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PubMed1996

Fixation of asthma and sexual impotence at different pregenital stages.

Most psychoanalytic writers believe that both asthma and sexual impotence depend on fixations at the early stages of the Oedipus complex. Through psychoanalytic study of patients with both disorders, the author believes that this problem may be considered from another angle whereby the fixation of sexual impotence is situated at the early stages of the Oedipus complex, while asthma depends on fixations at the level of the breast although its character is also triangular. It is the author's opinion that in studying the psycho-pathogenesis of these afflictions it is important to distinguish between basic and defensive phantasies, since it is the former which reveals the level of object relations where the malady is situated. Defensive phantasies include, owing to regressive and progressive movements, objects and defences from other levels and therefore cannot be used for the investigation of levels of fixation. In the cases presented, the aim of the psychosomatic symptom is, in asthma, to avoid the collapse of the self while, in impotence, it is to avoid castration anxieties, when the introjected object does not provide sufficient cohesion to the self or is experienced as persecutory. At first the patient uses manic defences but should these fail, further defences are resorted to (contraction of the bronchioles in asthma and inhibition in sexual impotence), and these give rise to the psychosomatic symptom.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

The Oedipus Cycle: developmental mythology, Greek tragedy, and the sociology of knowledge.

The Oedipus complex of Freud is based on the inevitability of the tragic fate of a man who fled his home to escape the prophecy of parricide. Thus, he fulfilled it by killing a stranger who proved to be his father. As Freud does, this consideration of the tragedy of Oedipus takes as its point of departure the inevitability of the confrontation between father and son. Where Freud looks to the son, however, I look to the father, who set the tragedy in motion by attempting to murder his infant son. Themes ignored in developmental theory but axiomatic in gerontology are considered in this study of the elder Oedipus. The study begins by noting that Oedipus ascended the throne of Thebes not by parricide but by answering the riddle of the Sphynx and affirming the continuity of the life cycle which his father denied. In the second tragedy of the Oedipus Cycle of Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, this affirmation is maintained. As Oedipus the elder accepts the infirmities of old age and the support of his daughter Antigone, Oedipus the king proves powerful up to the very end of his life when he gives his blessing not to the sons who had exiled him from Thebes, but to King Theseus who shelters him in his old age. Thus, the Oedipus cycle, in contrast to the "Oedipus complex," represents not the unconscious passions of the small boy, but rather the awareness of the life cycle in the larger context of the succession of the generations and their mutual interdependence. These themes are illuminated by a fuller consideration of the tragedy of Oedipus.

Humans↗
PubMed1996

The eternal triangle across cultures. Oedipus, Hsueh, and Ganesa.

In this chapter we consider the cross-cultural relevance of the Oedipus complex by investigating three "oedipal" myths from three disparate cultures: Chinese, Indian, and European. Although all three myths concern the same mother-father-son triad, they stress different aspects and proscriptions. These are interpreted as reflecting the different values that are central to the respective cultures. The relationship between these values and child-rearing practices is discussed. We conclude that fundamental psychoanalytic concepts are relevant cross-culturally, although the content of the Oedipus complex may vary from society to society.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Oedipus again: a critical study of Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter.

In this paper the Oedipus complex is reexamined through a film, The Night of the Hunter. Study reveals a concealed fairy tale structure, a structure that, when presented against a mythic backdrop, is ideal for presenting a certain kind of oedipal situation, that of a vulnerable damaged father and couple (indeed, couples), revealing a skewed oedipal situation. The film, produced in 1954 and looked at forty years later in the context of psychoanalytic writings of the last decade (Bergmann, Feldman, Herman, Simon), provides a matrix with which to reexamine a fundamental psychoanalytic concept, the Oedipus complex. It is the mutual enrichment of art and psychoanalysis that this paper addresses.

Drama↗
PubMed1993

[The dead mother].

This study is not concerned, as the title might suggest, with the actual death of the mother but with the child's experience of a mother who is physically present but internally absent due to depression. The child simultaneously introjects and splits off the mother imago, making mourning and "burial" equally impossible. The consequence of this cathectic deprivation is what the author calls "psychic holes" or "white depression". Green attributes to the dead mother a similar structuring function for the psychic apparatus to that attributed to the dead father in Freud's Totem and Taboo, and places the dead mother complex side by side with the Oedipus complex.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1982

Introspection, empathy, and the semi-circle of mental health.

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.

Ego↗
PubMed1994

The Kore complex: the myths and some unconscious fantasies.

Drawing on ancient legends involving the goddesses Demeter and Kore/Persephone, this study describes highly overdetermined unconscious fantasies associated with the acute anxieties and conflicts of separation-individuation. These fantasies, often aggressive in nature, involve condensation of generational and gender roles, and of oral and genital motifs. It is suggested that the pre-oedipal child of either sex experiences itself as a 'kore' (Greek for 'girl'), that is, as feminine in primary identification with the mother, and that the set of anxieties underlying these fantasies may therefore be called the Kore complex, a developmentally earlier counterpart of the Oedipus complex.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1984

The femininity of the analyst in professional practice.

The author puts forward the hypothesis that the wishes concerning genitality are present from the beginning, and especially the wish to make or to have a child. From this follows that pregenital sexual satisfactions would be mainly substitutes for genital satisfactions, which are not available because of the human fundamental prematurity. Woman's maternal aptitude enables her to fulfil, in displacing it, her dual incestuous wish, i.e. to keep her father's penis inside her during pregnancy, to recover the stage of merging with her mother by means of the fusion with the foetus. This would explain why women are less often murderers than men: an archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex would exist which aims at finding an access to the mother's belly, which means to make it perfectly smooth after getting rid of all its contents, that is of all obstacles. This need leads to a destruction of reality. The disposition to maternity is common to both sexes (through identification to the mother). The author wants to describe the disposition to maternity of the analyst in the treatment. The analytic situation would correspond to the triangle schema of the Oedipus complex: it favours the regression to the foetal stage, but, at the same time, the psychoanalytic framework constitutes a limit which cuts the child from the mother.

Aptitude↗
PubMed2006

The role of pre-oedipal and oedipal factors in psychic life.

The Oedipus complex, a basic concept in Freudian theory, is an essential factor in the constitution of the human subject. It plays a key role in the structuring of the personality and in the orientation of desire. It is the oedipal triangular structure that precedes the pre-oedipal situation (in a logical, not chronological, order), and not vice versa. The oedipal structure exists before the infant's biological birth. It is present in the parents' desires and identifications, which inexorably fall upon each subject. That is why the author believes that it is necessary to leave behind a solipsistic reading of the nuclear complex of neuroses--a reading that is based solely on Oedipus's drive nucleus--and take a joint and comprehensive view of Laius's and Jocasta's histories and traumatic experiences, which were invested in their son. Among these three vertices, a dynamic set of forces emerges whereby a basic, original unconscious field phantasy is created that bears a unique narrative and an invisible and hermetic web made of passions and beliefs, scandals and secrets. This phantasy gives shape to an unrepeatable oedipal structure in each subject, a structure that articulates with the effects of the narcissistic and fraternal dynamic and may determine the subject's fate. This paper develops the following issues: 1) Oedipus, victimizer or victim?; 2) the generational confrontation as dynamic field; and 3) neuroses with a preponderance of dualistic relationships.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The feminization of the female oedipal complex, Part I: a reconsideration of the significance of separation issues.

Freud's insights about the oedipus complex have been universalized to include the psychology of the girl. The authors argue that this crucial developmental phase for girls has uniquely feminine characteristics that have not been fully recognized or cohesively incorporated into psychoanalytic theories. This paper addresses these differences, which are based on characteristic patterns of object relationships, typical defenses, and social considerations. The authors argue that "female oedipal" is an oxymoron, and propose that this constellation be named "the Persephone complex" after the Greek myth of Persephone, which seems to capture better the typical situation of the little girl. They focus on the issue of separation and its complicated and necessary role in the triangular situation of females. Using illustrations from clinical material, the authors argue that the frequent appearance of separation material linked to triangular heterosexual competitive fantasies can and should be differentiated from material in which ideas about separation stem from dyadic and earlier issues. Misunderstanding how these separation conflicts tie into triangular "oedipal" relationships can lead to a "preoedipalization" of the dynamics of girls and women.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Oedipus and the oedipal.

Psychoanalysts have assumed that Sophocles can be seen through the lens of Freud, and that the Oedipus complex is about the incest taboo, guilt, and aggression. However, an examination of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (as well as other plays) suggests that these themes are only a part of the central dynamics of the play, perhaps not the most central part. This article describes discrepancies between what Freud sees of oedipal dynamics and the oedipal dynamics at work in Sophocles and suggests possible explanations. A central theme of my discussion is the shame and blindness of Oedipus.

Conflict, Psychological↗
PubMed1999

Listening psychoanalytically to the Shoah half a century on.

The author discusses the repercussions of the Nazi genocide of the Jews on descendants of victims and survivors, with particular reference to identifications. A typical vampiric form of identification is discussed, in which the subject is stated to be neither alive nor dead, unborn, in an imageless, timeless and spaceless condition, and imprisoned in an earlier generation's traumas. Analysis of such cases must, the author shows, tackle the genocide-induced fantasies of a vampire complex involving infanticide and parricide in addition to the incestuous and parricidal wishes of the Oedipus complex. These ideas are illustrated by a case history in which the female patient concerned, although born after the Shoah, carried the unrepresentable parental traumas within her to the detriment of her affective and professional life. The patient was effectively linked with her mother in a deadly circulation through communicating vessels, which was repeated in the transference countertransference constellation and resulted in a disavowal of both birth and death, mediated by the genocidal project. The author shows how the analysand was gradually released from this vampiric fusion and became able to reappropriate her secondary narcissistic and oedipal identifications, the resulting triangulation opening the way to sublimation and creativity.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Clinical notes on a case of transvestism in a child.

This clinical presentation describes the therapeutic process of a 5-year-old male child presenting as a main symptom quasi-delusional feminine enactments starting at an early age, which persisted for most of his five-year treatment. This symptom was understood in terms of an attempt at restitution, itself the result of being confronted with an autistic structure stemming from a series of traumatic incidents during the oral phase: his mother's pregnancy, abortion, depression and subsequent three-month absence at the end of his first year of life. The clinical material, drawings included, illustrates the interplay of oral, anal and phallic levels, with enactment predominant in sessions. The oral traumatic situation initially led to anal-manic play, then to quasi-delusional female personifications in sessions, later surfacing as an annihilating 'black hole'. All the above issued into a broad enacted phallic-genital unfolding that dramatised an oral-genital primal scene, in the course of which he managed to structure his male identity. Near the end of the analytic process the analysand reworked the 'stages' of the link to the analyst. To end, based on the clinical material, the respective participation of the early and the late Oedipus complex is examined.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1994

In Vienna veritas...?

The author focuses first on the cultural background which stimulated Freud and led to some of his conclusions on the importance and meaning of 'Oedipus Rex' and 'Hamlet' for his discovery of the Oedipus complex. He stresses the significance of Freud's education and the influence of the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century tradition of the German-speaking intellectuals. The author uses the sources of Freud's actual or possible readings from 1897 leading up to the publication of 'The Interpretation of Dreams' to support the evidence for his thesis of the complex interaction between Freud and his cultural background. The author tentatively tries to show that even post-Freudian interpretations of 'Oedipus Rex' cannot be considered without looking at parallel research taking place in fields other than psychoanalysis. He stresses the importance of myth in post-Freudian psychoanalysis and particularly focuses on the relationship between the myth of Narcissus and 'Oedipus Rex' and what this gave rise to. He concludes his paper by stressing that as Freud's interpretations of the 'Oedipus Rex' do show the influence of the cultural context in which he operated, the same can be said for our interpretations too. They are part of a changing historical process, but at the same time they contain some permanent values.

Austria↗
PubMed1999

'My heart belongs to daddy'. Some reflections on the difference between generations as the organiser of the triangular structure of the mind.

The author begins his paper with a historical review of the concept of the difference between generations, which is in his opinion a metaphorical transformation that underpins the three-dimensional functioning of the psychic apparatus by introducing a differentiating intergenerational space between subject and object. He postulates that at the point of intersection between the intersubjective and the intrapsychic the subject clings to the specific fragments of his parents' history that are consistent with a belief about himself and the oedipal couple in which intergenerational links are severed and infantile incestuous wishes are seen as fulfilled. Disavowal of this generation gap is considered to lead to failure of post-oedipal secondary identifications, resulting in disturbance of the triangular structuring of the mind and consequent impairment of the genesis of thought processes. These ideas are compared with related conceptions of other authors and illustrated, with an account of the associated transference/countertransference vicissitudes, by a clinical example of the constellation the author calls 'My heart belongs to daddy', which he sees as a way station in the negotiation of the female Oedipus complex.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

A woman's attempt at a perverse solution and its failure.

The Programme Committee of the Montreal Congress asked the author to present a case of perversion connected with traumas. Rather than speak about erotization of the effects of the trauma (death or castration anxiety transformed into a source of pleasure) the author relates the first 18 months of analysis of a young woman whose important narcissistic trauma, the result of an inadequate early relationship with her mother, is camouflaged by an avidity for sexual excitations. The aim is to transform narcissistic pain which cannot be worked through into sexuality for which release is possible. Sexuality becomes a means of expressing feelings of hate, revenge and triumph over the primary object. The ensuing perverse solution--an attempt to slip into the primal scene by identification with the sadistic penis--does not succeed. The author advances certain hypotheses concerning the mother-daughter relationship which seem to explain this failure and to explain too the absence of a stable perverse organization in women. There follows a longing to return to the womb, in the shape of the fantasied destruction of the contents of the mother's belly, expressed as the fantasy of the end of the world, and which the author labels as 'the archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex'.

Borderline Personality Disorder↗
PubMed1976

The Little Nell Complex--an Oedipal variant.

An oedipal relationship between a girl and her grandfather might be named the "Little Nell Complex" after Dickens' description of the close relationship between thirteen year old Little Nell and her grandfather in "The Old Curiosity Shop". A clinical illustration of a Little Nell Complex is described in a seventeen year old girl who presented with depression following the death of her grandmother. Oedipal complexes existing between the patient and her parents, the patient and her grandparents, and between the patient's mother and her parents, are described. In offering notations the "erotic" component of the Oedipus complex has usually received more attention than the "attachment" component. It is felt that Bowlby's concepts of attachment behaviour may be useful in the consideration of oedipal behaviour and in the structuring of therapy.

Adjustment Disorders↗