“Oedipus the King” by Sophocles: Greek Chorus, self-mutilation, multiple personality, and why, at one point, Oedipus refers to Chorus as “my voice”

The stage directions say that the Chorus represents the citizens of Thebes, Oedipus’s countrymen. And the Chorus often does appear to play that role.

But at one point, after Oedipus blinds himself, I was struck by his reference to the Chorus as “my voice.”

At first, I thought this only meant that since he was blind, and could not see the Chorus, he could only hear its voices. But his dialogue with “my voice” is surprisingly intimate and personal:

OEDIPUS:

“…where’s my voice?—

…Dear friend, still here?

Standing by me, still with a care for me,

the blind man? Such compassion,

loyal to the last. Oh it’s you,

I know you’re here, dark as it is

I’d know you anywhere, your voice—

it’s yours, clearly yours…

CHORUS:

“Pitiful, you suffer so, you understand so much…

I wish you had never known” (1, lines 1446-1482).

This sounds like a conversation between a regular, host personality and an alternate personality, known to the host as a voice in his head. As usual in multiple personality, the host personality is the least in the know. Indeed, one of the principal functions of alternate personalities is to contain the knowledge and memory of things that are too disturbing for the host personality to deal with.

Self-mutilation occurs in about a third of people with clinical, multiple personality disorder. In rare cases, it can be as severe as gouging out the eyes or self-castration, but more common types are self-cutting with sharp objects or self-burning with cigarettes. Self-mutilation is usually done by “persecutor personalities” who are fed up with the way the host handles things and want to teach the host a lesson. (Of course, the vast majority of people with multiple personality—who have the normal version—do not self-mutilate.)

If Oedipus had multiple personality, he almost certainly had more than two personalities. The self-mutilation was probably the work of neither his regular, host personality nor his “Dear friend” chorus personality. But the latter, if asked, might have known who did do it.

1. Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York, Penguin Books, 1984.