 The Oedipal myth is a very complicated thing in spite of what the Freudians say, and one cannot really look at it separately from the Greek tradition. A man has to overcome the mother demon, and that was the moment when Oedipus had to answer the riddle of the Sphinx, who is a maternal mother demon, a devouring mother figure. He did it by giving a witty, intellectual answer. That is a way how certain men escape the devouring mother. They do not slay the dragon, they outwit the dragon, so to speak. Nowadays those are the men who study theoretical physics and become very intelligent and knowing all the mathematics, and therefore having a masculine realm of their own where their mother cannot follow them. They build up a kind of mental masculine world. Such an escape into the intellectual or scientific realm has been, for instance, done by the society around Socrates and Plato in Greece. That was an escape into a pure, immense society of philosophers and scientists among themselves. We know that they were mostly homosexual, or that Socrates did not get on with his wife, Xantipe, at all, had a very unhappy marriage. In other words, the problem of the feminine and the getting away from the mother is only seemingly achieved. There must be another round in the battle with the great mother, and that is what the Oedipus myth mirrors. Oedipus thinks he has answered the riddle of the Sphinx and happily goes off having outwitted her, and in her evil witch-like behavior pretends to commit suicide. So to give him that illusion, now I have overcome the mother with the powers of the mind, and he just runs into marrying his own mother with all the tragedy and the divine punishment which befalls him on account of that. So this myth shows that the masculine intellectual overcoming of the devouring powers of the unconscious is not enough. It has to be done by the way one lives, not by the way one thinks, just as it wouldn't help the young man who has to take a room for himself to understand that he has a mother complex and that all his neurotic symptoms comes from his mother tie. He has to actually take the other room and stand the battle. If he takes the other room, does he have to understand why he's doing it? Yes, certainly. Otherwise at the next occasion when he runs out of money he moves back to Marmar again. Perhaps he finds a disagreeable landlady in his first room so he moves back home again. He has to understand why he does it and that it is vitally essential for him, that it is not just a technical change in his life.