NEW IDEAS ABOUT THE COMPLEX
by Robert M. Young
It has always seemed odd to me that the Oedipus myth and complex should lie at
the heart of our humanity. It strikes me as so eccentric, so weird, in the same
way that being turned on by dangling bits of fat with nipples on them or an
enlarged vein with a sac beneath it seems undignified and comical. But there it
is: evolution, culture and fashion have left us this way, with sexuality and the
Oedipal triangle intermingled and as lifelong unconscious preoccupations which
ramify throughout both personal and large-scale history. For example, as the
artist Otto Dix once said, all wars are fought over the pudenda. We’ll just have
to make the best of it and play the hand we’ve been dealt.
In a similar way I have been slow to accept the centrality of the Oedipal
triangle in psychotherapy - to realize that the analytic space is an Oedipal
space, that the analytic frame keeps incest at bay and that the analytic
relationship involves continually offering incest and continually declining it
in the name of analytic abstinence and the hope of a relationship that
transcends or goes beyond incestuous desires. Breaking the analytic frame
invariably involves the risk of child abuse and sleeping with patients or
ex-patients is precisely that.
Martin Bergmann puts some of these points very nicely in his essay on
transference love (Bergmann, 1987, ch. 18). He says, ‘In the analytic situation,
the early images are made conscious and thereby deprived of their energising
potential. In analysis, the uncovering of the incestuous fixation behind
transference love loosens the incestuous ties and prepares the way for a future
love free from the need to repeat oedipal triangulation. Under conditions of
health the infantile prototypes merely energize the new falling in love while in
neurosis they also evoke the incest taboo and needs for new triangulation that
repeat the triangle of the oedipal state’ (p. 220). With respect to patients who
get involved with ex-therapists, he says that they claim that “‘unlike the rest
of humanity I am entitled to disobey the incest taboo, circumventing the work of
mourning, and possess my parent sexually. I am entitled to do so because I
suffered so much or simply because I am an exception’” (p. 222). From the
therapist’s point of view, ‘When the transference relationship becomes a sexual
one, it represents symbolically and unconsciously the fulfilment of the wish
that the infantile love object will not be given up and that incestuous love can
be refound in reality’ (p.223). This is a variant on the Pygmalion theme. The
analytic relationship works only to the extent that the therapist shows, in
’s words, ‘that he is proof against every temptation’ (Freud, 1915, p.
166).
These are weighty matters, ones which Freud claimed in Civilization and Its
Discontents (1930) provide the historical and emotional foundations of culture,
law civility and decency. I find it embarrassing to admit that when I asked
myself how much of this I carry around as my normal conceptual baggage, it
turned out to be a light valise. First, there is the Oedipal triangle, whereby a
child somewhere between three and a half and six wants the parent of the
opposite sex and has to come to terms with the same sex. It's a bit more
complicated with girls, but that's not part of my normal baggage, is hotly
debated and is not central to my purpose today (see Klein, 1945, pp. 72-5;
Mitchell, 1974; Temperley, 1993). The incestuous desire and the murderous
impulses make the child feel guilty, and the result is that the superego is the
heir to the Oedipus complex. The whole thing gets reprised in adolescence, with
respect to sexuality and to authority and may arise again when one or the other
parent dies. Patients who have not negotiated these rites of passage have
unresolved Oedipal problems. One of the big ones that inhibits achievement and
satisfaction is fear of Oedipal triumph; another is the risk of believing one
can be an adult without growing up emotionally (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985).
You'll be embarrassed on my behalf that it's such a small valise with only a
beginner book inside. I had another look into my tacit clinical baggage and came
up with the copulating couple with whom the patient has to come to terms -
hopefully moving from an unconscious phantasy of something violent and feared to
a more benign one, in the lee of which he or she can feel safe, benefiting from
the parents' union. Some of my patients are stuck because they have no phantasy
of their parents together and believe that they are in bed preventing the
parents from getting together and cannot get on with relationships themselves
because of the harm they unconsciously believe they have caused. Lack of
fulfilment, stasis and longing are the likely results.
Beyond that my ideas were unclear, but they have become much clearer as a result
of preparing this essay. I want to dwell on this matter - the unclarity -
because I now think that I am clearer about that and hope you will find it
interesting. That is, I hope to clarify the unclarity.
Let's start with a definite developmental scheme, the one which constitutes the
classical chronological story of orthodox Freudianism, as modified and enriched
by Karl Abraham and, some would say, Erik Erikson. We begin with primary
narcissism and pass through psychosexual phases, in which the child is
preoccupied with successive erogenous zones - oral, anal, phallic and genital
(oral for the first year and a half, anal for the next year and a half and
phallic beginning toward the close of the third year. See Brenner, 1973, p. 26
and Meltzer, 1973, pp. 21-27). As I have said, the classical Oedipal period is
ages three and a half to six (some say five). This leads on to the formation of
the superego and a period of relatively latency, during which boys are
quintessentially boyish and horrid, with their bikes, hobbies and play, and
girls are sugar and spice and everything nice, playing nurse and mommy (or so it
is said; cf. Chodorow, 1978). Things get fraught again in adolescence when
biological changes coincide with agonising problems about gender identity
(Waddell, 1992, esp. pp. 9-10), sexual exploration and maturation, conflict with
parents, competitiveness and achievement. Erik Erikson spells out a further set
of stages, beginning with a psychosocial moratorium in late adolescence,
followed by young adulthood, adulthood and mature age, the last of which (you
may be troubled to hear) he characterises as a period in which the central
conflict is between integrity on the one hand and disgust and despair, on the
other. I certainly recognise that dichotomy (Erikson, 1959, p. 120).
How do specifically Kleinian ideas relate to all this? First, of course, she
famously claimed to find what she called 'the Oedipal situation' much earlier in
life, along with persecuting ideas from the superego, long before a Freudian
would grant that there could be a superego. Indeed, she found the copulating
couple - for ill or good - in very early phantasies.
I am going to say quite a bit about all this, but first I want to linger over
the classical Freudian story. Freud called the Oedipus complex 'the core
complex' or the nuclear complex of every neurosis. In a footnote added to the
1920 edition of Three Essays on Sexuality, he made it clear that the Oedipus
complex is the immovable foundation stone on which the whole edifice of
psychoanalysis is based: ‘It has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is
the nuclear complex of the neuroses, and constitutes the essential part of their
content. It represents the peak of infantile sexuality, which, through its
after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on the sexuality of adults. Every
new arrival on this planet is faced with the task of mastering the Oedipus
complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis. With the progress
of psycho-analytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has become more
and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that
distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents’ (Freud, 1905,
p. 226n).
