University College of London and Anna Freud Centre

MSc in Psychoanalytic Developmental Psychology

PSYCGP25: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Child Development Module 2

Tutor: Inge Pretorius

Student Candidate Number: NXKL2

Date of Submission: 21 March 2017

Essay Title:

The Oedipus Complex has always held a pivotal position in classical

psychoanalytic theories of child development. Discuss why this is so and whether

you think it still deserves this position.

Word Count: 2945

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Introduction

Since his first psychoanalytic publications alongside Breuer in “Studies of

Hysteria” (1895/1955), Freud was concerned by the role sexuality played in human

development. It was during his early work that he realised hysteric female patients

seemed to have unconscious incestuous wishes towards their father, were unable

to resolve them and thus, manifested physical symptoms as way of communicating

their psychical internal conflict. Freud hoped to cure this by the therapeutic effect

of psychoanalysis: the talking cure. This is known as Freud’s first model of the

mind, namely, affect-trauma.

It was this realisation which led him to believe that sexuality was not just an

aspect exclusive to the adult life, since most of these patients showed evidence of

sexually orientated experiences during their childhood. Later, with his

topographical model of the mind, he would come to understand that these

experiences had more to do with his patient’s phantasies, as oppose to external

reality. This in turn reinforced his idea that sexuality also lies in the realm of

infantile development having a functional role.

This essay will provide a historical understanding of Freud´s thinking process

around the concept of the Oedipus Complex, its relevance regarding human

psychic development and why it became one of the central concepts for

psychoanalytic theory. Post-Freudian theorists and contemporary psychoanalytic

perspectives will be considered in order to assess whether the Oedipus Complex

still warrants a pivotal position within psychoanalytic theory, as Freud thought it did.

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The Oedipus Complex in Freud’s theory

Freud introduced his ideas on infantile sexuality in his “Three Essays on the

Theory of Sexuality” (1905/1949), in an attempt to demonstrate the existence of a

sexual function beyond the genital. In this paper he described the organization of

libido (sexual energy) by postulating the notion of libidinal stage. This was

understood as a period of childhood development, characterised by a specific

organization of the libido under the primacy of one erotogenic zone, namely, any

region of the skin or mucous membrane capable of being the seat of an excitation

of a sexual nature, and by the dominance of one mode of object-relationship. A

main point in this work is the difference between the sexuality of puberty and

adulthood, both organized under the genital primacy, and the infantile sexuality

which will have multiple aims and erotogenic zones to support them (oral, anal and

phallic). This notion about childhood is also known as the thesis of an originally

perverse and polymorphous character of sexuality (Laplanche & Pontalis,

1973/1988). In this sense, it is also necessary to bear in mind that these stages of

development are of a psychosexual nature, meaning that sexuality and psyche are

two faces of one coin, where libidinal energy and psychic development influence

each other and they are both necessary for human health.

Having these ideas in mind due to the analysis of his patients, Freud also

realised by his own self-analysis that he had feelings of love for his mother

alongside a jealousy of his father, which conflicted with the affection he had for him

(Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973/1988).

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 In reference to “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles, Freud developed one of the

concepts that until the present has held a pivotal position in the theory of

psychoanalysis: The Oedipus Complex.

According to the Greek tragedy, at a banquet a drunken man told Oedipus he

was not his father's son. Oedipus went to ask the oracle about this matter. He was

given a prophecy that one day he would murder his father and sleep with his

mother. Because of this, Oedipus decided to leave his city and never return. While

traveling, he came to the crossroad where Laius was murdered, and encountered a

carriage which attempted to drive him off the road. This provoked an argument with

the travelers and Oedipus killed them, including a man who matched the

description of Laius. Years before, Laius and his wife Jocasta had given their baby

(Oedipus) to a shepherd, in fear of the prophecy she thought had never come true:

the child would kill his father. Now Oedipus finds himself married to Jocasta.

In 1897, Freud wrote to his friend Fliess: “we can understand the riveting power

of Oedipus Rex (…) the Greek legend seizes on a compulsion which everyone

recognizes because he feels its existence within himself”. Later in his “Three

Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905/1949) he stated that “every new arrival

on this planet is faced with the task of mastering the Oedipus complex (p. 226). By

this point Freud was convinced that in a universal way among humanity, we all

have sexual wishes towards our mother while being infants and that it’s a

developmental achievement to negotiate the cultural prohibition of incest and thus

become a social being.

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 The universal character of this prohibition and thus, of his Oedipus Complex,

made him theorise around the question of how most cultures have stablished this

fundamental rule. In 1912-1913, Freud wrote “Totem and Taboo”:

“based on the researches of ethnologists and anthropologists, he draws parallels

with certain discoveries made by psychoanalysis, and in particular with certain

elements involving the Oedipus complex such as the prohibition against murdering

one’s ancestors – the father or his representatives – and the barrier against incest

– against marrying the father’s wife. However, the Oedipus complex is not born

afresh with each individual or each generation, and this idea led Freud to put

forward a hypothesis: ancestral traces going back to the origins of humanity

influence the constitution of the Oedipus complex” (Quinodoz, 2004/2005, p. 121).

Freud established the initiation of the phallic phase around the third year of life of

the child, entering the path of the Oedipus complex by the realisation of sexual

anatomic differences, in Nachträglichkeit (Freud, 1895/1950) or après-coup. This

means children are aware of the anatomic difference from an earlier stage in their

lives, however, within the phallic stage the libido is organized under the supremacy

of this organ, which brings new meaning to the fact of having a penis or not.

It was not until 1910 that Freud gave the name of Oedipus Complex to these

ideas, appearing as a concept for the first time in his work “A Special Type of

Choice of Object Made by Men”, describing at first only the “positive” form of the

complex, that is, the heterosexual object choice.

According to this positive form of the complex, the boy will be born into an

undifferentiated relationship with his mother and will develop strong feelings of love

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for her. When the young boy enters the phallic phase he attributes an important

value to his penis. He will then fear its loss when facing the reality that girls don´t

possess one and then theorise this may be due to castration. The young boy

realises his father has a stronger sexual organ and that the reality is his mother

does not belong to him but to his father. In this way the father becomes a rival,

however the boy fears he will be punished by his father for desiring his wife, and

this may lead to his father castrating him. It is this castration anxiety that will force

the young boy to internalise the prohibition of incest and understand he will have to

wait, become bigger and stronger, and look for a female partner outside of his own

family. At the same time, girls are also born with a desire for their mothers and

when facing the fact that they have been born without a penis (castrated), they turn

against her for giving them a damaged body. This will force the young girl to turn to

her father who owns a phallus and make a rival out of her mother. The little girl

then changes her love object and searches for her father who has a penis to give

to her, wishing that he can repair the error her mother made. When she realises

this is not possible, she recognised her castration, gives up the desire for a penis

and by displacement she will now wish to have a baby with her father. For this

matter she will change the erotogenic zone as well, from the clitoris to the vagina,

during adolescence as a container for the wished for penis (Vega, 2015).

The threat of castration will then mean the entry into the Oedipus complex

for girls and its dissolution for boys. This, according to Freud, will have significant

differences for each sex in them building the structure of their personality, by the

process of formation of their Superego:

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“In girls the motive for the demolition of the Oedipus Complex is lacking. Castration

has already had its effects (…) it maybe slowly abandoned or dealt with by

repression, or its effects may persist far into women´s normal mental life. I cannot

evade the notion that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different

from what it is in men” (Freud, 1925/1962b, p. 257).

The formation of the Superego is considered by Freud as the culmination of

the Oedipus Complex, as a consequence of the introjection of parental authority

into the ego (Freud, 1924/1962a) by the realisation of being an excluded third in

relation to the parental couple and the repression of their incestuous sexual

wishes: “the object-cathexes are given up and replaced by identifications (…) the

libidinal trends belonging to the Oedipus Complex are in part desexualized and

sublimated and in part inhibited in their aim and changed into impulses of affection”

(Freud, 1924/1962a, p. 176-177). This will mean facing reality, being able to

develop a structured mind ruled by internal conflict, consolidate sexual identity and

love object choice, developing morality, a theory of mind and an understanding of

their place in generational order (Pretorius, 2017). Therefore the formation of the

Superego due to the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex can be thought of as a

major developmental achievement in childhood.

Freud (1924/1962a) also thought that the Oedipus Complex needed more

than repression to be dealt with. Instead he speaks of destruction or abolition,

arguing that “if the ego hasn’t achieved much more than a repression, the complex

will persist in an unconscious state in the id and will later manifest in pathogenic

effect” (p.177). An important outcome of this dissolution of the complex, is that

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children will be able to enter the latency period, understood as that which starts at

the dissolution of the complex to the onset of puberty and where a desexualisation

of object-relationships and emotions is seen along with the emergence of feelings

of shame, disgust and moral aspirations: it represents a transformation of object-

cathexes into identifications and a development of sublimations (Laplanche &

Pontalis, 1973/1988). These sublimations will help the individual to invest in new

activities such as learning and peer interactions, both essential for the initiation of

school.

Several authors have elaborated on Freud’s ideas of the Oedipus Complex

in terms of the relevance the way children face the threat of castration has for their

future personality development. Jacques Lacan for instance, has brought a

thorough meaning to Freud´s concepts of repression, foreclosure and disavowal; to

describe how it is possible that by facing or not facing the reality of being lacked

and excluded from the parental couple, the subject could end up developing a

pathological structure of personality such as perverse and psychotic. In this sense,

neuroses would be the healthiest outcome from the Oedipus Complex because

neuroses involves the acceptance of symbolic castration and therefore, the entry

into the social world (Dör, 1985/1997).

So far this essay has stated how Freud came to develop his ideas on the

Oedipus Complex and why it has been given such an important position within

psychoanalytic theory, since after all, it involves the recognition of an universal

sexual nature of the human being from birth and it has been a clinically relevant

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attempt to theorise around the process within which all humans develop, through

early relationships, a way to be in/with the world.

The Oedipus Complex after Freud

After Freud, many other psychoanalytic authors have written about his ideas on

the Oedipus Complex to agree with them, criticise them or to provide additional

perspectives. Among the criticism made around his model, it has been said that

there may be a sense of determinism and cultural bias to it, along with current

theories that propose an earlier acknowledgement in childhood, regarding sexual

difference, sexual identity and moral development.

Melanie Klein, a well-known Austrian psychoanalyst who established herself in

London in 1926 and developed most of her theory in England, claimed to follow

Freud’s ideas. However, she came to be certain that the Superego was present in

the child´s psyche long before Freud proposed, and for that matter, the Oedipal

Situation had to take place before he thought it did as well. In this sense, for Klein,

the Oedipus Complex described by Freud was the final stage of a conflict that had

started soon after birth, since for her its “tendencies are released in consequence

of the frustration the child experiences at weaning (…) they receive reinforcement

through the anal frustrations undergone during training in cleanliness” (Klein, 1928,

p. 186). Another main difference she proposed is the inexistence of a Phallic

Stage, given that she thought children were well aware of both sexual organs and

they don’t see them as having or lacking a penis (Klein, 1925)

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 Regardless of Klein’s differing perspective regarding the Oedipal Situation, she

still recognised the importance of a resolution around these issues, in order for the

young boy and girl to develop. For her, the giving up of one of the parents is an act

of love and reparation reached within what she called the “Depressive Position”,

allowing the child to see his parents with both their good and bad attributes. By

doing this, the child can introject good objects; deal with the loss brought by being

an excluded third, and have a less severe Superego that now serves as guidance

(Stojkovic, 2017).

For Donald Winnicott, another British analyst who first followed Klein’s view but

eventually developed his own theory, the determinant would be the capacity of the

child to conceive his oedipal ideas as fantasies, which will depend on a good

enough relationship with his environment (real parents) (Fernandez, 2012). This

capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy will only be possible with a sense of

separateness of the child from their primary care giver, namely, the mother, which

can only be possible if his environment allows him the chance of facing reality by

lowering their adaptation to them and progressively providing necessary frustration.

Both these authors, however different they may seem in their thinking,

recognise the importance of a sense of difference towards the parents and the

necessity of an experience of loss and frustration in order for the child to continue

his path in development.

Considering the modifications these new perspectives have provided, the

Oedipus Complex remains a fundamental concept for psychoanalytic theory in the

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present. Contemporary Freudians including Rose Edgcumbe and Marion Burgner,

would address the importance of bearing in mind not only the phases of drive

development, but also the levels of object relationships these involve. In their paper

“The Phallic-Narcissistic phase-A Differentiation between Preoedipal and Oedipal

Aspects of Phallic Development” (1975) they acknowledge the fact that for Freud

phallic and oedipal came together whereas they believe a difference can be made

between a preoedipal phallic phase characterised by exhibitionism to gain the

admiration of the object and the dominancy of one-to-one relationships, where the

triangular rivalry is not present, and the oedipal phase proper where this rivalry is

operating. This contribution involves the idea of two phases ruled by the same

drive organization, but a radical difference “with regard to relationships to self and

objects and drive and ego manifestations” (p. 179).

Conclusion

The importance of the Oedipus Complex as Freud understood it and thus for

psychoanalytic theory, is that it is given the place of being the one process through

which human beings come to develop a structured mind, a sense of sexual identity

and particularly, the internalisation of social rules, morality and empathy among

other aspects. In other words, a successful path through the complex transforms

children into social beings.

This essay has also provided some ideas around criticism and perspectives

developed by post-Freudian psychoanalysts regarding the Oedipus Complex, as

well as contemporary authors. This revision concluded that although the Oedipus

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Complex has been understood in different ways by different thinkers, they all agree

on its fundamental role in development, especially because it is apparent that for

most psychoanalytic theories, development would not be possible if the child does

not fear the loss of the loved object.

The Oedipus Complex has been a central concept in psychoanalytic theory

throughout history and this essay has taken the stance that it still deserves a

fundamental position in the understanding of human psychic development. Every

author is a son of their generation to some extent, so it is important to consider that

modifications may be needed regarding Freud’s first proposition, according to new

knowledge and our current historical and cultural context. However, it still seems

necessary to consider that for every child to enter the social world, they must

overcome their sense of omnipotence necessarily experienced during the first

months of life and see themselves in their lacked condition, in order for them to

build reciprocal relationships with others. This essay proposes, based on the

revision provided, that the latter is given by a progressive separation of the initial

dyad mother-baby, which usually involves a third, namely the father or any other

preoccupations the mother may naturally have. This understanding is reminiscent

of the essence of Freud’s visionary thoughts on his Oedipus Complex.

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