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To understand the modern portrayal, one must first acknowledge the shadow of Sophocles. Oedipus Rex gave Western culture its most enduring (and most misunderstood) template: the son who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. But the tragedy is less about Freud’s later sexual theories than about the tragic irony of failed knowledge. Jocasta, Oedipus’s mother-wife, is the first great literary figure to realize that loving a son too deeply, or without boundaries, unravels the world.

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