The Subconscious Mind In Oedipus The King

Oedipus Rex, is a compelling play, with a main character story line that is very complicated. Oedipus, who was adopted into a royal family, but never told he was adopted, obtains a prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother. He runs away from his family, to escape the prophecy, but finds them to come true in the end, when he is reconnected with his birth family. An ongoing, popular question readers have at the end of the play, is if Oedipus’ outcome was due to fate or free will. Could he have had the power to stop the prophecies from coming true, or were they destined to happen? Looking through the literary lens of Psychoanalytic Criticism based on Sigmund Freud's theories of psychology, we can try to determine if Oedipus’ subconscious chose to make the decisions he did. Psychoanalytic criticism looks
Three main aspects of our unconscious mind that can help understand our thoughts are the id, ego and the superego. The id is the unconscious part of our mind. It controls our impulses, our needs, why we do whatever we want in the moment. This is the part of the mind that would control Oedipus’ impulse to kill Laius. Oedipus’ id drove him to feel extreme anger towards Laius, resulting in killing his own father, “The driver, an old man himself, tried to push me off the road. In anger I struck the driver as he tried to crowd me off” (pg. 45). Fear is controlled by this part of the mind, a quote shows how fear greatly influenced Oedipus’ actions during the play “So! Why then, Jocasta, should we study Apollo’s oracle, or gaze at the birds screaming over our heads-those prophets who announced that I would kill my father? He’s dead, buried below ground. And here I am in Thebes-I didn't put hand to sword. Perhaps he