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Riddle of the Sphinx Revisited: Self-Referential Twists to an Ancient Myth

Riddle of the Sphinx Revisited: Self-Referential Twists to an Ancient Myth
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Author(s): Terry Marks-Tarlow (Insight Center, USA & Italian Universita Niccolo Cusano London, UK)
Copyright: 2018
Pages: 18
Source title: Empirical Research on Semiotics and Visual Rhetoric
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Marcel Danesi (University of Toronto, Canada)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-5622-0.ch003

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Abstract

Myth is a universal conveyor of culture whose stories capture the human heart and whose embodied set of guidelines serve to conduct everyday life. When Freud added the Oedipus myth to his theory of psychosexual development, his method of psychoanalysis subsequently launched worldwide. Whereas Freud viewed the myth of Oedipus quite literally as a prohibition against infanticide, patricide, and incest, this chapter views the myth more metaphorically to examine how the riddle of the Sphinx informs self-referential thinking as a collective stage of human consciousness. Two contemporary theoretical lenses are adopted: 1) interpersonal neurobiology, which proposes that mind, brain, and body develop from relational origins, and 2) second-order cybernetics, which examines how observers become entangled in their very processes under observation. From within these perspectives, the Sphinx's riddle appears as a paradox of self-reference whose solution requires humankind to leap from concrete to metaphorical thinking. Only upon retaining recursive loops in consciousness can humans attain full self-reflection as a beacon towards full actualization.

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