AN OEDIPAL READING: FATHERLESSNESS IN NEF’Î

Abstract

“Paternity”, which doesn’t have an instinctive and biological side like motherhood is an inevitable consequence of the blood connection between the father and the child. The absence of the father in the child's life causes great traumas for the child in his later life. Freud considers the absence of the father as a problem as well as considering the existence of him as a traumatic phenomenon. This situation, which Freud treats as Oedipus Syndrome, is defined as father jealousy, abolishing the father in psychoanalytic examination method. When the psychoanalytic method of examination is applied to the poems of Nef’î, it allows researchers to make a different journey to the dark halls of the poet’s unconscious. Nef’î could not accept the fact that his father deserted his family and became a bridesmaid to the Crimean ruler and he satirized his father in the first verse of his work named Siham-ı Kaza. According to psychoanalytic literary theory, the poet’s satire of his father is not just a consequence of his satirizer character, but a manifestation of the sense of revenge from the father.

In this study, Nef’î’s negative attitude caused by his being fatherless has been tried to be explained with psychoanalytic literary theory and Oedipus Syndrome based on the satire for his father and his other poems.