Oedipus marries Jocasta

Oedipus marries Jocasta as a consequence of the events that bring him to Thebes: after killing Laius in a sudden quarrel, he solves the Sphinx’s riddle, and the grateful Thebans make him king and give him Jocasta’s hand. He does not know that she is his mother. Sigmund Freud reads this concealed kinship not merely as an element of tragic fate but as the realization of a childhood wish whose repressed traces, he argues, persist in the audience.

The marriage in the legend

Oedipus is the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and Jocasta. An oracle predicts that the son yet unborn will kill his father, so the infant is abandoned, rescued, and raised as a king’s son at a foreign court. When Oedipus consults the oracle about his origins, he is told to flee the city he believes to be his home, lest he kill his father and marry his mother. On the road, he encounters Laius and kills him in a sudden quarrel, not knowing who he is.

From the Sphinx to the throne

At Thebes, Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx, who has barred his way. The Thebans reward him by choosing him as king and presenting him with Jocasta’s hand in marriage. The union follows his success and appears to secure a settled future: he reigns for years in peace and dignity, and he and Jocasta have two sons and two daughters. Neither the marriage nor the family is understood by Oedipus as the fulfillment of the oracle.

The hidden consequence

The truth becomes the crisis of Sophocles’ tragedy only after a plague strikes Thebes and prompts the people to question the oracle again. The messengers report that the plague will end when Laius’s murderer is driven from the land. The search for that murderer turns the king’s public duty into a discovery of his own past: the marriage to Jocasta is exposed as the very outcome Oedipus had been warned to flee.

Freud’s interpretation

Freud argues that the marriage’s power cannot be explained simply by the contrast between divine fate and human resistance. Oedipus moves modern audiences, he suggests, because his fate touches wishes that belong not only to the legendary king but to ordinary childhood: sexual impulses directed toward the mother and hostility toward the father. In this interpretation, Oedipus’s marriage to Jocasta fulfills that childhood wish, while the audience recoils because those impulses have since been suppressed. The tragedy’s investigation thus makes the hidden kinship consequential twice over: it reveals the oracle’s fulfillment within the story and, for Freud, compels spectators to recognize a repressed part of their own inner life.