by Robert M. Young
It has always seemed odd to me that the Oedipus myth and complex should lie at
the heart of our humanity. It strikes me as so eccentric, so weird, in the same
way that being turned on by dangling bits of fat with nipples on them or an
enlarged vein with a sac beneath it seems undignified and comical. But there it
is: evolution, culture and fashion have left us this way, with sexuality and the
Oedipal triangle intermingled and as lifelong unconscious preoccupations which
ramify throughout both personal and large-scale history. For example, as the
artist Otto Dix once said, all wars are fought over the pudenda. We’ll just have
to make the best of it and play the hand we’ve been dealt.
In a similar way I have been slow to accept the centrality of the Oedipal
triangle in psychotherapy - to realize that the analytic space is an Oedipal
space, that the analytic frame keeps incest at bay and that the analytic
relationship involves continually offering incest and continually declining it
in the name of analytic abstinence and the hope of a relationship that
transcends or goes beyond incestuous desires. Breaking the analytic frame
invariably involves the risk of child abuse and sleeping with patients or
ex-patients is precisely that.
Martin Bergmann puts some of these points very nicely in his essay on
transference love (Bergmann, 1987, ch. 18). He says, ‘In the analytic situation,
the early images are made conscious and thereby deprived of their energising
potential. In analysis, the uncovering of the incestuous fixation behind
transference love loosens the incestuous ties and prepares the way for a future
love free from the need to repeat oedipal triangulation. Under conditions of
health the infantile prototypes merely energize the new falling in love while in
neurosis they also evoke the incest taboo and needs for new triangulation that
repeat the triangle of the oedipal state’ (p. 220). With respect to patients who
get involved with ex-therapists, he says that they claim that “‘unlike the rest
of humanity I am entitled to disobey the incest taboo, circumventing the work of
mourning, and possess my parent sexually. I am entitled to do so because I
suffered so much or simply because I am an exception’” (p. 222). From the
therapist’s point of view, ‘When the transference relationship becomes a sexual
one, it represents symbolically and unconsciously the fulfilment of the wish
that the infantile love object will not be given up and that incestuous love can
be refound in reality’ (p.223). This is a variant on the Pygmalion theme. The
analytic relationship works only to the extent that the therapist shows, in
Freud’s words, ‘that he is proof against every temptation’ (Freud, 1915, p.
166).
These are weighty matters, ones which Freud claimed in Civilization and Its
Discontents (1930) provide the historical and emotional foundations of culture,
law civility and decency. I find it embarrassing to admit that when I asked
myself how much of this I carry around as my normal conceptual baggage, it
turned out to be a light valise. First, there is the Oedipal triangle, whereby a
child somewhere between three and a half and six wants the parent of the
opposite sex and has to come to terms with the same sex. It's a bit more
complicated with girls, but that's not part of my normal baggage, is hotly
debated and is not central to my purpose today (see Klein, 1945, pp. 72-5;
Mitchell, 1974; Temperley, 1993). The incestuous desire and the murderous
impulses make the child feel guilty, and the result is that the superego is the
heir to the Oedipus complex. The whole thing gets reprised in adolescence, with
respect to sexuality and to authority and may arise again when one or the other
parent dies. Patients who have not negotiated these rites of passage have
unresolved Oedipal problems. One of the big ones that inhibits achievement and
satisfaction is fear of Oedipal triumph; another is the risk of believing one
can be an adult without growing up emotionally (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985).
You'll be embarrassed on my behalf that it's such a small valise with only a
beginner book inside. I had another look into my tacit clinical baggage and came
up with the copulating couple with whom the patient has to come to terms -
hopefully moving from an unconscious phantasy of something violent and feared to
a more benign one, in the lee of which he or she can feel safe, benefiting from
the parents' union. Some of my patients are stuck because they have no phantasy
of their parents together and believe that they are in bed preventing the
parents from getting together and cannot get on with relationships themselves
because of the harm they unconsciously believe they have caused. Lack of
fulfilment, stasis and longing are the likely results.
Beyond that my ideas were unclear, but they have become much clearer as a result
of preparing this essay. I want to dwell on this matter - the unclarity -
because I now think that I am clearer about that and hope you will find it
interesting. That is, I hope to clarify the unclarity.
Let's start with a definite developmental scheme, the one which constitutes the
classical chronological story of orthodox Freudianism, as modified and enriched
by Karl Abraham and, some would say, Erik Erikson. We begin with primary
narcissism and pass through psychosexual phases, in which the child is
preoccupied with successive erogenous zones - oral, anal, phallic and genital
(oral for the first year and a half, anal for the next year and a half and
phallic beginning toward the close of the third year. See Brenner, 1973, p. 26
and Meltzer, 1973, pp. 21-27). As I have said, the classical Oedipal period is
ages three and a half to six (some say five). This leads on to the formation of
the superego and a period of relatively latency, during which boys are
quintessentially boyish and horrid, with their bikes, hobbies and play, and
girls are sugar and spice and everything nice, playing nurse and mommy (or so it
is said; cf. Chodorow, 1978). Things get fraught again in adolescence when
biological changes coincide with agonising problems about gender identity
(Waddell, 1992, esp. pp. 9-10), sexual exploration and maturation, conflict with
parents, competitiveness and achievement. Erik Erikson spells out a further set
of stages, beginning with a psychosocial moratorium in late adolescence,
followed by young adulthood, adulthood and mature age, the last of which (you
may be troubled to hear) he characterises as a period in which the central
conflict is between integrity on the one hand and disgust and despair, on the
other. I certainly recognise that dichotomy (Erikson, 1959, p. 120).
How do specifically Kleinian ideas relate to all this? First, of course, she
famously claimed to find what she called 'the Oedipal situation' much earlier in
life, along with persecuting ideas from the superego, long before a Freudian
would grant that there could be a superego. Indeed, she found the copulating
couple - for ill or good - in very early phantasies.
I am going to say quite a bit about all this, but first I want to linger over
the classical Freudian story. Freud called the Oedipus complex 'the core
complex' or the nuclear complex of every neurosis. In a footnote added to the
1920 edition of Three Essays on Sexuality, he made it clear that the Oedipus
complex is the immovable foundation stone on which the whole edifice of
psychoanalysis is based: ‘It has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is
the nuclear complex of the neuroses, and constitutes the essential part of their
content. It represents the peak of infantile sexuality, which, through its
after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on the sexuality of adults. Every
new arrival on this planet is faced with the task of mastering the Oedipus
complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis. With the progress
of psycho-analytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has become more
and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that
distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents’ (Freud, 1905,
p. 226n).
In the first published reference to the incest taboo in 1910 (he had written
about the ‘horror of incest’ and incest as ‘antisocial’ in an unpublished draft
in 1897), Freud refers to it as ‘a cultural demand made by society’ which may
get passed on by organic inheritance and adds, ‘Psycho-analytic investigation
shows, however, how intensely the individual struggles with the temptation to
incest during his period of growth and how frequently the barrier is
transgressed in phantasy and even in reality’ (Freud, 1905, p. 225 and 225n). In
both the development of the individual and the history of mankind he identified
the incest taboo as the basis of all other prohibitions. Guilt was the essential
weapon in the struggle against uncivilised, rapacious impulses, and sublimation
of sexual energies provided the energy for all of culture and civilisation,
concepts which he disdained to distinguish. 'Incest is anti-social and
civilisation consists of the progressive renunciation of it' (Freud, 1930, p.
60). 'We cannot get away from the assumption that man's sense of guilt springs
from the Oedipus complex and was acquired at the killing of the father by the
brothers banned together' (p. 131). The price we pay for the advance of
civilisation 'is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of
guilt'. He calls this 'the final conclusion of our investigation', thus making
vivid the juxtaposition of civilisation and discontent (p. 134). He saw all of
the vast panorama of human history as being acted out in the emotional space
between Eros and Thanatos - the constructive impulse to love and create and the
aggressive impulse to destroy and die.
I think Klein is Freud's most assiduous follower with respect to the dual
instinct theory and the sombre lessons of Freud's theory of civilisation and its
discontents. But I also think that there is a quite fundamental divergence
between them with respect to development, structures and, indeed, all of the
signposts in the inner world which help Freudians to find their way about. I
think Kleinian ideas in this area help us to see why it is so hard to get hold
of Klein at all. I am going to spell out the history and present situation with
respect to the Kleinian tradition on the Oedipus complex, but I'm going to tell
you my overall conclusion now.
I think it's a matter of background and foreground. This may appear at first
glance a small matter, but I think it is of fundamental significance. At first I
thought that developmental chronology and stages didn't matter at all for Klein.
I thought the structural hypothesis of id, ego and superego didn't matter to
her, either, but I was wrong. These concepts are there - all of them. So are
oral, anal, phallic, genital, as well as the Oedipus complex, but they are not
in the foreground. They are background. What is in the foreground is the
interplay of positions and emotions. The fundamental dichotomy is between Eros
and Thanatos; this creates the fundamental split between the depressive and
paranoid-schizoid positions, which, in turn, give us paired emotions such as
love and hate, gratitude and envy - all directed to whole-object and part-object
relations.
There is another general point to be put alongside this one about positions and
emotions. It is that the primitive is never transcended in the way it is in the
Freudian developmental scheme. In particular, psychotic anxieties associated
with the paranoid-schizoid position continue to break through integrated
perceptions, leading to a perpetual oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid
and depressive positions, the latter of which is characterised by integrated,
more mature thinking in relation to whole objects, where part-object relations
dominate the paranoid-schizoid position. The two positions were eventually
linked with a double-headed arrow to show the oscillation between them: Ps÷D. It
is because the primitive continues to dominate that the developmental scheme is
background, while the interplay of emotions is foreground.
I'm not making all this up. It follows from the argument of a lovely paper by
Ruth Stein (1990) to which I will return at the end. I am suggesting that the
problem of finding one's way in the Kleinian inner world is to a considerable
extent explained by the fact that they have taken the signposts down, rather as
the British did when they expected Hitler to invade. The result is that feelings
are rushing around witout the benefit of the sorts of roadmaps, boundaries and
tramlines that make Freudians feel safe.
If you don't find that way of seeing things congenial, don't despair. I'll still
tell you the orthodox story, but before doing so I want to ponder Oedipus a bit.
In the light of all the recent revelations and controversies about child abuse I
had a sudden insight about old 'King Oedipus', the play Aristotle called the
perfect tragedy, the inspiration for the other candidate, ‘Hamlet’ (see Jones,
1949). If we ask when Oedipus did it, the answers can be seen in a very
different light than the usual story gives. What really happened is that having
heard from the oracle that his son would murder his father and marry his mother,
Laius assaulted the kid at birth. Jocasta tells it like this:
'As for the child,
It was not yet three days old, when it was cast out
(By other hands, not his) with rivetted ankles
To perish on the empty mountain-side' (Sophocles, p. 45).
'Oedipus', the name he was given by his adoptive parents, Polybus and Meropé,
means 'swollen footed'. When he was older and heard from a drunkard that he was
not his father's son, he asked his supposed parents who were upset that anyone
had said this. He went to an oracle.
'I went to Pytho;
But came back disappointed of any answer
To the question I asked, having heard instead a tale
Of horror and misery: how I must marry my mother,
And become the parent of a misbegotten brood.
An offence to all mankind - and kill my father' (p. 47).
Oedipus fled from Corinth, 'never to see home again, That no such horror should
ever pass' (ibid.), in order to avoid harming the man he believed to be his
father and to avoid sleeping with the woman he believed to be his mother. As he
did so, he had a chance encounter with Laius. Did his father greet him with open
arms? No, he did not. He tried to bully him over a trivial matter of who should
pass first at a cross-roads.
'When I came to the place where three roads join, I met
A herald followed by a horse-drawn carriage, and a man
Seated therein, just as you have described.
The leader roughly ordered me out of the way;
And his venerable master joined in with a surly command.
It was the driver that thrust me aside, and him I struck, for I was angry. The
old man saw it, leaning from the carriage,
Waited until I passed, then, seizing for weapon
The driver's two-pronged goad, struck me on the head.
He paid with interest for his temerity;
Quick as lightening, the staff in his right hand
Did its work; he tumbled headlong out of the carriage,
And every man of them I killed' (Sophocles, p. 48).
So what has Oedipus done except get assaulted at birth and again when he was
trying to run away from the Oedipal triangle (Young, 1988)? Of course, he
certainly over-reacted to the bullying, but he was assaulted twice. Then he
answers the riddle - about the life cycle - ends the tyranny of the Sphinx, gets
the prize (which turns out to be incestuous union with his mother), learns the
truth from wise, blind old Teiresias, doubts him, pursues the truth
relentlessly, gets it confirmed by servants who were directly involved when he
was an infant and in the wake of a new pestilence He feels awful, and Jocasta
hangs herself. Oedipus puts out his own eyes and eventually gets wisdom from
looking into the inner world. I'd say he has had bad, uncontained and
uncontaining parents, a far from good enough mother, a grossly and repeatedly
abusing father and a bad press, one which could rival our own renditions of
couples and triangles. This man was well and truly maltreated and has the scars
to prove it.
But as close inspection reveals with respect to many of the abused, this is not
the whole story. A very different one can be told about his unconscious. Indeed,
there is some evidence that Sophocles was a Kleinian, since, if we look at the
inner world, Oedipus will have been having the impulses which justified Laius'
behaviour at a very early age. He wasn't committing incest in his mind at three
and a half, as he would have if he was a Freudian baby, but straightaway, like a
good Kleinian baby. No primary narcissism but object relations at birth.
As John Steiner has argued, there is evidence that all the people involved in
the tragedy really did know the other story or could easily have worked it out,
but they turned a blind eye (Steiner, 1985). I've had another look at Sophocles'
Theban Plays, and I am here to tell you he must certainly have read Klein's 1928
paper, though we cannot be sure about the 1945 one or the 1946 one, where the
role of projective identification in the paranoid-schizoid position was fully
formulated, thus providing all the elements of the modern Kleinian analogue of
the Oedipal story.
It would be a truism to say that this play made a deep impression on Freud, but
I think it might benefit us to dwell a moment on that fact. We know that he said
to Fliess in 1897, 'I have found in my own case too, falling in love with the
mother and jealousy of the father, and I now regard it as a universal event of
childhood... If that is so, we can understand the riveting power of Oedipus
Rex...' (Freud, 1953, p. 265). He tells about seeking out his own family story
in that letter and suggests that the same tragic triangle is at the bottom of
'Hamlet' (pp. 263-66).