Vol. 76/No. 22      June 4, 2012

Below is an excerpt from Woman’s Evolution by Evelyn Reed, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for May. Reed was a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party. The excerpt describes how the rise of class-divided patriarchal society and its accompanying oppression of women is reflected in Greek mythology and plays. Copyright © 1975 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY EVELYN REED  
The conflict and turbulence that accompanied the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy left an indelible imprint in Greek mythology. The fifth-century Greek dramatists created their tragedies on the basis of these myth-histories. The most memorable are Orestes by Aeschylus, Oedipus by Sophocles, and Medea by Euripides.

The story of Oedipus, the best known, is believed to be a tragedy of the crime and punishment of incest—an impression introduced by Freud. In the course of his psychoanalytical studies, Freud uncovered a widespread unconscious incestuous desire of boys for their mothers. He seized upon the story of Oedipus, the man who killed his father and married his mother, to buttress his theory that boys from time immemorial had had the secret urge to kill their fathers and marry their mothers.

By extension, other incestuous feelings—between brother and sister, father and daughter—were posited. But the mother-son “Oedipus complex” remained central. Anthropologists picked up the theme, and since Freud’s time there have been innumerable references to the “Oedipal” factor at work in the unconscious minds of savages as well as civilized peoples.

Freud unquestionably performed a service in bringing to light a sexual neurosis that afflicts members of the modern family. He went wrong, however, in interpreting this as an everlasting affliction and naming it after an ancient Greek legend. Other psychological theorists have since given more realistic explanations for the phenomenon; they pinpoint its source in the ingrown character of the modern “nuclear” family. An appropriate term for the neurosis would be the “nuclear family complex” because this restricts its application to more recent times.

The term “nuclear family” is of recent coinage and expresses the last stage in the evolution of the father-family. It signifies a family reduced to a molecule consisting of a father, a mother, and their children. The nuclear family differs from the “extended” family, that is, the large farm family characteristic of the pre-industrial era. The extended farm family, which included grandparents and even uncles, aunts, and cousins, was a productive unit; all its members worked to sustain the whole group.

But with the industrial revolution, under the impact of factory work and city life, the family unit narrowed down. The nuclear family no longer had a significant role in production. It was composed of a small group of consumers dependent on the father or mother for their support. This closed-in economic dependence fostered emotional dependence. Added to this was the Judeo-Christian idea of the sinfulness of sex outside marriage. This puritanism meant the suppression of sexual intercourse until it became economically possible for a pair to marry. All this invited the “fixation” of a boy on his mother, with whom he was in intimate association for many years while deprived of other sexual outlets. The inhibitions thus acquired often afflicted a man even long after he became a husband.

The story of Oedipus does not at all fit into the basic premise of the nuclear family sex neurosis. Incest fixation depends upon a boy remaining in prolonged intimate association with his mother. Only in that way would he develop his secret sexual desires for the forbidden woman and conceive the notion that his father was the obstacle standing in the way of mother-son intercourse.

However, Oedipus never knew his father and mother; he was cast out at birth. In earlier times and under other conditions, Oedipus would have been the sacrificial firstborn son. Instead, under the slightly more humane conditions of a higher culture, he was “exposed”; he was lucky enough to be saved by shepherds and finally to be adopted by the childless king and queen of Corinth.

How, under these circumstances, could Oedipus’s acts be said to spring from “incestuous” desires for his mother—or an impulse to kill his father in order to have access to her? He grew up believing his foster parents were his real parents. It is true that he killed a man whom he later discovered to be his real father and married a woman who turned out to be his real mother. But at the time these events occurred they were complete strangers to him.

Thus Oedipus was one man who could not possibly have had an “Oedipus complex”; the essentials were absent. Freud’s use of the term gives the grossly misleading impression that unconscious incestuous desires occur in the male psyche from time immemorial when in fact they are quite recent.

If the story of Oedipus is not about incest—even though he did marry his mother—what is its message? Here it is instructive to place it in the same context as the stories of Medea and Orestes. These three plays and the myth-histories on which they are based tell us about the family tragedy on a vast scale that attended the crucial change from matriarchy to patriarchy. …

Evolutionary anthropologists have long recognized that the story of Orestes is a story of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. … In fact all three of these great Greek plays symbolize the turmoil and suffering that accompanied this colossal upheaval. But while the other two lines of fathers and sons are annihilated, Orestes sails through the stormy seas of social change, bringing himself and his house to safe moorings on the patriarchal shores. He represents the victory of the father-family and the triumph of the new social order.  
 
 
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