Oedipus complex

The Oedipus conflict or complex is a stage in the psycho-sexual development of the child in the theory of psychoanalysis, developed by Sigmund Freud to explain the origin of certain neuroses in childhood. Taken from the Greek myth of Oedipus, who was fated by the oracle to kill his father Laius and marry his mother Jocasta, Freud developed the notion of the Oedipus complex to explain the male child's unconscious desire for the exclusive love of the parent of the opposite sex, occurring around the age of five and a half years (a period known as the phallic stage in Freudian theory). This desire includes jealousy toward the parent of the same sex and the unconscious wish for that parent's death. Freud used the term to describe the unconscious feelings of children of both sexes toward their parents. However, later researchers used the term Electra complex for the the same phenomena in girls. (In Greek myth, Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, helped plan the murder of her mother). Freud and his ideas were a primary inspiration for Carl Jung, who further described the concept and coined the term "complex".

The Stages of Psycho-Sexual Development

According to Freud's early psychoanalytic theory, the libido, alternatively understood as sexual desire or a quantity of energy, was attached to specific sexual instincts. The child was born with a quantity of libido that needed to be "cathected" or invested into objects to achieve satisfaction. If this libidinal energy built up, it would cause unpleasure. Freud postulated that at birth children are "polymorphously perverse," that is, their libidinal drive has not particular object of cathexis. They take pleasure from the stimulation of any part of the body. Over time, the libido acquires specific object. It goes through several stages associated with different zones of the body.

The oral stage, as the name suggests, is when the mother's breast is the primary focus of the libido. While the primary purpose is nourishment, the child also enjoys the pleasure of sucking. This stage last until potty training. During the second stage, or anal stage at around two years old, the ability to control one's own bowels both pleases the parents and, through either holding or evacuating, also creates a sensation of pleasure. During the third stage, the phallic state at around three or four years old, the object of libidinal cathexis becomes the genital zone. In one of Freud's more controversial findings, he believes that children discover masturbation during this period. At this stage, children of both sexes undergo the phallic stage. There is no difference yet between boys and girls. Finally, at around five or six, the child enters into the phase of the Oedipus complex.

Theory of the Oedipus complex

During the male phallic stage, the young boy loves his mother and identifies with his father. However, as the libido becomes cathected in the genital zone, the boy's love for the mother becomes more exclusive and sexualized. The traditional paradigm in a (male) child's psychological coming-into-being is to first select the mother as the object of libidinal investment. Consequently, the identification with the father becomes rivalrous. At this point, Freud conjectures, the boy sees the female genital and surmises that she has been castrated. He fears that if he arouses the father's anger, the father might castrate him as well. This castration anxiety causes the son to retreat from his desire for the mother. The castration complex essentially ends and replaces the Oedipus complex. The boy retreats in fear from his desire to replace the father; he represses his desires and the Oedipus complex disappears. After the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, the child goes through a latency period until reaching puberty.

When the boy renounces the mother as object, he will either identify with the lost object (mother) or strengthen his identification with the father, depending on the relative strength of the masculine and feminine tendencies in the boy. As a corrolate to his notion of polymorphous perversity, Freud postulates an original bisexual disposition.

Although Freud devoted most of his early literature to the Oedipus complex in males, he believed that the Oedipus complex was universal. Females underwent an inverted Oedipus complex. The girl's first love object is also the mother, but the father is not the primary identification. When she discovers the boy's external genitals, she feels castrated and blames the mother, weakening the early cathexis. Her attention turns to the father, who has the missing organ, but for that reason she also feels envy, what Freud calls "penis envy." This is the girl's equivalent to the castration complex, except that the castration complex ends the boy's Oedipus complex, while it serves to initiate the girl's. She desires her father and envies her mother, what some would later call the "Electra complex" after the Greek myth. Since there is no equivalent threat of castration, as she is already castrated, the complex is not abandonned suddenly, but eventually weakens over time through the maturation process.

Later, when Freud introduced his structural theory, the heir to the Oedipus complex would become the superego. The child internalizes the rules and the rule of the father.

The Oedipus complex would begin with the material from his self-analysis. Later, after Freud adopts his structural model, based on anthropological studies of totemism, Freud extends the Oedipus complex to the social level in his theory of the primal band in Totem and Taboo.

Little Hans: a case study by Freud

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' neurosis took the shape of a crippling phobia of horses (Hippophobia). 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". This was one of just a few case studies that Freud published.

Hans' fear and anxiety were thought to be the result of several factors, including the birth of a little sister, his desire to replace his father as his mother's mate, conflicts over masturbation, and other issues. Freud saw this anxiety as rooted in an incomplete repression of sexual feelings and other defense mechanisms the boy was using to combat the impulses involved in his sexual development. Hans' behavior and emotional state did improve when he was provided with information by his father, and the two became closer.

It should be noted that Hans himself was unable to find on his own any connection at all between the fear of horses and the desire to get rid of his father. George Serban, in a more modern commentary, says

This assumption was suggested to him by his father. Furthermore, Freud himself admitted that 'Hans had to be told many things that he could not say himself'; that 'he had to be presented with thoughts which he had so far shown no signs of possessing'; and that 'his attention had to be turned in the direction from which his father was expecting something to come.' (Serban 1982)

Critiques of the Oedipus Complex

Popular culture often portrays Freud as overly focused on sexual influences and his theory of the Oedipus Complex is often considered untenable. However, there have always been a great deal of critiques of the Oedipus complex by psychoanalysts and among philosophers who acquainted themselves with the work of Freud.

Alfred Adler contended with Freud's belief over the dominance of the sex drive and whether ego drives were libidinal; he also attacked Freud's ideas over repression. Adler believed that the repression theory should be replaced with the concept of ego-defensive tendencies - compared to the neurotic state derived from inferiority feelings and overcompensation of the masculine protest, Oedipal complexes were to him insignificant. Although Freud believed that the Oedipus complex takes place around the age of five, Melanie Klein believed it took place far earlier, possibly in the first two years of a child's life. There have also been criticisms from anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski or Edvard Westermarck. Research such as that of Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands is often cited as a challenge to Freud's conviction that the Oedipus complex is a universal phenomenon.

Philosophy and the Oedipus Complex

Philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, along with radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, have used their work to show how internalized power structures are a function of the world order we live in, bent on disciplining the subject. Discipline is meant by Foucault in both its senses, arguing that the science of man has created its own object, relying on Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the will to power. According to this theory the Oedipus Complex can only arise historically under certain conditions.

Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus apply this to the dissemination of Freud's Oedipus Complex, which they call "Oedipalization". They believe that the capitalist system and psychoanalysis as its tool rely on making people believe in a father, who is more powerful than them and has a phallus, which will always be unobtainable for them. Their idea is that the family structure is the smallest unit of this subjection because now power does not come from a central force like God or a monarch, but is spread over small power units which keep people in submission. Therefore they assume a system of pure immanence without an outside. They believe psychoanalysis is intent on producing neuroses while the capitalist system is really inherently schizophrenic. They propose an escape through anoedipal structures, relying on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's concept of partial objects and proposing non-centered schizophrenia as a tendency to strive for, displacing psychoanalysis for schizoanalysis.

French theorist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan revised the Oedipus complex in line with his structuralist attempt to combine psychoanalysis and linguistics. Lacan claimed that the position of the father could never be held by the infant. On the one hand the infant must identify with the father, in order to participate in sexual relations. However the infant could also never become the father as this would imply sexual relations with the mother. Through the dictates on the one hand to be the father and on the other not to, the father is elevated to an ideal. He is no longer a real material father, but a function of a father. Lacan terms this the "Name-of-the-Father". The same goes for the mother — Lacan no longer talks of a real mother, but simply of desire, which is a desire to return to the undifferentiated state of being together with the mother, before the interference through the Name-of-the-Father.

This desire necessarily lacks something, i.e. it is a desire of lack. The father and accordingly the phallus (not a real penis, but a representation of mastery) can never be reached, thus he is above or outside the language system and cannot be spoken about. All language relies on this absence of the phallus from the system of signification. According to this theory, without a phallus outside of language, nothing in language would make sense or could be differentiated. Thus Lacan remodels the linguistic theory of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. It is this idea that forms the basis of much contemporary thought, especially poststructuralism. Nothing can be thought that is outside of language, but the phallus is there and therefore structures the whole system of thought accordingly. Oedipus could also be thought of the theme of the story.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Serban, George. The Tyranny of Magical Thinking. E. P. Dutton Inc., New York 1982. ISBN 052524140X

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