Oedipus

I never liked Oedipus. I didn't like the play, I didn't like the man, and I didn't like Freud's eponymous theory. It was the one piece of psychoanalysis I never embraced. That we have an unconscious mental life, that we are constantly suppressing forbidden sexual desires and the aggressions that rise in their wake, that these suppressed wishes manifest themselves in our dreams, our slips of the tongue, our neuroses - all this I believed. But that men want sex with their mothers, and girls with their fathers - this I did not accept. Freud would say, of course, that my skepticism was "resistance". He would say I did not want the Oedipus theory to be true. No doubt that was so. But resistance, whatever else it is, surely does not prove the truth of the idea resisted.
Jed Rubinfeld: The Interpretation of Murder