The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy

André Green's first book, three psychoanalytic essays on the negative face of the Oedipus complex in ancient, Elizabethan and French classical tragedy, framed by a prologue on the psychoanalytic reading of tragedy and an epilogue on the Oedipus myth. Green takes tragedy as the stage on which the Oedipus complex is played out, especially as hostility between the sexes and between the generations. He reads matricide in Aeschylus' Oresteia against the Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides, a husband's murder of his wife in Shakespeare's Othello as a tragedy of jealous madness that exposes the course of paranoia, and a father's sacrifice of his daughter in Racine's Iphigénie, compared with Euripides. Published by Éditions de Minuit in its Critique series, it appeared in Alan Sheridan's English translation as The Tragic Effect (Cambridge University Press, 1979).