The Oedipus complex, in Freudian psychoanalysis, is named after the Greek mythical character Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father, Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta. According to the theory, the complex appears between the ages of three and five. The child feels sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and desires the death of the parent of the same sex or a giant orgy with their parents.[1] Freud first put forth the theory in these words:
| “ | His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours –- because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.[2] | ” |
As understood today,[3] the Freudian Oedipus complex has two poles. The "positive pole" implies hatred and a death wish for the parent of the same sex (father for boys and mother for girls), and love and attachment towards the parent of the opposite sex. The "negative pole" implies the hatred and death wish directed at the parent of the opposite sex, and love for the parent of the same sex. Although common usage refers to "suffering from an Oedipus complex", psychoanalysis does not consider the complex a pathology, but instead a normal stage that all children go through. Oedipal desires are thought to remain heavily repressed and unconscious in the minds of all functioning adults.
While Freud regarded boys' and girls' relationships to the phallus as central to their psychosexual development, Melanie Klein argued that a greater importance should be attached to the pre-Oedipal phase, focusing on the mother-child relationship.[4] In Jungian thought, the Oedipus complex tends to refer only to the experience of male children, with female children experiencing an Electra complex, in which they regard their mothers as competitors for the exclusive love of their fathers.
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Freud considered the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex to be key to the development of gender roles and identity. He posited that boys and girls resolved the conflicts differently as a result of castration anxiety (for males) and penis envy (for females). Freud also held that the unsuccessful resolution of the Oedipus complex could result in neurosis, pedophilia, and homosexuality. Most Freud scholars today agree that Freud's views on the Oedipus complex went through a number of stages of development. This is exemplified by the Simon and Blass (1991) publication, which documents six stages of development for Freud's thinking on this subject:
Freud's writings on the Oedipus complex in females date primarily from his later writings, of the 1920s and 1930s. He believed that Oedipal wishes in females are initially expressions of homosexual desire for the mother. In 1925, he raised the question of how females later abandon this desire for their mother, and shift their sexual desires to their father (Appignanesisi & Forrester, 1992). Freud believed that this stems from their disappointment in discovery that their mother lacks a penis. It is noteworthy that, as Slipp (1993) points out, "Nowhere in the Standard Edition of Freud's Collected Works does Freud discuss matricide" (Slipp, 1993, p95). Freud's final comments on female sexuality occurred in his "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" in 1933 (Slipp, 1993) and deal with the different effects of penis envy and castration anxiety. While Freud argued that both sexes experience desire for their mothers and aggression towards their fathers, Carl Jung believed that females experienced desire for their fathers and aggression towards their mothers. He referred to this idea as the Electra complex, after Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon. Electra wanted to kill her mother, who had helped plan the murder of her father. This complex is not part of Freudian psychoanalytic theory.
Relying on material from his self-analysis and on anthropological studies of totemism, Freud developed the Oedipus complex as an explanation of the formation of the super-ego. The traditional paradigm in a (male) child's psychological coming-of-age is to first select the mother as the object of libidinal investment. This however is expected to arouse the father's anger, and the infant surmises that the most probable outcome of this would be castration. Although Freud devoted most of his early literature to the Oedipus complex in males, by 1931 he was arguing that females do experience an Oedipus complex, and that in the case of females, incestuous desires are initially homosexual desires towards the mothers. It is clear that in Freud's view, at least as we can tell from his later writings, the Oedipus complex was a far more complicated process in female than in male development.
The infant internalizes the rules pronounced by his father. This is how the super-ego comes into being. The father now becomes the figure of identification, as the child wants to keep his penis, but resigns from his attempts to take the mother, shifting his libidinal attention to new objects of desire. In contrast, Otto Rank theorized in the early 1920s that the powerful mother was the source of the super-ego in normal development, a theory that catapulted Rank out of the inner circle in 1925 and led to the development of modern object-relations therapy. (Rank coined the term "pre-Oedipal".)
"Little Hans" was a young boy who was the subject of an early but extensive study of castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex by Freud. Hans's neurosis took the shape of a phobia of horses (Equinophobia). Freud wrote a summary of his treatment of Little Hans, in 1909, in a paper entitled "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy."
Today some psychiatrists, particularly those who tend to regard mental health as a physiological issue, rather than a result of experiential and emotional biography, such as Peter D. Kramer, maintain that many, if not most of Freud's theories are incorrect, his methods flawed, and his conclusions do not stand up to rigorous testing.[5]
| “ | "I'm afraid he doesn't hold up very well at all," says Peter D. Kramer, a psychiatrist and author of "Listening to Prozac," who is working on a biography of Freud. "It almost feels like a personal betrayal to say that. But every particular is wrong: the universality of the Oedipus complex, penis envy, infantile sexuality."
Not even Freud's most orthodox adherents defend his entire body of work in all its details, but they do talk about the bigger picture. "He was wrong about so many things," says James Hansell, a University of Michigan psychologist. "But he was wrong in such interesting ways. He pioneered a whole new way of looking at things."[5] |
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