SOURCE: “The Oedipus Complex and the Oedipus Myth,” in The Family: Its Function and Destiny, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, Harper & Brothers, 1949, pp. 420-48.

In the following excerpt, Fromm contends that Oedipus Tyrannus must be examined in conjunction with Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone in order for its theme of the son rebelling against patriarchal control to be fully explicated.

If the Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks, the only possible explanation is that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend upon the conflict between fate and human will, but upon the peculiar nature of the material by which this conflict is revealed. There must be a voice within us which is prepared to acknowledge the compelling power of fate in the Oedipus, while we are able to condemn the situations occurring...