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Who is Oedipus? Where does he belong? In Oedipus the King, the heimlich (homely, familiar) and the unheimlich (strange, uncanny) undo each other before his own eyes. Oedipus has made Thebes his adopted, second, home by freeing it from persecution by the Sphinx, using his reason to defeat a monster and to solve a riddle. Step by step it is revealed to Oedipus that he himself is the one indicated by the oracle, that his origin is not in Corinth but here in Thebes. Sophocles presents us with reversals for which the word ‘irony’ seems inadequate. If recognition and reversal unfold the horror of Oedipus the King, in Oedipus at Colonus they are instead a means through which Oedipus is drawn with grace towards his ending. The meaning of the heimlich is reconfigured again, and the symbolic status of Oedipus himself undergoes a reversal in the course of the play, as he is brought into a new relation with the gods. Theseus confirms that the death of Oedipus is nothing which we should regret.

This chapter asks what Sophocles' Oedipus the King, the tragedy on which Freud based his radical theory of human subjectivity, might offer in relation to the new kinds of identity and family that have emerged in the century since. In particular, it considers how Freud's emphasis on sexual fantasy and childhood has obscured Sophocles' stress on the significance of parents', not children's, desires and fears. Oedipus's birth father Laius is so fearful of what a son might do to him that he throws him out; his adoptive father, on the other hand, is profoundly loving. Another proto-parental theme of the play which Freud ignores is childlessness, apaidia. This theme is prominent in today's culture (especially through issues of infertility and new reproductive technologies) but was largely unspoken in Freud's.

Chapter Five considers Freud’s turn to the two tragedies, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It locates Freud’s reading of them in the theoretical crisis of 1897 over the theory of traumatic seduction examined in Chapter Four. It considers this turning point and Freud’s reading of the two tragedies in relation to his affiliation of psychoanalysis to the Copernican revolution that overturned the geocentric Ptolemaic synthesis. Freud describes three acts of decentring in which ‘Man’ is displaced from centre in relation to the cosmos (Copernicus), the world of animal species (Darwin), the unconscious and the drives (Freud). Laplanche proposes that “if Freud is his own Copernicus, he is also his own Ptolemy” and that the abandonment of the seduction theory is a move from a ‘Copernican’ other-centred model to a ‘Ptolemaic’ recentring of the individual on his own endogenous, ‘oedipal’ impulses. Metapsychologically Freud replaces an external agent, the seductive, traumatizing other, with “a universal event in early childhood.” His ‘Ptolemaic’ reading reduces the role of Apollo and the Delphic Oracle’s prophetic function in Sophocles’ tragedy to “no more than materialisations of an internal necessity”. There follows a ‘Copernican’ counter-reading of the daimonic and traumatic repetitions of Oedipus.

In 1968, at the onset of the most traumatic phase of the civil war in post-colonial Nigeria, Ola Rotimi staged a production of his new play The Gods Are Not To Blame, which is, amongst other things, an adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. Although this play, like virtually all of Rotimi’s dramas, is theatrical on a grand scale, it possesses a considerable literary dimension insofar as it adapts the highly literary source of a Greek tragedy, and insofar as its very success in the theatre transformed it, ironically, into a dramatic text studied in classrooms across a good deal of Africa. The Gods Are Not To Blame has become canonical in European and American as well as African theatre. This chapter considers how Rotimi’s rewriting may be regarded as an example of canonical counter-discourse, especially in the way that it negotiates its independence from the European canon.

This chapter explores the shifts of focus found in Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus the King. The play starts as a quest to find the root behind the pollution of Thebes, but later shifts to the household of Oedipus himself. The chapter notes that despite the shifts of focus, the religious emphasis of the play remains the same; serving as a guide to demonstrate the mirror image that the pollution of the city reflects upon the pollution of the household.

Ibsen clearly has classical tragedy in mind in Ghosts, particularly Sophocles' Oedipus the King, which is held by Aristotle in his Poetics to be the exemplary tragedy. Ibsen, before he turned to social realism, had written plays in verse, and one of the best known of these plays is Brand. Ghosts suggests that Ibsen was well aware that a move to social realism had major implications for tragedy. Like Oedipus, it is very much about the relationship between past and present. Its ending is almost as catastrophic as any in classical tragedy, with Oswald's mind being destroyed by congenital syphilis, inherited from his father but transmitted to him through his mother, and Mrs Alving finally being faced with the dilemma of whether or not to agree to his demand to kill him and thus put him out of his misery when his mind gives way.

Sophocles and Pericles were two of Athens' leading intellectuals. They were also almost exact contemporaries, Sophocles being perhaps a year or two older than Pericles. Although Sophocles was primarily a poet and Pericles a statesman, they knew one another very well, having served together as generals in putting down the Samian revolt in 440–439 B.C. The setting of Sophocles' most famous play, Oedipus the King, is a city suffering from a plague. The exact date of the play's first production is not known, but it is generally agreed that it belongs to the 420s, probably the early 420s—that is, not very long after Pericles' death. The city in question is Thebes, which was founded in Boeotia by Cadmus and, as the play opens, is ruled by Oedipus. It appears inescapable that the play's fictional plague will have recalled the historical plague that struck Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War and had ended not long before the tragedy was produced.

Foundling stories, which abound in legend, have generally looked at the fate of the found child, not at the parents on either side, abandoning or taking in. But two famous stories, of Oedipus and Moses, do include parental elements. A form of collaborative parenthood can be seen in the founding of foundling hospitals at times when the abandonment of babies was commonplace. The chapter outlines the early history of the eighteenth-century London Foundling Hospital, which came about largely through the initiative of Captain Thomas Coram, and discusses the meanings of two of its paintings: William Hogarth's ‘Moses Brought before Pharaoh's Daughter’ (1756), and Emma Brownlow King's ‘The Foundling Restored to its Mother’ (1858). Two novels contemporary with King's painting both have stories of adoptive foundling fathers: George Eliot's Silas Marner (further discussed in Chapter 7) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847).

This chapter looks at some articulations of the distinctive forces and passion of parental feelings, including those that come from the loss or absence of children. It notes the relative absence of the subject of parental wishes (or fears) from Freud's writings, in spite of his drawing on Greek tragedy, where children and childlessness are common themes. Parental issues are prominent in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, for instance, where Freud saw only the history of a child. The chapter's main focus is on how parenthood and infertility appear in Euripides’ Medea. Medea is both a murdering mother whose parental feelings are unhinged in the face of her jealousy of her husband's new woman, and—at the same time—an infallible fertility consultant.

Chapter 2 examines plays that turn to Greek tragedy in response to collective predicament and catastrophe in the contemporary world. The discussion focuses on Steven Berkoff’s Greek, after Oedipus the King, Hélène Cixous’s La Ville parjure, ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies), and Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender, an adaptation of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis. While in the first two examples the adaptation of tragic themes and patterns involves a critique of tragedy and its histories of reception, Crimp’s play challenges Western perceptions of tragedy in a more overt manner, resisting the polarizing discourses of tragedy reproduced by the mainstream media in the aftermath of 9/11. The rewriting of the Greek tragic texts in these plays provides a frame that challenges established definitions of tragedy and, at the same time, proposes a renewed more egalitarian understanding of tragedy.

The good-feelings aura of Manhattan Murder Mystery was undermined by the lack of any real creativity in that movie; the Greek chorus framing Mighty Aphrodite and thematically connected to its search for origins makes it a more compelling comedy. Mighty Aphrodite dramatically opposes Allen’s pessimistic perception of human life with his desire to make movies that provide the condemned with consolatory laughter, the Greek chorus transforming itself from a prognosticator of dark fates to celebrants of “that voodoo that you do so well.” Heredity proves to be other than deterministic in Mighty Aphrodite,which offers as benignly comedic a validation as Allen could manage to create on film of his much-quoted self-justification during the tabloid wars, “the heart wants what it wants.”