The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex

Freud's short paper of 1924, published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, asks what brings the Oedipus complex, the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early childhood, to its end. He weighs two accounts: that the complex founders on the painful disappointments its impossible wishes meet, and that it passes away when its developmentally appointed time is over, as milk teeth fall out when the permanent ones come. He treats the two as compatible, the individual events realising an inherited programme. In the boy he locates the decisive factor in the phallic phase, in which only the male genital is known. A threat of castration, provoked by masturbation and at first disbelieved, takes effect retroactively once the boy has seen the female genitals. Since both the active and the passive Oedipal satisfactions would cost him his penis, his narcissistic interest in the organ wins out over the libidinal cathexis of his parents. The object cathexes are given up and replaced by identification. The parental authority taken into the ego forms the nucleus of the super-ego, which borrows the father's severity and perpetuates the prohibition of incest, while the libidinal trends are partly desexualised and sublimated and partly inhibited in their aim and turned into tenderness. The latency period begins. Ideally the process is more than a repression: it amounts to the destruction and abolition of the complex, whereas a complex that is merely repressed persists unconsciously in the id and may later have pathogenic effects. Freud then turns to the girl, whose development he finds obscure and incomplete. She takes her lack of a penis as a castration already carried out, not as a threat. Lacking castration anxiety, she has a weaker motive for setting up the super-ego and breaking off her infantile genital organisation, which owe more to upbringing and to the fear of losing love. Her Oedipus complex culminates in the wish to receive a child from her father, a substitute for the penis, and fades gradually because that wish is never fulfilled. Freud closes by allowing that the sequence he describes is typical but perhaps not the only possible one, and notes that Otto Rank's theory of the trauma of birth raises a question about castration anxiety that he leaves for another occasion.