, inspiration refuses to come. He is increasingly drawn into reveries, memories of his childhood, and strange dream sequences, many of them populated by the people around him, and the line between reality and fantasy becomes more and more blurred.
The Oedipus myth is a simpler story, dramatized by Sophocles (and, later, other playwrights) as a powerful tragedy and co-opted by Freud to explain mythic forces driving every man in the development of his essential personality. C. Maurice Bowra summarizes the Sophoclean story:
When Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother the inviolable laws of the gods are broken and the divine order of things sustains a grievous wound. The wound must be healed, the order restored. Before this can be done, the evil that has been, albeit unconsciously, committed, must show its full force . . . As Oedipus comes to see the truth and to punish himself for his past actions, he makes his peace with the gods. He does what is right, accepts his position, knows the truth (291).
Freud adapted this tragic triangle for the universality of its psychological elements. In his scheme, "boys . . . fearing castration from their fathers and threatened in their narcissism, repress the Oedipus complex (their mother-love) and emerge from it with a superego made up largely of identifications, especially their father-rivals" (Young-Bruehl 36). For him, the punishment of the gods results simply from desire and hostility, not from acting on these feelings. The end result in the ideal Freudian scheme is not murder and marriage but the final peace and strength that also come to Sophocles' tragic hero. Freud's bloodshed is all internal but no less devastating.
The first, most obvious Oedipal structure is the one between Guido and his parents. An early fantasy sequence has him meeting his parents in the cemetery where they have been long buried. His father complains about the low ceiling on his tomb. ...