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Author Salley Vickers is set to discuss her new book at event this evening |
Author says Freud slipped up in Oedipus ‘obsession’
ONE of Britain’s most popular authors, Salley Vickers, will speak in Holloway tonight (Friday) about her influences, including the hysteria surrounding the Madeleine McCann case, and the work of Clement Freud.
Ms Vickers, a former Tufnell Park psychotherapist, will be in conversation with leading psychoanalyst Michael Parsons at the Holloway Road Resource Centre at 7pm.
Her new book, Where Three Roads Meet, is a harrowing account of Sigmund Freud’s battle with mouth cancer after he was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938 and take refuge in Hampstead.
The book by Ms Vickers, who worked as a therapist in the 1980s, explores the famous Oedipus complex on which Freud based many of his theories of psychiatry.
She told the Tribune: “I felt there were important things about the way Freud read that myth which were wrong. The book is my way of trying to set Freud right.
“He got very hooked on the fact that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. But he doesn’t really deal with the fact that Oedipus doesn’t actually know they are his parents.”
There is also the issue, she said, of Oedipus’s parents trying to kill him at birth because of the prophecy.
Referring to the McCann case, she added: “There’s quite a strong body of opinion in Britain that would have really liked the McCanns to have murdered their own child. They would have been quite excited by it.
“There is something quite terrible in this myth which encapsulates some of our worst fears.”
Ms Vickers said she is interested in what human beings believe they know and, in fact, don’t know, which for her is the true tragedy of Oedipus.
She said: “My book is an utterly contemporary drama about the ways we blind ourselves to reality and the price we pay for knowledge.”
But she admits that she has a huge admiration for Freud.
“He had great personal courage when he tried to withstand the Nazis and he endured terrible pain with his cancer of the mouth,” she said.
“Many of his theories of the unconscious have changed our way of thinking. He had a great mind, but he was always going to get something wrong.”
One of the greatest myths of our times, she said, comes inevitably from politicians, East and West, who are convinced that they are always right.
She added: “Blair, Brown and Bush were convinced they were right in going to war in Iraq and were quite obviously wrong.”
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