Bookplate belonging to Sigmund Freud.
“Ecco chi risolse il famoso enigma e fu il più potente tra gli uomini”
«On 6-th of May 1906, Freud’s closest disciples give him a surprise present for his fiftieth birthday: a bronze medallion with his own effigy and on its back a motive representing Oedipus and Sphinx face to face. On the medallion there was a verse engraved, a verse that Sophocles puts in the mouth of Coryphaeus and that is the 1525-th of the 1530 verses which the tragedy of Oedipus-King includes. This verse is the following:
“ὄς τὰ κλείν᾽αἰνίγματ᾽ᾔδει καὶ κράτιστος ἦν ἀνήρ”
Separated from its context, the verse can be translated as Ernest Jones did by: “He who solved the famous enigma and was a man of a great power”. We may even say “the most powerful”, because kratiztoz is the superlative of kratos, which means powerful.
However, put in its context, the verse has a unique connotation, which confers it a so properly called tragic signification. Here are the six final verses of Oedipus the King, in Jean Grosjean’s translation (Pleiade).
“People of Thebes, my fatherland, look at Oedipus
who solved the famous riddles. He triumphed.
Nobody could look at his fortune without envying him.
But in what a whirlwind of terrible misfortune he has fallen
One ought not to estimate happy any mortal
Before having seen his last day till he has reached
the end of his life without having to undergo suffering”
It is death that changes life into destiny (fate), according to Andre Malraux.
Let us return to the 6-th of May 1906. As we said, this day Freud receives the famous medallion. A remarkable incident then takes place. This is how Ernest Jones comments this event:
“Something strange happened when the medallion was handed him. After reading the inscription, Freud grew pale, became agitated and, with a strange voice, asked who had chosen this inscription. He reacted as if he just met something again; actually, it was this that just happened. Federn told Freud it was he who had chosen the quotation. Then Freud let them know that, as a young student at University in Wien, he was accustomed to walk around the great court and look at the busts of the old famous professors. It was then that he not only had had the phantasm of viewing his own future bust (that should not come as a surprise from an ambitious student), but also he also had imagined this bust precisely with exact the same words on the medallion" (Ernest Jones, La vie et l'oeuvre de Freud, tome 2, p. 14-15).
This incident, which typically reveals the phenomenon of “threatening queerness”- “Das Unheimliche”- incites us to see it as a true preconsciente identification of Freud, - at least as powerful as the identification with Moses – with the identification with Oedipus. Not precisely with the incestuous and parricide Oedipus, who slumbers in the depth of our unconsciousness, but with the tragic one. The way as Sophocles immortalized him and who, for the Greeks of the fifth century, embodied just the hero of reason and knowledge.
This was the man eager to find the truth above all things and by this appears as the mythical forerunner of the philosophers of Golden Age in Greek and forecasts the coming of Logos as glorified by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. If Oedipus is tragic it is because by searching the truth, which is his greatest ideal, like for the Socratic philosophers as well, this quest leads him to destroying himself completely.
The message that the tragic poet let us know is the following: Any ideal has in itself necessarily the germ of its own destruction. That is what is tragic. When Freud wrote in “The ego and id” (1923) the ambiguous aphorism: “The Super-ego is a pure culture of death drive”, it is - as we think- this tragic character that is pointed out. »
Jean Mélon “Oedipe et Moïse” Cahiers du CEP n° 7 Avril 1996 (source)
