Jan Bremmer attempts to address these problems by asking not "What does the Oedipus myth mean in a universal sense?" but rather, "What did it mean in its ancient context?" A second but still important question he asks is, "Why do we still find it important today?" Rather than assuming that the meaning of the myth is universal, he instead assumes that it will be found meaningful by different cultures under similar circumstances, and tries to back up this belief by analyzing the meaning of the myth in classical Greece, particularly in fifth-century Athens, and in fin-de-siecle Vienna, the time and place within which Sigmund Freud developed his infuential ideas about the Oedipus complex.
For Bremmer, the structure of the Oedipus myth corresponds to that of many other tales in which children are abandoned, reveal themselves as heroes, and succeed their fathers as king, often through some violent event. This aspect of the myth he relates to the very widespread existence of puberty rites in many world cultures, rites that speak to the psychological problems that attend a growing awareness of oneself as a maturing adult and a concomitant understanding of what this implies about the inevitable death of one's parents, the necessity to succeed them, and so forth. According to Bremmer, Oedipus, like Theseus elsewhere in Greek myth and like Geriguiguiatugo in South American mythology, is an example of a common story type in which "a young man performs an impressive feat, defeats a monster, kills his fatyher (or is the cause of his death) and becomes king (or culture hero)" (p. 48). To this extent the Oedipus myth is found to correspond to a universal story type that is rooted in the experience of approaching adulthood. Its meaning in the context of archaic Greece is rather simple: "the Oedipus myth can be read as a warning to the younger generation: 'you have grown up, but you must continue to respect your fathers.'"
At this point Bremmer distinguishes the Oedipus myth from others of this type because of the prominence that it places on the incest motif. Despite the fact that sexuality might seem an inevitable part of any myth involving a rite of passage from childhoos to adulthood, it is not the case that the story type Bremmer identifies really is overtly concerned with sexuality of any sort, let alone incest. Thus for bremmer, unlike Levi-Strauss, the incest motif is not just a structural element, but actually means something in ancient Greek culture -- and, he infers, in the modern cultural setting that produced Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex.
Here especially Bremmer's investigation takes on a historical dimension. He begins by noting that there exist many Greek myths in which incest is a motif, but in which incest is not regraded as a crime or even as particularly deviant behavior. Further, he argues, the fact that we know of pre-Sophoclean version of the Oedipus story in which Oedipus' mother has a different name indicates that she was originally not an important character in the myth. He therefore concludes that the prominence of Jocasta and of the incest motif are later additions to the myth, and that these additions reflect social consditions at a particular time (and perhaps place) in Greek history. This he identifies as Athens in the fifth century, the social milieu in which Sophocles' "definitive" version of the Oedipus myth was first produced, society in which we know that women were segregated from adult men to an extreme degree and also one in which relations between young men and their fathers was, among the upper classes especially, often far from close. Bremmer finds in this setting fertile ground for the specific relationship between parricide and maternal incest that form the crux of Sophocles' tragedy.
Although he does not go into comparable detail, Bremmer suggests that Freud's interpretation of the Oedipus myth "took place after drastic changes in most women's lives, since in the course of the nineteenth century the social contacts open to women once again became restricted in the upper classes. It seems likely that these developments, coupled with the rise of the nuclear family as we know it today, generated the social environment wich produced the feelings observed by Freud. Even the Oedipus complex has a history" (p. 55).