17. Freud Had the Hots for His Mom
The famous Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud is widely acknowledged as the father of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. We have him to thank for the psychiatrist couch, and the payment of hundreds of dollars an hour for somebody to nod his head as he listens to us drone on about our lives, before prescribing us some happy pills. Freud basically said that we are all perverts, and that deep down, all guys want to murder their fathers in order to clear the path for intercourse with their own mothers.
Ironically, the figure he chose to name that complex after was probably the least Oedipal person ever. In Greek mythology, Oedipus went to extreme lengths to avoid a prophecy that predicted he would murder his father and marry his mother. He only ended up doing so unwittingly, after a series of extraordinary flukes. Freud, by contrast, was pretty Oedipal himself, as he openly acknowledged the awkward fact that he had lusted after his mother. That paled in comparison to Freud’s theory that the root cause of child molestation was not adults who preyed upon children, but children who lusted after their parents.