Oedipus complex envy. "Oedipus" refers to a 5th-century BC Greek mythological character Oedipus, who unwittingly kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta. A play based on the myth, "Oedipus Rex", was written by Sophocles, ca. 429 BC. Modern productions of Sophocles' play were staged in Paris and Vienna in the 19th century and were phenomenally successful in the 1880s and 1890s. The Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), attended. In his book "The Interpretation of Dreams" first published in 1899, he proposed that an Oedipal desire is a universal, psychological phenomenon innate (phylogenetic) to human beings, and the cause of much
Oedipus Rex is based on; he refers to the play as a “further modification of the legend”, one that originates in a “misconceived secondary revision of the material, which has sought to exploit it for theological purposes.” The play has been filmed several times, twice in English. The 1957 film version, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, starred Douglas Campbell as Oedipus and had the cast performing the entire play in masks, as in ancient Greek theatre. The second English language film version, directed by Philip Saville and released in 1968, was filmed in Greece. This one showed the actors' faces and boasted an