Parricide

"Murder of the father" is a reference to the murder of the legendary king of Thebes by Oedipus, the Greek hero in Sophocles' play Oedipus Tyrannus (King Oedipus). According to Freud, we were all, as young children, gripped by the "compulsion" embodied in the Greek legend: we were all, "once, in germ and in phantasy, just such an Oedipus" (1950a [1892-1899], p. 265). Analysts speak of "parricide" when the fantasy is acted out, when the murder of the father is no longer merely an imagined infraction of one of the two oedipal injunctions.