Oedipus complex

Discovered and description of the complex

Freud discovers the complex during self-analysis, by contemplating on the history of the Greek hero Oedipus, such as she is told in the work of Sophocle. In its first writings, Freud speaks more readily about “nuclear” or “complex complex maternal”. It is only in 1910, in its text entitled Contribution to the psychology of the love life which Oedipus complex term the “appears”.

According to Freud, the development of an Oedipus complex constitutes a normal stage in the psychological development of the boys. The mother being perceived, since the first stage of the development, like the “feeder” which gets pleasure (by giving the center), the little boy gradually tends “to adapt it”. This tender impulse starts the complex itself, which proceeds then in three phases:

; The phallic phase

the boy with the intuition of the existing sexual plays between his/her parents and becomes aware that there exists between them a complicity from where it is excluded. Frustration that it feels some causes several typical behaviors where the child tries to interpose between his father and his mother (it enters the parental room without striking, for example). It ends up entering in direct competition with his father and exhibe his penis to his mother.

; The Castration

the father is opposed to the desires of the child and takes, with the eyes of the boy, the stature of an authoritative figure likely to punish it. The child thinks castration either as sanction by the father in their competition (one speaks then about “positive Oedipus complex”), or as identification with the mother in a desire reversed to allure the father then (it acts in this case of a “reversed Oedipus complex”, which gives an account of ambivalence and the human bisexuality). In a case as in the other, however, the Pulsion S sexual constitutive of the complex are driven back. Also this stage often generates it Traumatisme S and Névrose S.

; The resolution

repression of the sexual instincts hard until adolescence, age to which the fear of castration leads the boy to give up sexual satisfaction with one or the other of his/her parents and him thus makes it possible to leave the Oedipus complex, to seek other sexual partners as his mother, and to build from now on its own personality by borrowing elements as well from his/her father as with his mother.

Examination criticizes complex

Freud believed the universal Oedipus complex. As it tried to show as the majority of the mental health disorders suitable for assign male patients rise from an Oedipus complex badly (or not) solved. Freud proves an astonishing virtuosity in this exercise (to read for example the work practices Five psychoanalyzes ).

Nevertheless, the complex could be criticized according to several angles.

With the center even of the psychoanalytical school “orthodoxe”

Freud itself was conscious that the model of the Oedipus complex could not adapt such as it is to the case of the little girl. The Oedipus complex explains indeed how the boy exceeds sexual attraction towards his “feeder” mother to direct it towards other women: however, for the little girl also, the mother presents herself, in the first stages of the development, like the “feeder”. If the Oedipus complex functions in a similar way in the girl and the boy, then one does not include/understand any more why the women, once adult, are attracted by the men. There exists an asymmetry whose psychoanalysis tries to return account with the Electra complex concept of .

Disputes come from the Anthropology and the Ethnology

Claude Lévi-Strauss found at the very least abusive that Freud based the essence of the human Psychologie on a “play of Sophocle”, part not having in addition the side of Mythe founder of the European spirit (the individual being opposed to the City) which is its tragedy Antigone . In Potière jealous (1985), it thus wrote a parodic “against-explanation” where it made derive all this psychology from a part of Eugene Labiche, a leghorn hat . This test described as “pleasant, but rigorous” ( “One saw there inter alia the uncle Vézinet, struck deafness, to make echo beyond the centuries with the Tirésias blind man, not only by their shared infirmity but also in what they hold the key of the intrigue without it to be able to untie” ) was mentioned by several authors, of which Michel Serres on Internet.

Criticisms more serious were also proposed by the ethnology. In particular, the concept of Oedipus complex appears indissociable of a family form precise, known as " nucléaire" , where the father, the mother and the children live under the same roof and where the biological father exerts the parental authority on the child. However, we teaches the Ethnologie of the family, this form of family organization does not have anything universal: in very many cultures, the agent of the authority with respect to the child is not the father, but the maternal uncle, from where very many difficulties since the Oedipus complex such as it is described by Freud supposes an identity between the biological father (with which the mother shares a complicity that the jealous child) and the authoritative paternal figure which interposes between the child and the mother. If these two roles are dissociated, it is not sure that the Oedipus complex can start.

This continuous question to nourish an extremely sharp debate, in particular in the current social context which sees developing in Occident of the new forms of the family (in particular monoparentality and recombining). Today, of many psychoanalysts try to arrange the theoretical concept of Oedipus complex to the cases of figure where the paternal authority proves to be absent, intermittent, or divided between several fathers.

The criticism of Carl Gustav Jung

With the center even of the psychoanalysis, however, a dissenting current emerged from work of Jung, which subjects the psychic life not only to unconscious individual impulses (as Freud thought it), but also, on a very different level, a Inconscient collective. Jung forever shared the idea of Freud of a sexual desire of the child for the relative of opposite sex. By doing this Jung did not deny with the incestueux desire its paramount importance in human psychism: for him this desire was much more one desire anobjectal of return to in-on this side life (to reappear there) that a sexual desire (see Death instinct). Consequently it was impossible for him to admit the Oedipus complex like universal.

The criticism of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

The critic constructivist of Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

In Madnesses with Several , appeared into 2002 with the editions of the Hinderers to think in round, the historian of the psychoanalysis Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen stresses that Freud affirms the universality of the Oedipus in a perfectly arbitrary way, apart from any clinical material (if it is not that, particularly suspect, provided by alleged the " autoanalyse"), in order to find an explanation ad hoc to the constant accounts of paternal seduction of its patients. According to the analysis of Borch-Jacobsen, these accounts were not due to any Oedipus but well rather with the Suggestion S induced by the beliefs of Freud itself in connection with the sexual etiology of the neuroses and the psychoses.

References

Dependant articles

Oedipus (general article)
Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud
the Electra complex for the little girl

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