Oedipus complex

Abstract: Freud’s interest in the origins of guilt came relatively late in his work, as he himself acknowledged (1933). It was only after his major clinical accounts had been written that Freud undertook a study of the origins of guilt in Totem and Taboo. In his clinical papers, as well as in his books on dreams and jokes, “disgust, shame, and morality” were simply the counterforces against which sexual longings (libido) contended. Moreover, the origin of these counterforces was at first located in the sexual instincts themselves (see Chapter 4) as sublimations and reaction formations of the sexual instincts. Hostility arose out of frustrated libido; sublimations and reaction formations of hostility (although in the service of the “ego-instincts”) also made use of the energy of the sexual instincts to deflect them into social and moral purposes. In this account, libido theory is the centerpiece of the explanation. Our path might have been easier if Freud had indeed regarded his libido theory as a theory of the emotions (as he said he did in Group Psychology, 1921, p. 90). If one permits libido to stand for the attachment emotions, the origin of hostility and morality in a single source becomes a viable hypothesis. Morality is the affective-cognitive outcome of attachment. Threatened attachment, which first evokes protest aimed at the caretaker—“other,” is then transformed, mainly by identification, into states of shame and guilt that aim at maintaining the attachment.

Abstract: During the First World War the pioneer anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski found himself stranded on the Trobriand Islands, off the eastern coast of New Guinea. By living among the people he studied there, speaking their language and participating in their activities, he invented what became known as 'participant-observation'. This new type of ethnographic study was to have a huge impact on the emerging discipline of anthropology. In Sex and Repression in Savage Society Malinowski applied his experiences on the Trobriand Islands to the study of sexuality, and the attendant issues of eroticism, obscenity, incest, oppression, power and parenthood. In so doing, he both utilized and challenged the psychoanalytical methods being popularized at the time in Europe by Freud and others. The result is a unique and brilliant book that, though revolutionary when first published, has since become a standard work on the psychology of sex.

Abstract: The Oedipus situation dawns with the child’s recognition of the parents’ relationship in whatever primitive or partial form. It is continued by the child’s rivalry with one parent for the other, and it is resolved by the child relinquishing his sexual claim on his parents by his acceptance of the reality of their sexual relationship. For S. Freud the Oedipus complex was the nuclear complex from its discovery in 1897 to the end of his life. The chapter suggests that if the encounter with the parental relationship starts to take place at a time when the individual has not established a securely based maternal object, the Oedipus situation appears in analysis only in primitive form and is not immediately recognizable as the classical Oedipus complex. It describes a patient who illustrates this situation. Oedipal illusions are a developmentally phenomenon than the primitive wiping out of the parental relationship with delusional development.

Abstract: Written shortly before his death, Heinz Kohut's last paper opens with a discussion of the paper 'Introspection, empathy, and psychoanalysis', written in 1959, which he presented at the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Meeting of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. In his first essay on the role of empathy in psychoanalysis, an essay that according to Kohut provided a foundation for many of his subsequent investigations in the field of depth psychology, he advanced the thesis that the introspective-empathic stance of the observer defines the science of psychoanalysis. The author explains that he was moved to propose this operational definition of psychoanalysis twenty-five years before because he felt that the introduction of the psychobiological concept of the drives (as well as various social psychological concepts) had not led to a true integration of psychoanalysis with biology or medicine but to a psychological and moral view of 'Guilty Man' that worked to distort the analyst's perception in the clinical and applied field. Kohut asserts that by defining itself operationally, psychoanalysis can accept itself as psychology, a psychology that studies man in terms of a self attempting to realize the programme laid down in his depth during the span of his life. The final section of the paper is devoted to a re-examination of man's intergenerational relationships in light of the shift Kohut advocates from psychobiology to psychology. The Oedipus complex is not to be understood as the end product of the uninfluentiable conflict of basic opposing instincts but as the result of interferences that impinge on man's development. Acknowledging the mythic power of Freud's formulation of the Oedipus complex, the author offers a dose of mythical counter-magic (to which the 'semi-circle of mental health' in the paper's title refers) and a re-interpretation of the story of King Oedipus. Kohut believes that the essence of human experience is not to be found in the biologically inevitable conflict between generations but in intergenerational continuity. Access to this essential nucleus of man's self can best be gained if psychoanalysis shifts from psychobiology to psychology. In this way, Kohut concludes, psychoanalysis can return to its own nuclear self, can realize its own essential programme of action.