume of Metapsychologica brings together the contributions developed during the 2024/25 seminar of the School of Freudian Psychoanalysis and is devoted to a rigorous re-examination of the Oedipus complex in Freudian theory. The chosen title, Œdipus Reloaded, is intended to signal not a mere revisiting of the theme, but rather an operation of theoretical restitution: restoring the Oedipus complex to its properly metapsychological status, freeing it from the distortions produced by a prolonged and often superficial reception within academic and cultural discourse.
The decision to devote an entire year to the theme of Oedipus responds to a need that is both theoretical and polemical. More than a century after its formulation, the Oedipus complex has undergone a process of progressive banalization that has obscured its conceptual scope. The criticisms that have followed one another — from structuralist objections to those deriving from philosophical and anthropological approaches — prove, upon close examination, largely insufficient on the level of argumentation, if not outright expressions of ideological rejection.
One of the most deeply rooted and persistent misunderstandings concerns the confusion between the Oedipus complex and the myth of Oedipus. Contemporary reception tends to treat the Oedipus complex as though it were a psychoanalytic interpretation of the Sophoclean myth, thereby reducing the Freudian concept to one hermeneutic key among others. Yet, as the seminar contributions have rightly emphasized, Freud himself explicitly excluded any possible identification between the plane of myth and that of theory. The Oedipus complex is not a reading of the myth: it is a structure of subjectivity that finds in the myth a privileged illustration, not its foundation. This implies that the Oedipus complex can never claim to exhaust the myth in its multiple layers of meaning.
The volume also subjects some of the most influential interpretations within the academic landscape to critical scrutiny, revealing their structural fragilities. This is the case, for example, with the reading proposed by Jean-Pierre Vernant, whose treatment of fundamental concepts of ancient Greek culture — beginning with the notion of philia — reveals a surprising unease in confronting the sexual implications of Freud’s text, an unease that cannot easily be justified in a scholar of his stature. Similarly, the structuralist approach of Claude Lévi-Strauss, which identifies structural invariants in the myth of Oedipus that are not mutually coherent and that reduce the sexual core of the problem of incest, ultimately fails to provide an effective causal explanation of the myth itself. Nor does the proposal advanced by René Girard appear more satisfactory, since his sacrificial reading reduces the entire Oedipal drama to a mechanism of victimization which, in its claim to universality, ultimately dissolves the specificity of the Oedipal conflict within a confessional framework.
These paradigmatic examples — to which the individual contributions in the volume add further and more detailed observations — demonstrate how certain readings, consolidated within the academic tradition, prove upon closer examination to lack genuine argumentative foundation. The apparent solidity of these critiques dissolves as soon as they are confronted with the Freudian text and with the demands of the theory’s internal coherence.
The seminar’s reflection, however, was not limited to a pars destruens. The contributions collected in this volume explore the figure of Oedipus in the plurality of its articulations: psychoanalytic, mythical, ethno-anthropological, clinical, ethical, and cultural. The Oedipus that emerges from these works is not a doctrinal residue to be updated or surpassed, but a theoretical operator whose fecundity lies precisely in its capacity to articulate heterogeneous dimensions of human experience.
We hope that reading this volume will provide readers with the tools for a reconsideration of the Oedipus complex free from prejudice and, more generally, for an engagement with Freudian theory that is commensurate with its complexity.
The Editorial Director