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Although Greuze intended to show here that virtue was attractive and vice repellant, it also appears that other forces might be at work in the obsession and endless reproduction of this story.  In looking at this image from a perspective other than one of iconography or formal concerns, there is an intense psychological drama taking place that in many ways could be hiding behind the veil of the well known story of the “prodigal son.”  The essence of this drama is a conflict between a father and son.  The father repels his “disobedient” son from the household, supposedly because of his request for his inheritance.  What if his expulsion was dependant on something else?  It seems appropriate to discuss the role that Oedipal desires, and a possible subconscious attraction to an image like this, play in its popular resonance with western culture.  Why is there a rich visual history of the depiction of this sort form the bible, as with many others?  Clearly there is something other than religious values or morals that attract us to certain images over the course of history and it is entirely possible that we aren’t even aware of them. 

One can look to paintings made by Dalí, in which he obsessively used visual elements of Millet’s Angelus.  The father, son, mother arrangement is seen in Archaeological Reminiscences of Millet’s Angelus and in Greuze’s painting as well.  In many of Dalí’s famous interpretations of Millet’s painting, there is a sexual tension evident in his reproduction, more so than the original.  This is seen in his depiction of the mother as being a nude, sensual and erotic being.  Similarly, my criticism of Greuze’s work is inherently more sexually charged than he intended it to be.  An interesting aspect of The Father’s Curse is that two younger male children are portrayed, which seems to suggest that this is part of their subcoscious mind as well, or that it undoubtedly is.  There is a figure of a young boy which doesn’t stand out quite as much as the other figures, that is looking at his father with a very incriminating, fearful expression.  This figure’s facial expression and placement, is perhaps the most striking one in the painting.  Women are present in this work, but it is overwhelmingly about the conflict between the men in the image.

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Therefore, Greuze may have chosen to depict this image based on his own Oedipal struggles, or conflicts that he also was never aware of.  Similarly, the reason that particular story exists may be because it started off as a story of Oedipal conflict, but was transformed into a moral lesson.  If Freud is right, and these subconscious desires and conflicts have been present in our mind from the beginning, then there is no way of knowing how many well received stories are directly influenced by them. […]