As psychoanalysts engage with our patients in exploring their lives, we learn a great deal about the ways in which they express their own agency, and also about ways in which they respond to being the object of other people. But because of the particular history of psychoanalytic theorizing, we are more familiar with interpreting the patient's activity - the drives and wishes - than we are with dealing with the inevitable reversals between activity and passivity that characterize every life. This problem is explored by drawing parallels between clinical material and Sophocles' tragic rendering of the life of Oedipus the King.
Psychoanalysis; passivity; activity