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I have argued that Oedipus of the Oedipus complex has a doubtful future as a tragic figure in literature.

But a writer who has a taste for irony and who sees incest in all its modern dimensions can let his imagination work on the disturbing joke in the incest myth, the joke that strikes right at the center of man's humanness.

Moral dread is seen as the other face of desire, and here psychoanalysis delivers to the writer a magnificent irony and a moral problem of great complexity.