DNA or Romance? Antigone's Choice

In Sophocles' "Antigone", the king orders that the rebel brother (of Antigone), who died in a civil war, should not be buried & his body should fall prey to carrion animals, the harshest punishment of the time. In passing it may be observed that being consumed by carrion birds is the preferred last rites among the Parsis in their "Towers of Silence." So much for cultural differences around the world!

Then the eponymous character decides to bury him, at the cost of her life, because;

"One husband gone, I might have found another,

Or a child from a new man in first child's place,

But with my parents hid away in death,

No brother, ever, could spring up for me."

This belief of hers, places blood relationship above romantic love, where it should be remembered, there is no shared DNA, but only mutual attraction, arranged by nature primarily for the propagation of the species.

Later Sigmund Freud, postulated that despite shared DNA, romantic love may occur, as in his "Oedipal Complex" & "Electra Complex." But Freud himself admitted that his interpretation was not primarily found in Sophocles', because Oedipus unknowingly killed his father & had to marry his mother (again unknowingly) on account of social customs & not because he desired her. Similarly, Electra killed her mother because the mother had Electra's father killed & not because Electra was physically attracted to her father.

This also may be due to the observation (made by Freud himself in his "The Interpretation of Dreams") that "filial piety towards parents is wont to recede before other interests."

Though the fifth commandment explicitly says that "Honour your father & your mother", in the Old Testament it also says (Genesis 2:24), "Man shall leave his parents & cleave to his wife." The later quote was not followed much in Oriental Societies until the prevalent Westernisation.

So the basis of Freudian thought may be Eurocentric & according to recent scholarship, also patriarchal in ascribing Oedipus & Electra complexes as an Universal Paradigm. Much of Post-modern scholarship also ascribes a more central role to Antigone than Oedipus even in Occidental Culture. (Ref. "The Antigone Complex" by Cecilia Sjoholm, pub. Stanford University Press.)

The same Eurocentric view is also exhibited by historians, notably Oswald Spengler, who asserted that "Causality had nothing whatever to do with time." But the eminent Indian historian, Dr S. Srikanta Sastri, points out the impossibility for the Western mind to understand that there can be an intense individual existence which can be independent of the World-as-Nature.