Sophocles, Freud, and Murakami

While studying for a psychology test, I've noticed that Haruki Murakami makes so many connections to Greek myths. In his novella, Hear the Wind Sing, he mentions in the beginning that Greek myths are worth reading. Hence he writes Kafka on the Shore which strictly follows Sophocles' story of Oedipus. In a nutshell, Oedipus the King is a story about a naive king who unconsciously marries his mother and murders his father. Kafka on the Shore is about a teenage boy who runs away from home to possibly search for his family. Although the reader cannot exactly tell if he actually did (typical Murakami), it seems that Kafka Tamura kills his father and has a sexual affair with his mother. In fact, Kafka explains how his father left a prophecy that Kafka will kill him eventually.

Freud was inspired by Sophocles' story and thus he called one of his terms the Oedipus Complex. This term is when the child begins to loathe his/her (but typically his) father, and love his mother. The reason why he loves his mother is because the mother is whom the child first gets his desires fulfilled. First and foremost, the child comes from the mother's womb. This means that the child would have a closer relation with the mother because it came from her! Secondly, what the child initially desires first are oral-related, such as thumb-sucking. So it makes sense that sucking on the breast fulfills the child. As the child slowly realizes that the mother is drawn towards another person (the father), the child would start to hate on him and store in his mind the act of murdering him. It is then that the child starts to learn that he cannot get what he always wants; things in life aren't always free and there for you. 

By looking at these realizations, I concluded that Sophocles was some writer! His story of Oedipus still lives on today and has made famous writers, professors, doctors, scholars, among others, to become inspired.

Now, let's take a little break from Sophocles. It seems that Murakami incorporated other Freudian terms in his works, namely dreams. Freud described that dream-work had two different steps: the manifest content ( initial understanding of dream) and the latent content (hidden meaning behind the dream). In Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the reader observes one of the characters 'dream-reading' skulls in the library, attempting to find the latent content in them. Interesting.