Oedipus complex

Freud sketched the idea in 1897, in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, before he had a name for it. Its first published statement came in The Interpretation of Dreams², issued by Deuticke in November 1899 with the imprint date 1900. In the chapter on the material and sources of dreams, discussing typical dreams in which a parent dies, Freud argued that parents play a leading part in the infantile psychology of all later neurotics. "Falling in love with one member of the parental couple and hatred of the other", he wrote, belong to the store of impulses formed in childhood that matters most for the symptoms of a later neurosis.

He then turned to antiquity, which, in A. A. Brill's 1913 translation, "has furnished us with legendary material to confirm this fact". Freud retold the legend of King Oedipus and compared the slow unveiling of the truth in Sophocles' drama to the work of a psychoanalysis. He rejected the usual reading of the play as a tragedy of fate and explained its hold on modern audiences in these terms: "His fate moves us only for the reason that it might have been ours, for the oracle has put the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. Perhaps we are all destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our mothers, and our first hatred and violent wishes towards our fathers; our dreams convince us of it." Oedipus, who struck down Laius and married Jocasta, is "nothing but the realised wish of our childhood". Freud found the dream itself named in the play, in Jocasta's words: "For it hath already been the lot of many men in dreams to think themselves partners of their mother's bed." The dream of intercourse with the mother, he concluded, is the key to the tragedy and the complement of the dream of the father's death.

In a long note Freud set Shakespeare's Hamlet beside Sophocles' play as "founded on the same basis". The change in the treatment of identical material revealed "the agelong progress of repression in the emotional life of humanity". In Oedipus the child's basic wish-phantasy is brought to light and realised, as in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed, and is known, as in a neurosis, only through the inhibition it produces. "Hamlet can do everything but take vengeance upon the man who has put his father out of the way and has taken his father's place with his mother." Citing Brandes, Freud added that the play was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father, in the midst of fresh mourning.

Ernest Jones expanded this note into a full study, The Œdipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery³ (1910). Jones argued that Hamlet suffers from a specific aboulia and that the excuses he gives for his delay are rationalisations. Claudius, on this reading, has carried out the very wishes Hamlet has repressed. Jones drew on the decomposition and doubling of figures that Rank had traced in the myths of the hero, and later enlarged the essay into the book Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). The term itself was coined only in 1910, when "Oedipus complex" first appeared in print in Freud's paper on a special type of object choice in men.

In Totem and Taboo⁴ (1913) Freud carried the conflict with the father back into prehistory, with the hypothesis of the primal horde. The sons of a violent father who kept all the women for himself banded together and killed him. Then, out of remorse and ambivalence, they forbade the killing of the totem animal that stood for him and renounced the women of the clan. Freud derived from this deed the incest taboo, morality and religion.

The Ego and the Id, the work that introduced the structural model of id, ego and super-ego, gives Freud's most complete description of the complex. In the simplified case of a boy, an early object cathexis of the mother, which begins at the breast, exists side by side with an identification with the father. As the boy's sexual wishes toward the mother grow stronger and the father comes to be felt as an obstacle, the identification with him takes on a hostile tone. This ambivalence toward the father, together with a purely tender object striving toward the mother, makes up what Freud called the simple, positive Oedipus complex.

Freud treated this as a simplification. Because of the child's original bisexuality, he wrote, the more complete complex is twofold, "ein positiver und negativer". The boy also has a tender, feminine attitude toward his father and a corresponding jealous hostility toward his mother. Real cases form a series running from the normal positive form to the reversed negative one. When the complex dissolves, its four strivings combine into an identification with the father and one with the mother.

In The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex⁵ (1924) Freud tied the complex to the phallic genital organisation of childhood (see phallic phase) and asked why it ends. He gave two answers and treated them as compatible. Seen ontogenetically, the complex founders on its own failure, the result of its inner impossibility. Seen phylogenetically, it passes because its time has come, as milk teeth fall out.

In the boy, Freud held, the decisive agent is the threat of castration. At first the boy does not believe it. Later the sight of the female genitals makes it credible, and the threat then takes effect retroactively ("nachträglich"). Both kinds of Oedipal satisfaction would cost him his penis: the masculine one as punishment, the feminine one as its precondition. His narcissistic interest in the organ wins out, and his ego turns away from the complex.

What follows is the formation of a new agency. The object cathexes are given up and replaced by identifications. The paternal or parental authority introjected into the ego forms the core of the super-ego, which borrows the father's severity and perpetuates his prohibition of incest. The libidinal strivings are partly desexualised and sublimated (see sublimation), partly inhibited in their aim and turned into tenderness, and the latency period begins.

Freud insisted that in the ideal case this is more than a repression: it amounts to "einer Zerstörung und Aufhebung des Komplexes", a destruction and abolition of the complex. Where the complex is merely repressed, it persists unconscious in the id and later exerts a pathogenic effect.

The Ego and the Id states the same outcome in structural terms. The father and mother identifications leave a precipitate in the ego, which stands over against the rest of the ego as ego ideal or super-ego. This agency has what Freud called a double face. It says both "So (wie der Vater) sollst du sein" ("you ought to be like your father") and "So (wie der Vater) darfst du nicht sein" ("you may not be like your father"), since some things remain the father's prerogative. Freud described it as a reaction formation that owes its existence to the repression of the Oedipus complex, and he called it the heir of the complex.

The girl's development gave Freud more difficulty. In the 1924 paper he asked whether she too passes through a phallic organisation and a castration complex. His answer was yes, "aber es kann nicht dasselbe sein wie beim Knaben" (but it cannot be the same as in the boy). Her hope of one day having a penis can branch off into a masculinity complex. Her Oedipus complex is far more unequivocal than the boy's and culminates in the long-held wish to receive a child from her father as a gift. Because that wish is never fulfilled, she gives it up only slowly, and what closes her complex owes more to upbringing and outside intimidation than to the castration threat. The castration complex, which ends the boy's Oedipus complex, thus prepares the girl's. Freud called his insight into these processes "unbefriedigend, lücken- und schattenhaft" (unsatisfactory, incomplete and vague).

Klein moved the complex back in time. In Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict⁶, read at the Innsbruck congress in 1927 and published in 1928, she dated the onset of both the complex and the super-ego to the latter part of the first year of life. On her account they are set off by weaning and coloured by oral and anal sadism. She described a femininity phase in children of both sexes and an epistemophilic impulse directed at the inside of the mother's body, and she held that anxiety and guilt arise far earlier than Freud's timetable allowed.

In The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties⁷ (1945), drawing on the cases of "Richard" and "Rita", Klein linked the complex to the depressive position. Anxiety for the good object, love and the urge to make reparation work alongside sadism and the fear of retaliation, and the internalised good parents help the child to work the conflict through. The paper closes with a point-by-point comparison of her views with Freud's.

Rank took a different course. In The Trauma of Birth⁸ (1924) he made separation at birth, the "primal castration", the nucleus of the neuroses. Weaning and castration repeat it, and the Oedipus complex is a further repetition, in which the father appears as the first disturber of the child's intrauterine bliss (see birth trauma). Freud's paper of the same year acknowledged that Rank's book had reopened the question of how the complex ends.

Horney's early papers reworked the female side of the theory. In On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women⁹ (1923) she began from the girl's intense feminine love for her father. Disappointed in it, the girl identifies with him, and her wounded femininity gives rise to the castration complex. Failure at the Oedipus complex is therefore as decisive for neurosis in women as in men.

In The Flight from Womanhood¹⁰ (1926) Horney treated the masculinity complex as a secondary flight from womanhood, driven by Oedipal guilt and genital anxiety. She observed that the analytic picture of female development mirrored the ideas little boys form about girls, and she raised men's envy of motherhood as a theme that the emphasis on penis envy had passed over.

Green returned to the literary source of the concept. In Un œil en trop¹¹ (1969), translated as The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, he treated tragedy as the stage on which the negative side of the complex is played out: hostility between the sexes and between generations, matricide, jealousy and sacrifice. He read Aeschylus' Oresteia and the Electra plays as a passage "from the oracle to the law", Othello in its relation to paranoia, and Racine's Iphigénie.

For Freud the complex was the nucleus of the neuroses, and its fate was clinically decisive. A complex that has been destroyed leaves behind the super-ego and the identifications of latency. A complex that has only been repressed lives on unconsciously in the id and returns in pathogenic form. Klein's 1945 paper rests on child analyses in which Oedipal anxieties appear in the play and associations of young patients.

Harold Searles turned attention to the analyst's side of the relationship. In Oedipal Love in the Countertransference¹² (1959) he described the romantic and erotic feelings he had experienced toward patients who were getting well. He argued that such responses, felt and contained by the analyst, contribute to a successful analysis of the complex rather than threatening it (see countertransference). Thomas Ogden, in Reading Harold Searles¹³ (2007), reads the paper as a rethinking of what a successful analysis of the Oedipus complex requires.

Horney's later work rejected the biological foundation of the complex. In New Ways in Psychoanalysis¹⁴ (1939) she set aside Freud's instinct theory and re-examined the complex in its light. She argued that a child's intense attachment to one parent is not a biologically given stage but a response to conditions in the family, and she gave neurotic trends and cultural circumstances the explanatory role Freud had given to the drives.

Benjamin's critique was feminist and philosophical. In The Bonds of Love¹⁵ (1988), drawing on Hegel's account of recognition, she traced the split between subject and object into the Oedipal model itself. That model makes the father the sole agent of separation and desire and leaves the mother as an object to be left behind, and in doing so reproduces gender domination. Her concept of identificatory love names the love a child of either sex feels for the parent who stands for the outside world and for desire of one's own. Boys, she argues, usually receive recognition for this love and girls are often denied it, which makes it one of the routes by which gender polarity is made.

The castration complex is the hinge of Freud's theory of how the complex ends in boys and begins in girls. The super-ego and the ego ideal are, in his phrase, its heirs, formed by identification with the parents once the object cathexes are given up. The phallic phase is the stage of libidinal organisation to which Freud tied the complex, and the primal horde is its prehistoric counterpart in Totem and Taboo.

Among later reworkings, the depressive position supplies the setting of Klein's account, and birth trauma the prior event Rank put in its place. Aphanisis is Jones's term, from The Early Development of Female Sexuality¹⁶ (1927), for the dread of losing all capacity for sexual enjoyment, of which castration fear would be only one form. Identificatory love is Benjamin's alternative to an Oedipal account of how children come to desire.