A definite group of such repressed primal impulses is given a prominent place by psychoanalysis. I refer to the so-called Œdipus complex that plays an important rôle in the dream life as also in myth and apparently, also in creative poetry. The fables (sagas, dramas) of Œdipus, who slays his father and marries his mother are well known. According to the observations of psychoanalysis there is a bit of Œdipus in every one of us. [These Œdipus elements in us can—as I must observe after reading Imago, January, 1913—be called “titanic” in the narrower sense, following the lead of Lorenz. They contain the motive for the separation of the child from the parents.] The related conflicts, that in their entirety constitute the Œdipus complex (almost always unconscious, because actively repressed) arise in the disturbance of the relation to the parents which every child goes through more or less in its first (and very early) sexual emotions. “If king Œdipus can deeply affect modern mankind no less than the contemporary Greeks, the explanation can lie only in the fact that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend on the antithesis between fate and the human will, but in the peculiarity of the material in which this antithesis is developed. There must be a voice in our inner life which is ready to recognize the compelling power of fate in the case of Œdipus, while we reject as arbitrary the situations in the Ahnfrau or other destiny tragedies. And such an element is indeed contained in the history of king Œdipus. His fate touches us only because it might have been ours, because the oracle hung the same curse over us before our birth as over him. For us all, probably, it is ordained that we should direct our first sexual feelings towards our mothers, the first hate and wish for violence against our fathers. Our dreams convince us of that. King Œdipus, who has slain his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, is only the wish-fulfillment of our childhood. But more fortunate than he, we have been able, unless we have become psychoneurotic, to dissociate our sexual feelings from our mothers and forget our jealousy of our fathers. From the person in whom that childish wish has been fulfilled we recoil with the entire force of the repressions, that these wishes have since that time suffered in our inner soul. While the poet in his probing brings to light the guilt of Œdipus, he calls to our attention our own inner life, in which that impulse, though repressed, is always present. The antithesis with which the chorus leaves us See, that is Œdipus, Who solved the great riddle and was peerless in power, Whose fortune the townspeople all extolled and envied. See into what a terrible flood of mishap he has sunk.