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| Our new masthead features an image of Oedipus contemplating the riddle of the Sphinx --a reminder that for us question is at the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise.
What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening? Oedipus, famously, solved the riddle, answering that man crawls on all fours in infancy, walks upright on two legs in adulthood, and uses a cane in old age. I've always felt that that answer--correct though it be--is a disappointment, anticlimactic and fundamentally unsatisfying. (There might be a better modern answer. Maybe the question hints at an evolutionary awareness: a progression from beast on all fours, to homo sapien with upright posture, to human being in human culture dependent on his tools.)
Also famously, the answer Oedipus gives is no real solution to anything; it only leads him further into a trap. He defeats the questioner, becomes king of Thebes, marries his mother and embroils himself still more deeply in his (Freud will make it our) tragedy. (If anyone wants to be reminded of the whole story, here's one of many summaries available on the internet: Sphinx) The moral, I guess, is watch out for pat answers, especially if fate (or your deepest nature) is against you.
Still, the riddle evokes a timeless and compelling human situation--answer correctly or die! And there's the possibility that (at least temporarily) human reason will defeat brute supernatural force. And the matter the riddle addresses is nothing less than the nature of human nature!
The Sphinx came to the ancient Greeks from still a more ancient Egypt (for a capsule history, see History). The Sophoclean question arose in an age we can hardly expect to apprehend directly. But the times must have privileged simple and certain answers. Today the Sphinx might pose a different riddle altogether, one expressing one or another of the puzzles of our own age. And a modern riddle would have to have a different form--an open-endedness: it would have to be a riddle without an already-known answer.
What would a comtemporary riddle about the natue of human nature be like?
What is mind that it can know and not know what it knows?
or:
What is the nature of human beings that we strive against ourselves?
or:
Why do we seek out and create the very life circumstances we'd most want to excape?
Anyone else interested in formulating a riddle?
~Henry Seiden
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Bravo Henry.
If the riddle is: who is it that knows and does not know what he or she knows?
The psychoanalyst is the one--like the Sphinx-- who is both assumed to pose this riddle and supposed to know the answer. However, one thing the psychoanalyst does know is that the one who contemplates the riddle is just as much the one who poses it. The Sphinx is in the question, not in either of the people in the room.
Bravo, Henry and David!
All of Henry's questins are apt for us. I like David's poetically given emphasis upon the fact that both analyst and analysand are questioners.
I am afraid I come along with pedestrian thoughts, taking the myth more concretely. The Sphinx in question had the head (and allure) of a woman, with the body of a lion. And he who did not know he was a man would be devoured. Poor Oedipus never got the unconscious part.
Perhaps a way of considering the myth is that the Sphinx represents urges that threaten destruction, unless the unique human capacity for self-knowledge prevails.
As Freud liked to point out, metaphor is a wonderful method of communication because it registers in many ways. So, another use of the myth is that in order to survive well psychologically, one must recognize the continuity of the self and the relationship between one's early life, one's adult state, and the part of living when one is closer to mortality.
To me, these messages are as important today as they were in Ancient Greece, let alone 19th Century Vienna. To return to the mysteries of human nature, they have not changed much. What is truly, remarkably new is the possibility psychoanalysis gives us for more understanding of the mysterious workings of human nature.
Johanna Tabin
We moderns show hubris (to stick to the Greek ambience) when we think our many achievements in culture free us from the fundamental questions of all humankind. The question of deteriorating with age might be taken care of soon by our scientists, but we still can expect to experience changes in ourselves from infancy to becoming chronologically old. It is hard for me to imagine a way to help a new little human out of the need to put so much together in mind during the first few years of life, with only its limited capacities for knowing and understanding. The Sphinx's challenge to recognize the inevitability of change will remain.
If Oedipus's participation in the myth of the Sphinx puts us in mind of the Oedipus complex, I will not beg that question. Every child, not long after birth, begins to learn that there are two classes of persons in its view: boys and girls. They see also big and small, but find out pretty soon that people (including themselves) change as to size. Gender binds them to the future as what remains true. Only that raises many questions about how they fit into the world (originally of the family). So, their riddle was in Ancient Greece and is today: What can it mean to be me, now that I am able to organize a sense of self, seeing who I am by gender, living in my family?
Johanna Tabin
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