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All of which brings up another problem in the use of psychoanalytic insight in a literary work.

Is the Oedipus complex, the clinical syndrome, material for a tragedy??

If we remove ourselves for a moment from our time and our infatuation with mental disease, isn't there something absurd about a hero in a novel who is defeated by his infantile neurosis??

I am not making a clinical judgment here, for such personal tragedies are real and are commonplace in the analyst's consulting room, but literature makes a different claim upon our sympathies than tragedy in life.

A man in a novel who is defeated in his childhood and condemned by unconscious forces within him to tiredly repeat his earliest failure in love, only makes us a little weary of man ; ;

his tragedy seems unworthy and trivial.