Legend has it that King Laius was a minor, divine hero of ancient Greece:
In Greek mythology, King Laius, or Laios of Thebes was a divine hero and key personage in the Theban founding myth. Son of Labdacus, he was raised by the regent Lycus after the death of his father.
Today, we remember Laius for his supporting role in one of the central myths of Psychoanalysis. When Laius was orphaned, he was taken in by King Pelops. Laius repaid the kindness by kidnapping and raping King Pelops's son, after which the story became even more interesting:
After the brutal anal rape of Chrysippus, Laius married Jocasta or Epicasta, the daughter of Menoeceus, a descendant of the Spartoi. Laius received an oracle from Delphi which told him that he must not have a child with his wife, or the child would kill him and marry her. One night, however, Laius was drunk and fathered Oedipus with her. Laius ordered the baby, Oedipus, to have his feet bound and to be exposed on Mount Cithaeron, but he was taken by a shepherd and given to King Polybus and Queen Merope (or Periboea) of Corinth who raised him to adulthood.
The story of Oedipus is familiar. In response to the Oracle at Delphi's prediction that he would kill his father and marry his mother, he ran from Corinth and set out for Thebes. On the road he encountered King Laius, who remained in character as a nasty piece of work, and in the struggle, with neither aware of the true identity of the other, Oedipus killed Laius. When he arrived in Thebes, he solved the riddle of the Sphinx and he was hailed as their new King, married Jocasta (his mother) and ruled until the famine set in which caused the whole tragedy to take place. In the Oedipus Myth, what makes the story so painful and tragic is that Oedipus, out of love for his presumed parents is unable to escape his fate and the tragedy that would destroy him and his family. What is rarely commented upon in discussions of the Oedipus Myth and the Oedipal Cmplex is the much more problematic Laius Myth and Laius Complex.
Laius was a selfish, narcissistically preoccupied man.
He was concerned first and foremost with his own pleasures and desires. Those who might thwart his wishes were to be destroyed. His death can not be considered tragic; if anything, he gets his just desserts. Consider Laius and his relationship to his son. He tries to murder his son when Oedipus is an infant. Note that he attempts to avoid responsibility for the crime even as he plans the murder by proxy. He does not kill or abandon the child but has his agents do the dirty work for him. Then, to compound his evil, he attempts to murder the adolescent Oedipus who is fleeing, out of love, from his fate. If Laius had not been an evil, hateful man, the Oedipus tragedy would never have occurred.
In Psychoanalysis, we see echoes of the Laius complex on a regular basis. By now, it has become understood, and a source of minimal conscious shame, that every boy contains elements of the Oedipal wish to win his mother from his father and do away with his father at the same time. However, touching upon the Laius myth in adult men is much more problematic. The idea that a loving father could harbor hateful, even murderous feelings toward his child, is a source of great shame. Yet, the roots of Laius can be found in many men. A friend likes to joke that if he could do it all over again he would want to come back as his child; his joke allows the appropriate expression of his envy. Most of us consciously want a better world and a better life for our children. This is the most normal of desires, yet hidden within this wish often is an amalgam of envy, love, and resentment. After all, our infant sons (and daughters) overtly take their mother away from us. She is physically less available sexually, often appropriately more centered on the needs of her infant than on the needs of the adult man who now must be supportive in so many ways. We are often exhausted by the demands of life with an infant (and this increases exponentially with each additional child.) Our finances are seriously impaired by our children, who are likely to cost a significant fraction of our income on the way to self-sufficiency. Further, by the time our sons are in their teens, they are faster and stronger than we are, can beat us one-on-one on a regular basis in sports (with some exceptions for those of us who have children when they are very young) and spend their time in leisure and the pursuit of young women in the first bloom of life. Further, they have their omnipotential futures in front of them while our futures are shorter and filled with derivative joys and inevitable decline. I do not mean to imply that there are no benefits from children. In fact, the joy that our children can bring us far outweighs the difficulties; I am suggesting that it is natural to envy and occasionally resent the youngsters who monopolize so much of our time and energy. The love we have for our children is far more significant than the animus we sometimes can feel toward them, though there are those, like Laius, whose resentments are overwhelming.
[Please note that there are an analogous set of feelings from mothers toward their daughters, as well as complex sets of feelings from fathers to daughters and mothers to sons. For simplicity's sake, I confined my comments principly to the Laius Myth.]
The greatest danger occurs when we deny our envy and resentment and allow it to fester out of awareness. When feelings and thoughts are maintained in the unconscious, they always look for ways to find expression. In the past I have commented upon America's insistence that we do so many things "for our children" and the contrast with a reality in which so many children are poorly treated and misused.
Today is Tax Day and to celebrate, thousands of Americans will take part in Tea Party events around the country. Glenn Reynolds is keeping us up to date on the Tea Party protests, and in his post today he links to this, from Human Events:
• If you’re a 50-year old-with a college degree, you will pay approximately $81,000 over your working life just to pay the interest on the debt in the Obama budget.
• If you’re a 40-year-old, you’ll pay $132,000.
• And if you’re a 20-year-old, just starting out after college, you will pay a whopping $114,000 just to service the interest on the debt created by the Obama budget.
This is the Laius Complex made real. What loving parent could bring a child into this world and saddle him or her with the debt for his profligate desires? Our politicians, of both parties, have put their short term pleasures, to be re-elected repeatedly and suckle from the teat of bloated government and the parasitic class that lives off of our taxes, far ahead of the needs of our children. The entitled classes have put their comfort and narcissistic desires far ahead of the realistic needs and expectations of our children. A culture and society that behaves as if it hates its own children is a culture and society that will fail. Laius's crimes were visited upon his son, and his people all suffered. Let us hope that the Tea Parties frighten our elected representatives enough that they will re-evaluate the course they have taken.
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