Humans, unlike animals, fight their most primal selves in order to pursue their full potentials as intelligent beings. In the story of Oedipus Rex, the protagonist, Oedipus, is told a prophecy that he would kill his father, and lay with his mother. However, by the time that he is told the prophecy, it has already started. Originally, it was his birth parents, the Theban royalty, that heard the prophecy. Instead of properly teaching their children, the parents had sent for the killing of the child. However, the shepherd tasked with doing so could not carry out the act and gave the boy to the Corinthian royalty, who could not bear a child at all. Thus, when the Corinthian prince, Oedipus, heard of the prophecy, he vowed to never to return to Corinth in order to prevent it from ever occurring. Instead, he headed toward Thebes, where on the road there, he had inadvertently killed his paternal father, solved the sphinx’s riddle, and marries Queen Jocasta, who he doesn’t know is his maternal mother. Such a story is held in high regards, even in modern times, because of Oedipus’s own revulsion to the act. In trying to prevent the prophecy from occurring, all characters, even Oedipus’s biological parents, helped in the fulfillment of the prophecy.

It can be argued that if the Theban royalty had instead raised the child correctly, then the prophecy would never have fulfilled. But the story should not be consumed literally, but metaphorically. The prophecy is the symbol for the animalistic aspect of humans, where humans are in a constant struggle to repress their ‘natural’ desires to strive for intelligence. The common man is Oedipus, who fights their primal self to stay a human. Even though he tries his hardest to prevent the prophecy from occurring,  it occurs regardless. I believe that this is a representation for the fact that humans will inevitably lose to their animalistic selves. While Oedipus was aware of his true feelings, it is that same awareness, that unknowingly guides him to his tragedy. That awareness is the ego. The feelings that he is unaware of and declines so much is represented by the id. These subconscious feelings are in a tug of war between the ego, and it is up to the superego to be the law. The superego is generally represented by the father figure, which he had inadvertently killed while pondering the prophecy. As a result of the killing of his law, it was inevitable that he would regress to his primal self and sleep with his mother.

The story of Oedipus Rex is the story of the common human man fighting against his animalistic self to strive for intelligence. Even though Oedipus lost his battle, his hard fought battle is what makes the story stand out from the others of the genre. Freud, in the Interpretation of Dreams, compares Oedipus’s story to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Freud writes that the main difference between the two is that Hamlet is, “built up on Hamlet’s hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations and an immense variety of attempts at interpreting them have failed to produce a result.” In Hamlet’s specific case, he ignores the vengeance for his father because he wanted to get rid of his law and superego, which was his father. It only takes his mother’s death where he fulfilled the vengeance, even after having many chances between his two parents’ deaths. His love for his mother is more pronounced than his love for his father. Because his uncle had gotten in the way of Hamlet’s process of loving his mother, he had completed the revenge. Hamlet’s story is one of repression, unlike Oedipus’s great battle. Although both lost to their animalistic selves, Oedipus’s story reigns supreme because readers value a human who would fight their very natures.

        Francoise Meltzer’s text investigates the term Unconscious and how scholars theoretically recognize it with a comparative examination of Psychoanalysis’s Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.  

        She first encourages the questioning of the phrase, reasoning that in its sound use, it is an adjective. It is partly attribution because it is neither a place nor a thing. And it is polysemantic, “Similarly complex is the fact that to be “unconscious” can mean all sorts of things – anything from being asleep to being in ignorance of something, to being in a coma, to having a certain kind of innocence, and so on”(Meltzer 1).  

        In addition, she is fascinated by the realism bound up in its mysticism, “In other words, the irony is that the unconscious can only be described in, or understood in, the realm and rules of “consciousness”‘ (Meltzer 3). It’s a paradoxical element, both not falsifiable and not secured. Nonetheless, it has assisted in the formation of psychoanalysis.  

        Meltzer breaks down Freud’s theory into descriptive, dynamic, and systematic categories. Descriptive is best described as Freud’s topographical model, with consciousness showing up on the surface and the unconsciousness hidden beneath. The space or barrier between these two domains keeps the subject disconnected from repressed desire; Meltzer demonstrates how unconsciousness in this sense evolves from an adjective to a noun, an existing place. 

        Dynamic, as she explains, is then the energy flow of that “place,” the build-up where energy not perceived by the subject generates a coming forth; for Freud, this means via dreams, puns, literature, etc. These pent-up notions appear in obscurity and illogically, reinforcing Freud’s theory of repressed desire.  

        Systematic then depicts Freud’s later revisions, the Id, the Ego, and the Superego, where sources of each element are gathered to make them understandable as one subject; although employed by Americans as “ego psychology”, the model furthers analytical development due to its contradictions. 

        Meltzer explains Lacan’s point of view in rejecting Freud’s revision, ” The French, however, led primarily by the analyst Jacques Lacan will see the revision as a repression in itself”(6). For Lacan, Freud’s topographical model is accurate; he asserts that there is a partition between the conscious and unconscious. As Meltzer clarifies, the ego for him is an object rather than a subject. As such, the ego is separate from desire, and instead, it is the derivative of desire. Meltzer notes that “the subject experiences desire as a lack, which they will strain to eradicate “(11). 

         In this way, the subject constantly advances movement between self and the fulfillment of one’s desires but disables the ability to actualize completion. Freud’s theory proposes that completion is an underlying preexistent reality just hiding in plain sight, which enables the subject to become themselves through decoding such desires.