Sophocles

Sophocles is the tragedian named as the author of Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, the two plays that anchor the book’s references to Oedipus. His importance here is less a biographical portrait than a lasting dramatic pattern: a protagonist caught in the consequences of a crime and a fate that reaches across generations, later used by Freud to frame the Oedipus complex.

Identity and Dramatic Works

The book identifies Sophocles as an ancient Greek playwright and names Oedipus as the protagonist of Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. These works supply the literary source for the figure repeatedly indexed alongside the Oedipus complex. The evidence offers no further account of Sophocles’s life, but establishes his plays as the defining context for the tragic character.

Tragedy, Crime, and Fate

A reference to a far-distant crime points to the translation of Sophocles’s drama used in the book, while a neighboring note distinguishes the later nineteenth-century German fate-tragedy genre, in which a curse is worked out. That contrast places Sophocles within a longer literary history of inherited consequence: the tragic action is not merely an isolated misdeed, but a crime whose reach extends through time. The source identifies Sophocles’s work as a classical point of reference, without equating it with the later genre.

Freud’s Use of Sophocles

The book’s index links Sophocles and Oedipus directly to the Oedipus complex, signaling the plays’ central role in Freud’s psychological framework. The connection turns a tragic protagonist into a recurring interpretive reference: Sophocles supplies the dramatic inheritance through which Freud’s account of the complex is discussed. The surviving evidence does not detail the play’s plot or Freud’s full interpretation, so Sophocles’s significance here rests on that clearly marked literary and conceptual association.