The article provides an ariyan interpretation of the ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, plus very interesting although shocking data, which shows that Freud’s reading of the play is a projection of very real problem in his own ethnic group. As Herve Ryssen says: "The truth is that everything they ever say about others and about “humanity” is, at bottom, nothing but the reflection of themselves". With such knowledge we immediately can recognise ethnicity of "Polish" writer Herling-Grudziński. In his journal several times he informs readers that incest is much more common practice than they suppose! In his particular case it may not be a deliberate subversion, since otherwise he is indeed the first class writer, but ...
For instance, let us apply what we have learnt from our author to a work composed by one of the Buddha’s contemporaries, in order to better understand a critical Pali concept. Probably the most famous ancient Greek tragedy is Oedipus Tyrannus, also known as Oedipus Rex. It dramatizes the downfall of the protagonist, a foundling, who by virtue of his acumen rose to power in the city of Thebes. Abandoned on a mountain by his father King Laïus, who was warned by the god Apollo that his son would kill him, he was saved from death by a shepherd, then adopted and raised kindly by Polybus and Merope, king and queen of Corinth. But upon hearing the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, he flees Corinth. On his journey he quarrels with and kills a man who blocks his way. He then travels to Thebes, which at the time was being harassed by the Sphinx, a monster who posed a riddle to passers-by and devoured all who could not answer it. Oedipus solves the riddle, thus freeing Thebes, and in reward is made its ruler and given in marriage to its widowed queen Jocasta, by whom he has four children. Subsequently, Thebes is ravaged by famine and plague, and according to the Delphic Oracle, these calamities will persist until the slayer of King Laïus, Jocasta’s first husband, is banished from the Boeotian capital. Oedipus is charged with finding and punishing the offender. Tiresias, a blind seer, comes forward and hints that the tyrant himself is the one responsible for the city’s plight. Oedipus becomes enraged, refuses to admit guilt and accuses others of plotting against him. However, ensuing evidence confirms his true parents are Laïus and Jocasta, not Polybus and Merope, and that the stranger he murdered was his own father. At last, the protagonist is forced to admit to himself and others that he is guilty of parricide and incest. Upon these revelations, Jocasta hangs herself in the palace, and out of grief and remorse, Oedipus puts out his eyes.
Many who have never seen or read the play by Sophocles are familiar with Sigmund Freud’s famous analysis of it, the basis for his controversial theory known as the ‘Oedipus complex’, explained in The Interpretation of Dreams (V, D). For the Austrian psychologist, the drama represents a latent sexual attraction on the part of every male child to his mother, accompanied by jealousy and antipathy towards his father.x Hence the universal appeal of the tragedy since, according to Freud, we all share the guilt of Oedipus: ‘His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.’
Freud’s reading of the play has been widely accepted. It does merit consideration, especially for perceiving that Sophocles dramatizes a latent guilt in all of us. However, the major drawback of his theory is that a crucial component of it—the contention that everyone undergoes an Oedipus complex in his early years—is purely speculative. While it is possible I was once infatuated with my mother, I do not recall my infancy; so I must rely on a psychologist, who in turn does not remember his, to tell me about it: because, according to Freud, memories of incestuous desire are “repressed”, i.e. buried in the unconscious. This fails to meet the criteria of Ven. Ñāṇavīra’s method, in which all assertions about human experience must be immediately verifiable. Even if I could recall events of a repressed past, even of a past life, I would remain in doubt: for as our author avers in “A Note on Paţiccasamuppāda” §7, ‘memory is not on the same level of certainty as present reflexive experience’. Therefore, we must go beyond the incest taboo in order to explain why ‘the oracle laid the same curse upon us as upon him’.xi
Let us see if we can arrive at a more satisfactory interpretation of the myth. The Italian novelist and essayist Alberto Moravia raises some crucial questions about the great Sophoclean tragedy which are seldom, if ever, addressed.* While allowing that myths portray improbable events, he says it is reasonable to assume they still have realistic elements to them. So, for him it is striking that throughout their long marriage, Oedipus and Jocasta apparently never spoke of King Laïus, in whose palace they sleep; or, assuming they did, why does Oedipus—married to an older widow, and knowing full well the prophecies of the oracle—never suspect that those prophecies have come true? From his arrival in Thebes through the epidemic of the plague, he remains strangely ignorant or unaware of who he is and what he is doing. For as we recall, he is renowned for his intelligence, having solved the Sphinx’s riddle.
The only plausible explanation is that the protagonist makes himself deaf and blind to his own guilt, ignoring or repressing, if you will, the obvious connection between what he knows and what he fears. Thus, his is a studied, intentional ignorance with moral implications, unlike a mere lack of knowledge.
There is no riddle to his motives. Clearly, Oedipus continues to act in bad faith because it suits him. He prefers to remain in the dark because in so doing he may unabashedly prolong his enjoyment of power and pleasure: for only as long as he conceals the facts from himself and others may he maintain the position he usurped from his father, as ruler over Thebes by day and lover of Jocasta by night.
Hence, for Moravia the story of Oedipus is not one of illicit love and failed ambition, which, though powerful, would lack universal relevance. More profoundly, it is the tragedy par excellence of ‘wilful, presumptuous, cowardly and wicked ignorance’, which is ‘the origin of all evils’. Therefore, in the standard “recognition scene” of Greek drama, in which the identity of someone previously unknown is at last revealed to the protagonist, Oedipus is compelled, like Joseph K., to arrest himself. The charge is neither parricide nor incest, but rather that of closing his eyes to his own self-deception; his past crimes are not so grievous as his refusal to admit them, nor so despicable as his ongoing indulgence in greed and sensuality, facilitated by remaining conveniently unknowing and ‘unseeing’. Thus his comeuppance is not death or castration, but self-induced blindness.
In sum, we have witnessed the ultimate drama of crucial aspects of taṇhā and avijjā. As Ven. Ñāṇavīra writes in Letter 149, ‘Avijjā functions automatically, but conceals this fact from itself. Avijjā is an automatically functioning blindness to its automatic functioning.’ (...)
* See L’attenzione (Milano: Bompiani, 1965) pp. 86–89.
John Stella from The introduction to Ven Nanavira's Letters
**
The Myth of the Oedipus Complex
The father of psychoanalysis built his theories based on the study of hysterical pathology, which was obviously no accident. Based on his personal case history and on a study of and his fellow Viennese Jews, he showed that incest was the major cause of hysteria.
In 1896, Freud categorically supported the notion that the specific cause of hysteria must be sought in some sort of sexual problem. Thirteen cases analysed by him permitted him to arrive at this conclusion. Hysteria, he affirmed, was caused by a serious incident of a sexual nature, passively experienced and occurring before puberty.
What his biographer Ernst Jones writes is edifying, as long as one understands that we are only speaking of the Jewish community: “From May 1893, the time in which he speaks for the first time to Fliess, in September 1897… he admitted that a sexual seduction committed against a child by an adult – most often the father – was the essential cause of hysteria. The proofs provided by the analytical materials seemed irrefutable. For more than four years, his conviction remained unshakeable, although the frequency of these so-called incidents surprised him more and more. Everything appeared to indicate that agreat number of fathers were addicted to the commission of incestuous crimes… Freud concluded that, judging by certain symptoms observable in his brotherand a few of his sisters, his father might havebeen guilty, too” (letter to Fliess, 11 February 1897).
In this letter, as Freud wrote to his great friend, Dr. Wilhem Fliess, “Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts: he is thecause of my brother’s hysteria (whose condition I am still striving todiagnose), and some of my younger sisters…
”In 1897, however, after his father’s death, which occurred at the end of October 1896, Freud abandoned the “seduction theory” and adopted the “fantasy theory”: hysterical women were no longer the unfortunate victims of incest committed against them during their childhood, but were now merely fantasizing about their fathers! His father was henceforth washed clean of any suspicion. Parents were no longer guilty. It was now necessary to believe that the children were in love with their parent of the opposite sex and desired incestuous relations.
Ernst Jones writes here: “During the winter following the death ofhis father (more precisely, in February), Freud accused his father ofacts of seduction; three months later (on 31 May 1897), an incestuous dream he had put an end to his doubts relating to the seduction story”.
In his letters of 3, 4, and 15 October 1897, Freud described the progress of his self-analysis and acknowledged “his father’s innocence” – or so it would appear. Ernst Jones appears satisfied with this explanation and supported the Freudian hypothesis: “What is important above all, more than the parent’s incestuous desires, even more than occasional acts of this kind, was the general fact of incestuous desires inspired in the child by the parent of the opposite sex”. Et voilà: “infantile sexuality” and the “Oedipus complex” were born!
Freud was obviously the object of very heavy pressure from his fellow Jews while he was still in the process of constructing his theories on the origins of hysteria, so as to avoid revealing to the world the heavy secret of Judaism. By inventing the theory of the “Oedipus complex”, he concealed the reality of incest within Jewish families while exculpating Jewish parents. And he covered his tracks even further by projecting this Jewish specificity onto a universal plane, through the mechanism of a Greek hero (Oedipus). In reality, the famous “Oedipus complex” is in reality and above all nothing more than an “Israel complex”, i.e., the complex of a son who has slept with his own mother, and who wishes to “kill his father”, for quite understandable reasons.
We nevertheless owe it to Freud for raising the question of incest, which is the one true great secret of Judaism. The only thing we need to do now is place this “psychoanalytic theory” in front of a mirror, which will then reflect the following conclusion: “Judaism is the illness which psychoanalysis sets out to cure”. Everything written by Jews must be read with a mirror. The truth is that everything they ever say about others and about “humanity” is, at bottom, nothing but the reflection of themselves.
After Freud, psychoanalysts replaced priests in caring for the souls of the faithful. The only difference, really – from the Jewish point of view – was that while priests were free of charge, while psychoanalysts demand to be paid cash on the barrel head! Or possibly credit card. Just the same, it’s a little bit comical to see all these “sick people” (the phrase is from Jacques Attali) forming the heavy battalions of all those who set out to cure humanity of its ills. But this is just one of the “paradoxes” of Judaism. The truth is that Jewish psychoanalysts don’t just practice their profession to treat their patients; rather, they treat their patients to try to treat themselves.
Typically, in claiming that the origin of neurosis were to be found in the repression of sexual impulses by Christian morality, Freud was, once again – and, once again, typically – deliberately projecting his own neurosis – and the neurosis of Judaism – onto a civilization which he consciously hated. He himself warned us, in embarking for America: “They do not know that we are bringing them the plague”.
*
Sexual Crimes Against Children
Paedophilia in the Jewish community is much more widespread that it appears. The media pass over the problem in silence and accuse Catholic priests. In reality, the phenomenon is incomparably more important within the Jewish sect, particularly among Orthodox Jews. We have compiled innumerable testimonies and legal proceedings since the publication of The Psychoanalysis of Judaism, in 2006.
In the United States, an Internet site – the Awareness Center – listed hundreds of rabbis, both Israeli and American, persecuted for sexual attacks on children. The site, unfortunately, no longer exists, but we compiled a few of these cases in the chapters of our books ( ThePsychoanalysis of Judaism, The Mirror of Judaism). Each week, the American and Israeli press provides us with new examples. In December 2011, the umpteenth scandal erupted in the Orthodox Jewish community of Brooklyn, where the New York City Police Department investigated charges of sexual abuse brought by no fewer than 117 children. 85 people were arrested in this one case.
In January 2012, the rabbi Daniel Fahri, eminent founder of the Jewish liberal movement of France, was indicted for similar misdeeds. This Daniel Fahri was also the father of rabbi Gabriel Fahri, who had been much talked about in 2003, who claimed to have been attacked with knives in a Paris street. Police investigations very quickly established that the rabbi had stabbed himself. (We have listed numerous cases of similar affairs in Jewish Fanaticism).
These sexual deviations are explained in part by the content of the Talmud, the holy book of Judaism, which contains the teachings of the rabbis, and which the Jews consider more important than the Torah. We have already studied this question in our books. Let us summarize the essential facts here:
The Sanhedrin treatise (54b-55a) teaches that as long as children have not reached sexual maturity, they are not physiologically capable of having sexual relations, are not considered persons, and the laws on sodomy do not apply to them. Many pages are dedicated to the description of paedophilia and “cohabitation” with young children. Sanhedrin 55a clearly establishes that a boy is considered sexually mature at age 9 years and 1 day, and a little girl at the age of 3 years and 1 day.
In France, very well known personalities have defended paedophilia in their books. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, former “68” leader, or the TV announcer Michel Polac, for example. We have long been aware of the morals of former Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, who declared in the newspaper Gay Pied on 31 January 1991: “The sexuality of children is still a forbidden continent. It is the task of the discoverersof the 21st century to approach the shores”. In September 2009, at the time of the arrest of the film director Roman Polanski, all Jewish intellectuals defended the paedophile as one man: Bernard-Henry Levi, Claude Lelouch, Constantin Costa-Gavras, etc. Even Frédéric Mitterrand got involved. It is necessary, once again, to note the convergences between Judaism and the “sexual minorities”.
At Last: Psychoanalysis Explained
The question of incest is a nagging one among Jewish intellectuals. Direct testimonies are rather rare, due to the fact that incest victims are highly reluctant to discuss the matter, and very few victims bring charges against their own parents. But if we read the Jews with a mirror, we will soon see that this whole problem is an absolute obsession in the cultural production of Judaism. Jewish intellectuals and film makers always talk about it with an air of great mystery, in an anecdotal way, or by projecting the problem onto a universal level, always using a goy family as an example. We know that the Jewish people love to encourage an air of mystery and secrecy, and that incest, in particular, is one of the secrets, if not the top secret of Judaism.
In our books The Psychoanalysis of Judaism (2006), Jewish Fanaticism (2007), and The Mirror of Judaism (2009), various chapters show that the near-totality of Jewish intellectuals, artists and film-makers have dealt with the problem at one time or another, usually via the mechanism of “projection”. This is not an accident.
Of course, incest is formally proscribed among Jews, as stipulated by the Torah (Leviticus 18) and the Babylonian Talmud (Yabamot 2a). But the interpretations of Jewish intellectuals are always ambiguous. Everything is ambiguous in Judaism.
Ambiguity may even be said to constitute the principal characteristic of Judaism. In the case in question, one must observe that the Jews know how to rationalize their war around the Biblical texts.
See for example, the film Chinatown, by Roman Polanski (USA, 1974): at Los Angeles, in the 1930s, a drought compels small farmers to sell their land. The land is purchased at rock-bottom prices by large landowners with the connivance of the municipality, which releases the badly needed, precious water over a spillway every night. Jack Nicholson, private detective, investigates the affair, which displeases powerful enemies. At the end of the film, the beautiful Faye Dunaway, slapped by Nicholson, finally admits that the little girl she has been hiding from everyone is both her daughter and her sister. Her father is a monster, a rich landowner. This is a typical example of the manner in which an intimate and highly sensitive, almost uniquely Jewish problem is projected onto the goyim, by a Jew who is a child rapist himself, Roman Polanski.
Examples of this genre are very numerous. Incest may also be depicted as occurring between father and son. Director and actor Tim Roth, for example, has admitted being abused by his own father. In his film The War Zone (Great Britain, 1999) he denounces the incestuous relations between a father and his daughter. The horror finally ends when Tom and his sister stab their father to death.
An article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on 13 December 2006, reports interesting statistics. We learn that Israel, over the course of the year, received more than 2,000 complaints alleging the sexual abuse of children under the age of 12, and nearly 2,500 others concerning adolescents aged between 13 and 18 years. 90% of the victims were attacked by someone they knew; 60% of the cases involving children below the age of 12 were incestuous relationships. One must remember that, in the immense majority of cases, the victims of incest never bring charges.
In the film They Live, (USA, 1988), by John Carpenter, the hero, Nada, thanks to special glasses, discovers that a small part of the population consists of extra-terrestrials who look like everybody else, constituting an elite which governs the world through lies. Nada (“nothing”, in Spanish) we learn, was the victim of an abusive father.
Some mention must be made at this point of the famous “Jewish mother”, which means an over-possessive, abusive mother. Jacques Attali, Bernard-Henry Levi, Romain Gary, Alain Finkielkraut and many others have left more than just a few ambiguous testimonies on this subject. This is what Elie Wiesel wrote on the subject, in Talmudic Celebration (1991): A woman visits Rabbi Yeoshoua. “So what’s theproblem?
Here it is: ‘B’nai hakatan mibni hagadol’, she says, “my younger son’s father is my older son”. […] Jewish mothers are always guilty ofwhat happens to their beloved children”.
Wiesel puts it elliptically: “As a good Jewish son, he loved his mother – a little bit too much”.
The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut felt the need to see a psychiatrist: “My fears and problems were no doubt a result of our frenzied intimacy… whether it was irritation or just weariness, it has happened to me to be weak and offer my Jewishness to psychoanalysis”. Finkielkraut himself writes: “Hysterical, I hadbecome Jewish to make people look at me”.
The American novelist Philip Roth, in Portnoy’s Complaint(1967), also “let go” a little (cf. Jewish Fanaticism): “Please, who crippled us so? Who made us so morbid, so hysterical and weak? … Doctor, whatdo you call this sickness I have? Is it the Jewish suffering which I used to hear so much about?… My own mother… Her beloved, she calls me!” Jewish mothers, “in love” with their sons, no doubt imagine that they have given birth to the long-awaited Messiah of Israel. And Philip Roth adds, sickened, “What was it with these Jewish parents, what, that theywere able to make us little Jewish boys believe that we were little princes on the other hand, unique as unicorns on the one hand, geniuses and brilliant like nobody had ever been brilliant and beautiful before in the whole history of childhood”?
The feminist Elisabeth Badinter explains ( XY: On MasculineIdentity, 1992), that this is all quite natural: “The good mother isnaturally incestuous and paedophile. Nobody would ever dream ofcomplaining of it, but they all wish to forget it, including the motherand son”. There are many glimpses of this type in cosmopolitan cinema. In 1997, the Jewish director Milos Forman presented Larry Flynt, a film on the scandalous life of a pornographic magazine tycoon who became the flag-bearer of the struggle against the moral order in the United States. We see this “Pope” of porn (represented as a goy) persecuted by the representatives of the “moral order” for caricaturizing the moral order in his magazine and claiming to have had sex with his own mother in a toilet. Here again, accusatory inversion is the norm. In France, Catholic associations were successful in bringing about the withdrawal of the film poster, which represented a man being crucified on a woman’s pubis.
Incestuous relations between brother and his sister are made to appear rather common, at least judging by the cultural production of Jewish cinema. References to incest are seen to be very numerous in film as soon as one starts paying attention. Here are a few: in Land ofLight (2008), director Stephane Kurc projects a history of incest between brother and sister among the French in Algeria, in a film dripping with anti-goy racism. There is also the film Disengagement by Israeli director Amos Gitai (2007); Kika by Pedro Almovodar (Spain, 1993), In Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), Christophe Gans shows us the rape of a sister by her brother. The film is also very “anti-racist”: an Iroquois Indian beats the stuffing out of a load of French peasants, in the 18th century!
In the novel by Jonathan Littell entitled The Kindly Ones (Goncourt Prize 2006), the hero is a homosexual SS officer, madly in love with his twin sister Una. This is a clear case of accusatory inversion, traditional among Jewish intellectuals.
The novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer also projects his guilt onto others. In his novel entitled Scum, published in 1991, we read: “In Argentina, Peru, in Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere, little girls are rapedby their fathers, brothers sleep with their sisters, mothers have sex withtheir own sons. People do not always put a stop to such crimes. They go talk to the priest, confess, and they are absolved with a little holywater.”
In his book On Anti-Semitism, Stéphane Zagdanski himself warns us that the reader will have to “decode” his remarks and put the following sentence in the right place. With reference to “anti-Semites”, he writes: “To be decoded: they are egotistically addicted to this obscure enjoyment of incest, access to which is prohibited to them. Anti-Semites, you understand, are very greatly disturbed by incest,which is logical, since they suffer from a lack of boundaries.”
Incest, as we see, is an absolute obsession among Jews. Mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, uncles and daughters, etc. … there are what are called “stove pipe” families, in which everybody “fits” into everybody else, from generation to generation. There is no doubt an urgent need for an official inquiry into the problem to provoke a discussion, intended to break the succession of “incestuous generations”.
At this point, there can no longer be any talk of any “Chosen People”; what the Jews need is a medical diagnosis. The “German poet”, Heinrich Heine, had the habit of declaring sardonically that Judaism is not a religion, but a “family misfortune” ( Familienunglück). Freud himself no doubt also understood that the origin of Judaism is not religious in nature, but sexual. But he lacked the courage to reveal to the world at large that the famous “Oedipus complex” was in reality nothing by an “Israel complex”, preferring to project the neurosis of Judaism onto humanity as a whole. One must always read the Jews with a mirror.
Hevre Ryssen
Understanding the Jews, Understanding Anti-Semitism
