Self-fulfilling prophecy

In my second post to this blog, I was struggling to remember the term for a prediction that by being made, is caused to occur.

Well, today my Psych professor used the term in class and I finally remembered.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

I did some research and it turns out that this concept is heavily used as a plot device in literature - even in ancient literature. One example would be the story of Oedipus by Sophocles.

A brief summary of the crazy story: Oedipus is told that he will kill his father and marry his mother. In order to escape his fate, he leaves his parents and travels elsewhere. Unluckily for him, his parents were actually his "foster" parents because his real parents had also heard the prophecy. They tried to get rid of him. Anyway, he has a bit of trouble while traveling and ends up killing this unknown man in self-defense. He continues on and ends up marrying a recently widowed queen.

Well, eventually everything comes out and the man Oedipus killed was his father. The woman he married was... yep, his mother.

Great story.

Okay, yes, that last remark was meant to be slightly sarcastic. I really do think that this is a brilliant piece of literature though, despite it's rather interesting plot.

But probably the best part of this whole conversation is that it comes back full circle. My Psych prof reminded me of the term "self-fulfilling prophecy," which led to a discussion of Oedipus and his tragedy, which in turn, leads right back to my Modern Lit class. We're currently reading Freud and basically, all his theories revolve around this Oedipus Complex idea.

Serendipitous.

Which is an awesome word.

Freud is interesting and we disagree a lot. Basically he thinks that everything comes from these two instincts/drives - eros and thanatos.

Sexual love and aggression/death

He believes that happiness comes from the quick satisfaction of instinct.

I found this passage interesting because in the Freudian perspective, I think it would be used to describe myself and my lack of a sex drive:

"These people make themselves independent of their object's acquiescence by displacing what they mainly value from being loved on to loving; they protect themselves against the loss of the object by directing their love, not to single objects but to all men alike, and they avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by turning away from its sexual aims and transforming the instinct into an impulse with an inhibited aim. What they bring about in the themselves in this way is a state of evenly suspended, steadfast, affectionate feeling, which has little external resemblance any more to the stormy agitations of genital love, from which it is nevertheless derived." - Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents pg. 56

And I realize that taking that passage out of context really makes it meaningless. Words have different meanings than they would in normal conversation. This is partly because of the translation but also because Freud uses certain terms. It took me forever to figure out what "libido" meant. Reading Freud with no background is like walking into a room where people have been having a conversation for the last couple of years, and you have no idea what that conversation is about. I still feel that way and I'm 65 pages into the book.

Tonight I'm going to finish it because tomorrow we begin Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. This is exciting. I've always wanted to read some Woolf. And it's stream-of-consciousness writing which fascinates me completely.