Oedipus complex

According to the theory of psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud, the Oedipus conflict or complex is a stage in the psycho-sexual development of the child which explains the origin of certain neuroses in childhood. Freud claims to have discovered the Oedipus complex during his own self-analysis in the late 1890s, first discussing the notion in his ground-breaking The Interpretation of Dreams. The notion is 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 phenomenon in girls, refering to the Greek myth of Electra. The Oedipus complex is significant for Freud as the origin of neuroses, since the culturally unacceptable desires of the child have to be repressed in adulthood. When they were first conceived, Freud's constructs, such as the unconscious and Oedipus complex pitted private, unacceptable sexual desires against the demands of society. After the development of his structural theory (ego, superego and id) the demands of civilization came to be built into the subject in the form of the superego.

The Stages of Psycho-Sexual Development

According to Freud's early psychoanalytic theory, the libido, alternately understood as a quantity of energy or sexual desire, 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 no particular object of cathexis. Children take pleasure from the stimulation of any part of the body. Over time, as part of the maturation process, the libido acquires specific objects. It goes through several stages associated with different zones of the body.

The oral stage, as the name suggests, is the stage when the infant's mouth on the mother's breast is the primary focus of the libido. While the primary purpose of feeding is nourishment, the child also enjoys the pleasure of sucking. This stage lasts until potty training. During the second stage, centering on the anal zone at around two years old, the ability to control one's own bowels pleases both the parents and, through either holding or evacuating, also creates a sensation of pleasure for the child. During the third stage, or phallic stage, 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

The traditional paradigm in a (male) child's psychological coming-into-being is to first select the mother as the object of libidinal investment. 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. 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. {This hypothesis of Freud's may be based on the observations of one of his case studies, "Little Hans.") 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, under the influence of infantile amnesia, the child goes through a latency period until reaching puberty.

After the repression of the Oedipus complex, 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. The outcome of the child's sexual development will be determined by which identification takes precedence.

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 of Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who helped plan the murder of her mother after she cuckolded her father. Since there is no equivalent threat of castration, as she is already castrated, the complex is not abandoned suddenly, but eventually weakens over time through the maturation process.

Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex began with the material from his self-analysis. Later, after Freud adopted his structural model, based on anthropological studies of totemism, Freud extended the Oedipus complex to the social level in his theory of the primal band in Totem and Taboo. When Freud introduced his structural theory, the heir to the Oedipus complex became the superego.

Little Hans: a case study by Freud

Freud published only a handful of case studies. One of these was about a young boy that Freud diagnosed as suffering from castration anxiety stemming from his unresolved Oedipus complex. Freud wrote a summary of his analysis in a paper entitled "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy" in 1909. "Little Hans" was not a patient, but the son of music critic and early Freud devotee, Max Graf. The father reported to Freud that his son was suffering from a crippling phobia of horses (Hippophobia). Freud only saw the boy once, working primarily through the father.

Freud interpreted Hans' fear and anxiety to be the result of several factors, including the birth of a little sister, castration anxiety over the boy's desire to replace his father as his mother's mate, and conflicts over masturbation. At the time that Freud wrote the case study, he believed that anxiety was the product of incomplete or unsuccessful repression, so Freud diagnosed 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. Later, after the development of his structural theory (id, ego, superego), he reversed the order, treating anxiety as the cause of repression. (See Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety 1926).

Whatever the relationship between anxiety and repression, it should be noted that much of the fabric of the case study was suggested by Freud. It was largely a construction, as has been pointed out by many recent scholars. Freud would often suggest an interpretation that he would ask the patient to validate, but in this case Hans 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 [Freud via] 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)

It has also been suggested by some that Freud's theories about children's knowledge of castration may have been extrapolated from some of little Hans' comments.

Critiques of the Oedipus Complex

Jung, Adler and Rank

Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex was controversial from the beginning, and not only in the general public, but among other psychologists and philosophers who acquainted themselves with the work of Freud.

Carl Jung and Alfred Adler were two early followers of Freud that broke with him over the dominance of the sex drive in Freud's theory and whether ego drives were libidinal; Adler attacked Freud's ideas over repression. Adler believed that the repression theory should be replaced with the concept of ego-defensive tendencies. He argued that compared to the neurotic state derived from inferiority feelings and overcompensation of the masculine protest, Oedipal complexes were insignificant. Later, another of Freud's closest disciples, Otto Rank, postulated the birth trauma as prior to the Oedipus complex. Although he originally intended it as a complement to the Oedipus theory, the controvery that it caused eventually caused a break between Freud and Rank.

Following the direction of Rank's theory pushing the decisive moment further back in the infant's life, Melanie Klein, who worked with very young children with moderate to severe psychological disorders, came to believe that aggressive tendencies were more critical than sexual ones.

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.

Jacques Lacan's structural interpretation of the Oedipus Complex

French theorist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan revised the Oedipus complex in line with his attempt to articulate a theory of psychoanalysis in terms of structuralist linguistics, based on the linguistic theory of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. 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 contradictory dictates to, on the one hand be the father and on the other hand not to be the father, the father's position 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, that is, through language. The Oedipus complex is another name for that desire.

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 or reached through language. All language relies on this absence of the phallus (or God, the object of desire) 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. Nothing can be thought that is outside of language, but the phallus is there and therefore structures the whole system of thought accordingly.

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus

Lacan's linguistic idea was politicized by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, along with radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, who created a politically revolutionary critique of the Oedipus complex and the social structure on which it is based. They argued that internalized power structures are a function of the world order we live in, bent on disciplining the subject. They draw on French philosopher Michel Foucault's notion of discipline which Foucault uses in both senses of the term, to instill a sense of self-discipline and/or to impose it from without, often through punishment. According to this theory the Oedipus Complex can only arise historically under certain conditions, namely under capitalism.

Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus apply this critique to the dissemination of Freud's Oedipus Complex, which they call "Oedipalization". Criticizing psychoanalysis' "familialism", they want to show that the oedipal model of the family is a kind of organization that must colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function as an organizing principle of society. 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. The Oedipus complex is implicated for them in social power, since the family structure is the smallest unit of subjection. Since in contemporary society power does not come from a central force like God or a monarch, it 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. The Oedipal complex begins with that original model's articulation of society based on the family triangle. They propose an escape through anoedipal structures, relying on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's concept of partial objects and proposing non-centered schizophrenia as a goal to strive for, replacing psychoanalysis with schizoanalysis. Rather than conceiving the "family" as a sphere contained by a larger "social" sphere, and giving a logical preeminence to the family triangle, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the family should be opened onto the social realm.

Freud's Structuralism

The logic behind Freud's way of thinking is structural. It is not the accidental problems that one encounters that causes neurosis. Rather, Freud pits private desires against the demands of civilization. This means that it is not just a few neurotic people who suffer from the Oedipus complex, but it is a feature of the human condition. It is this philosophical aspect that has given Freud's theory greater currency outside of therapeutic circles. The appropriations of Freud's Oedipus complex by Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari remain inside the realm of structuralism, but replace the structuring agent, Oedipal desire, with language (the Name-of-the-Father) or capitalism and the patriarchal family. Despite Freud's insistence that he was creating a new science, Freud's popularity today is largely in the field of the humanities because his theories cannot be scientifically tested (cannot be falsified).

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Borch-Jacobson, Mikkel. Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford University Press. Palo Alto, CA, 1991. ISBN 0804717281

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. 1983. ISBN 0816612250.

Freud, Sigmund. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 4-5: 1 — 621.

Freud, Sigmund. (1909a) Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 10: 5 — 149.

Freud, Sigmund. (1912-13) Totem and Taboo. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 13: 1 — 161.

Freud, Sigmund. (1926a) Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. The Standard Edition of the Comlete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 20: 87 — 172.

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

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