Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict

Paper read by Melanie Klein at the Innsbruck Congress of 1927 and published in 1928, in English and in German as "Frühstadien des Ödipuskonfliktes". Drawing on her analyses of young children, Klein moves the beginnings of the Oedipus conflict and of the super-ego back to the frustrations of weaning towards the end of the first year, a period she sees as dominated by oral and anal sadism. She describes a "femininity phase" through which children of both sexes pass, and an epistemophilic impulse directed at the inside of the mother's body. On her account anxiety and guilt already arise at this early stage, well before the period Freud had assigned to the Oedipus complex.