A Freudian reading of Oedipus the King and Antigone In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud postulates that the main source of conflict within the human psyche lies between the id, the ego and the superego. The id contains all of a person's primary drives, such as rage, sex, or violence, and these drives are projected onto the ego, which is the source of rational thought. As a result, many of our conscious thoughts are affected by these urges. Since in a civilized society many of these compulsions, such as the tendency towards violence and casual couplings, are unacceptable, a mechanism is needed to control these thoughts. The Superego performs this function by restraining the ego, and it achieves this by reversing these primary drives onto the ego itself. Freud suggests that this causes unhappiness in humans, because these animal tendencies, since they do not cause destruction in the external world, now cause destruction in the human psyche. This leads to internal conflict and unhappiness among humans. In extreme cases, this leads to psychological illnesses such as hysteria. The two main drives in man are those of Eros and Death, and these two forces oppose each other like a struggle “between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction”. This appears very early, as shown by the famous Oedipal complex developed by Freud, where the male infant concentrates his Eros drive on his mother and his Death drive on the father figure. This leads us to the classic Oedipal triangle in which the son kills his father and marries his mother, as originally occurred in Sophocles' play Oedipus the King. Here, Freud takes a decidedly modern view of an age-old problem of why humans are not alive. ..... middle of paper ......ace College Publishers, 1999.Ehrenberg, Victor. “Leaders of Sophoclea: Oedipus. » In Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Oedipus Rex, edited by Michael J. O'Brien. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968. Fagles, Robert. “Introduction to Oedipus Rex.” In The Three Theban Plays of Sophocles: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. Trans. Robert Fagles. NY: Penguin, 1984. 131-53. Sigmund Freud, “Oedipus Rex”. The interpretation of dreams. Qt. In Sophocles: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. ThomasWoodard (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1966) 101-104.Sophocles. The three Theban plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. Trans. Robert Fagles. NY: Penguin, 1984. 157-25 Van Nortwick, Thomas. Oedipus: the meaning of a masculine life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.