Concept
Oedipus complex
The organised set of loving and hostile wishes a child directs at its parents: in its classical form, desire for the parent of the other sex and rivalry with the parent of the same sex, together with the reverse pattern. Freud placed it at the centre of psychic development and of the neuroses; the way it is given up shapes identification, the superego and later choices of love objects.
Read more- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 16
- Related
developed by
- Ernest Jones 1910 Jones extended Freud's brief remark on Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams into a full study, an early and influential application of the Oedipus complex to literature, later expanded as Hamlet and Oedipus (1949).
- Sigmund Freud 1924 In Das Ich und das Es Freud sets out the complete Oedipus complex, positive and negative, rooted in bisexuality; in Der Untergang des Ödipuskomplexes he describes how in the boy the threat of castration makes the complex founder, its object-cathexes giving way to identifications that form the super-ego.
- André Green 1969 In Un Œil en trop (1969) Green read the negative side of the Oedipus complex, matricide, jealousy and sacrifice, in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Racine.
reworked by
- Melanie Klein 1928 Klein dates the onset of the Oedipus conflict to the latter part of the first year, set off by the frustration of weaning and coloured by oral and anal sadism (1928). In 1945 she ties it to the depressive position, the wish to make reparation and the internalised good parents.
- Harold Searles 1959 In 'Oedipal Love in the Countertransference' (1959), Searles described his own romantic and erotic feelings toward recovering patients and held that such responses, felt and contained by the analyst, help the analysis of the Oedipus complex succeed. Ogden reads this as a reconception of what that analysis requires.
critiqued by
- Karen Horney 1939 Horney denied the Oedipus complex a biological basis, reading the child's attachment to a parent as a response to conditions in the family.
- Jessica Benjamin 1988 In The Bonds of Love Benjamin criticised the Oedipal model for making the father the sole agent of separation and desire and the mother an object to be left behind, a split she held to reproduce gender domination.