Understanding Classical Psychoanalysis

Freudian concepts in contemporary practice

Ahmed Fayek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315437873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Understanding Classical Psychoanalysis gives a clear overview of the key tenets of classical Freudian psychoanalysis, and offers a guide to how these might be best understood and applied to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Covering such essential concepts as the Oedipal complex, narcissism and metapsychology, Fayek explores what Freud's thinking has to offer psychoanalysts of all schools of thought today, and what key facets of his work can usefully be built on to develop future theory.

The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in practice and training, as well as teaching faculties and postgraduate students studying Freudian psychoanalysis.

1
The Oedipus Complex

Keep or abandon?

Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex was a shocking psychoanalytic discovery because it was a condensation of all the fragmentary and disconnected repressed material at that time. It comprised the sexual in its most unacceptable form, which was incestuous. It also stipulated that the intrapsychical is structured around the dynamics of the forbidden and asocial. It depicted the child, who was considered till then just an innocent and ignorant entity as a ‘being’ who could be very much different in his intentions and desires from the moral person he was believed to be. Most of all, the Oedipus challenged all the moral convictions that humanity took centuries to build and instil in people.¹ The Oedipus shocked the world because it was a good conception to explain most of the previous discoveries and open the eyes to new unexpected ones. It was considered in the first few decades in the history of psychoanalysis as a conclusive psychoanalytic statement. The Oedipus stood out in the psychoanalytic literature as a yardstick to measure the deviation from the essence of psychoanalytic insights.

Psychoanalysts who were trained in the 1950s and 1960s never questioned the status of the Oedipus complex in the theory. There was a minor difference about that status between the Europeans and the North Americans. In Europe the Oedipus had an explicit place in the theory and the psychoanalytic way of thinking. It was hallowed and maintained a significant place, demonstrated by Klein’s unsuccessful attempt to give it an existence in the first year of life. In France, it was kept as the measure of classism versus Lacanianism, although Lacan did not lack the ability to show that the Oedipus has a better explication in his theory than in the classical one. In the USA, the preoccupation with ego-psychology pushed the Oedipus to the background, but kept it as an implicit conception. Although very few analysts, mostly of a classical bent, and only in some circles in Europe (for instance, J. Kristeva) still talk about the Oedipus complex occasionally (Crownfield, 1992) this conception does not have a significant place in the theory of psychoanalysis anymore, as the current psychoanalytic literature shows. Therefore, the Oedipus is no longer one of the main staples of psychoanalytic training; nevertheless, we can hardly find in the literature any open criticism of that conception. I treat the conception of the Oedipus as a Freudian proposition and not just a conception for reasons I will present shortly and in the revision of that proposition.

The proposition of the Oedipus

It was one of Freud’s early intuitions that came to him first through his process of self-analysis and later he extrapolated it clinically in an intelligent way. In a letter to Fliess (October 15, 1897c) he says:

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 universal event of childhood … if that is so, we can understand the riveting power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the objections raised by reason against its presupposition of destiny.

Mentioning the Oedipus Rex in the letter came as a weak link between his insight of the interfamilial dynamics and the Greek myth. In a paper, thirteen years later (1910h) Freud turns that particular interfamilial setting into a complex – moving it from the universal, which means in a way ‘usual’, to the problematic and the seat of possible psychopathology. In the next thirteen years Freud went back to the Oedipus complex occasionally. But, he made it a central piece in the Ego and the Id (1923b). In that work one could get confused about the significance of the complex to psychoanalysis, because in some places he explained it in terms of ego-psychology, and in other places he explained ego-psychology using it. He said: “The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications [Father-identification and mother-identification] in some way united with each other” (ibid., 34). In those words, the Oedipus complex is the creator of the agencies of ego-psychology. But shortly after he says: “By setting up the ego ideal, the ego has mastered the Oedipus complex” (ibid., 36), which makes the new agencies responsible for the case of the Oedipus complex. There are other similar confusing statements in that regard, which in taking them seriously, we can conclude that the Oedipus complex was a misnomer of a very significant Freudian intuition. For now, I would say that his choice of the Greek Myth as the name of the interfamilial dynamics was unfortunate, although the structure of that myth was and still is merely an insight of the Greek myth. However, neither structuralism nor any structural analysis of the myth was available to Freud or later until Levi-Strauss had done it (1963).

Freud continued using the Oedipus as a conception that bordered the universal and the individual on one side and the normal and the pathological on the other. This intuition led him to think more, specifically about the destiny of the complex, because it could be the base of the normal and the abnormal. He talked about the types of dissolution of the Oedipus (Freud, 1924d) as the basis of creating the subject’s character. Nevertheless he says:

Although the majority of human beings go through the Oedipus complex as an individual experience, it is nevertheless a phenomenon which is determined and laid down by heredity and which is bound to pass away according to a programme when the next pre-ordained phase of development sets in. This being so, it is of no great importance what the occasions are which allow this to happen, or, indeed, whether any such occasion be discovered at all.

(1924d, 174)

In light of the obvious hesitation he had about committing to one point of view about his intuition, we have to ask: what made the Oedipus complex the most popular conception in the history of the psychoanalytic discovery, and then fade away to oblivion? Why do some psychoanalysts – at that time, and still now – consider this a landmark conception? Would we be deviating from the Freudian doctrine if we denied or even just ignored it?

After Freud’s death the conflict between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein was – in a major part – about the Oedipus complex (though it was also a personal conflict). The most basic difference between the two stands was the place of sexuality in the formation of the Oedipus situation. Freud and his daughter referred the Oedipus complex to the role of sexuality in creating a conflictual situation between father and son (daughter and mother). The Oedipus to them had a sexual content. Klein gave the Oedipus an earlier start that preceded the emergence of any infantile sexuality. It was based on the presence of the father within the relationship with the mother as soon as the infant is able to relate to full objects (the depressive phase), after the part-object stage (the schizoid phase). In Great Britain the Oedipus remained an ontological entity within clinical arguments between the three schools of the British society (the Freudian, the Kleinian and the independent group).

In France, the adoption of psychoanalysis by the intellectual community saved it from a narrow clinical understanding, obliged psychoanalysts to open their minds to the new rich comprehension of its theory, and fertilized psychoanalysis with the thinkers’ flare of understanding the Oedipus myth. The birth of structuralism as a new trend of thinking, which emerged with the new works in linguistics, encouraged the human science people to ‘structuralize’ the phenomena they were studying. It was most obvious in anthropology in the work of Levi-Strauss (1978). He eventually structuralized the study of myths (1955) and the Oedipus myth in particular. He concluded that the myth of Oedipus “provides a kind of logical tool which relates the original problem-born from one or born from two? … born from different or born from the same” (1963, 216). The structuring of the myth this way puts sex within the interfamilial dynamics rather than as an isolated desire or urge. The structure of the myth reveals that if the child kills the father (in Freud’s version of the complex, eliminating him) he will discover that the woman he married was his mother (in Freud’s version, the woman he wants for himself is a mother). Lago and Thompson conclude (1996): “It is clear that analysis of this kind will quickly find itself reaching to the level of those unconscious categories of thought which underpin and formulate our total view of the world” (17). The structural understanding of the myth suggests that sexuality is not its motivating force but in fact is resultant of the familial structure. It has nothing to do with a sexual desire for the mother or a murderous wish towards the father. It pertains to the interfamilial situation in which the child’s identity is defined by realizing his position between the man and the woman in that family. The Oedipus, structurally speaking, is the natural childhood event in which the subject’s identity meets its different possibilities of formation, and not – as Freud originally presumed – a conflictual set up of the family. It later became the structuring force of the human attribute – the structuring force that creates and builds the impossible within human subject, which is an intrinsic aspect of human nature. Analysts-thinkers in France weaved the Oedipus into this new insight about the subject.

In the USA, the situation was quite different. The Oedipus complex was not denied but had no significant place in a non-dynamic psychology because ego-psychology precluded the interest in the processes that lead to the formation of the sense of identity: the ego as an agency that replaced the pronoun I. Analysts felt more at ease talking about the agency instead of the speaking of the subject. The literature on the subject shows the same sense of confusion which infiltrates Freud’s writings about the subject. There was a tendency to separate the interfamilial core of the complex from its link to the myth. Eisold (2008) examined the result of replacing the myth of Oedipus with that of Orestes and the effect that would have had on understanding the interfamilial dynamics in terms of succeeding the parents instead of conflicting with them. Clark (2009) suggested the same thing, but added an interesting angle to that replacement. She suggested that if Freud opted to put Orestes as the core of interfamilial structure instead of Oedipus, psychoanalysis and even Western society would have had a different outlook on the psychological understanding of family structure – and maybe its function too. This viewpoint presumes that Freud has ‘chosen’ and determined a name for the family structure, not that family structure made Freud revive Oedipus drama.

There was a gradual relinquishing of the Oedipus complex for two underlying and unclearly articulated reasons. The first was that neither its universality nor its generality in the Western type of family is verified or verifiable. The complex was seen by many analysts as an exaggeration of some preconceived ideas. Freedman and Downey (1995) pointed out that the complex comprises two component parts that could be considered separately. They suggested that the part about the incestuous wish is unconfirmed, while the competitive part with the parent of the same sex is feasible. Nonetheless, this part should be considered within the biological differences between the sexes because it could be just a separate line of development. Kancyper (2006) suggested that it is necessary to leave behind a limited reading of the Oedipus nuclear complex and pay attention to Laius and Jocasta’s histories and traumatic experiences with the murder of their son Oedipus. He added that the narrative of the myth creates phantasies made of passions and beliefs, scandals and secrets, which give shape to repeatable Oedipal structure in each individual subject – a structure that articulates the effects of the narcissistic and fraternal dynamic and may determine the subject’s fate. Thus, the sanctity of the myth could be ignored to allow other views of its function. Masling et al. (2002) questioned the Oedipus from a different point of view: does it account equally for boys (men) and girls (women)? They reviewed the literature carefully to imply that the psychoanalytic bias towards the sexes is partially due to adopting the classical Oedipus complex and that bias for males has a direct effect on understanding the interfamilial structure. The second unarticulated reason for relinquishing the Oedipus complex was the radical and evident changes in the stereotypical perception of females in the society.

Blass (1994), in reviewing the Dora case, decided that Freud was wrong in concluding that the patient was experiencing the difficulties of a ‘positive Oedipus position’. Green (1993) on the other hand used the Freudian concept of the Oedipus to support one of his clinical concepts – the dead mother. He concluded that it is a structuring function of the psychical apparatus similar to the functions attributed to the dead father in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), and places the dead mother side by side with the Oedipus. The literature on the Oedipus complex is clearly undecided on whether it is the actual situation we encounter in the formation of the family or if it was just a fortunate (or unfortunate) choice of Greek myth to describe it. However, the most significant push to retire the Oedipus complex came from outside psychoanalysis. It came from anthropology and sociology.

Malinowski (1955) concluded from his anthropological studies that the Oedipus is not a universal complex, and it is simply a concern of Western culture because in the avunculate structure the mother’s brother takes the father’s status and function in interfamilial structure despite the presence of the biological father in the family. This familial type suggests that the universality of the Oedipus is not conditional on the presence of the biological father. Therefore, to decide if it is replaced with something else we have to examine its significance away from its content, because it seems that the biological link with two biologically different parents as Levi-Strauss clarified earlier (1963, 16), and the sexual content involved, make it too functional and concrete to fit within a structural theory of the subject. Family and family structure are very old social concepts (Frazer, 2012). They were recognized as one of the important social instruments in shaping and developing a child. However, before Freud proposed the Oedipus complex there was no conception of what takes place in the family (if there even was a conception of something taking place) to make those things happen. Freud’s insight – limited as it was to the middle-class European family of the nineteenth century – was not about the Oedipus complex but about the existence of psychological interplay of forces that result in influencing the development of kids, till adulthood. In other words, Freud had the intuition that the relationship between father, mother and child has an operational influence in child rearing. His choice of the Oedipal model should not conceal the key idea that family dynamics have a structural core. Thus, the Oedipus was convenient and a relevant formation that could give it a structure. It also defines – in a familiar way – the interfamilial dynamics and what we deal with clinically.

The Oedipus complex, with the fundamental changes psychoanalysis initiated in the society, lost its sexual content and became less culturally coloured. It looks as if it faded away; yet confirming that would be a misleading reading of the literature. The best example of that change is Lacan’s dealing with it within the tendency to liberate it from its sexual stigma. He says (1979):

We submit that the most normalizing situation in the early experience of the modern subject, in the condensed form represented by the conjugal family, is linked to the fact that the father is representative, the incarnation, of a symbolic function which concentrates in itself those things most essential in other cultural structures: Namely, the tranquil, or rather, symbolic, enjoyment, culturally determined and established, of the mother’s love, that is to say, of the pole of which the subject is linked by a bond that is irrefutably natural.

(422–423)

The undeniable necessity of a structuring modality for building the individual’s identity would have forced analysts to unconsciously search for a replacement for the Oedipus. Whether it is projective identification, defence mechanism, good mothering, accepting the lack, or defining the desire (wish) of the other, etc., there is no psychoanalysis without a replacement for the Oedipus, simply because the subject matter, at least in its clinical aspects, relates to the familial conditions that build the intrapsychic organization. Without an ontological concept of such an organizing principle we cannot do any clinical work because our work is to introduce that organizing principle to replace the disorganized intrapsychic. Hence, we have to know what and how the intrapsychical is supposed to be organized. The replacement of the Oedipus is the key to what the school of psychoanalysis tried and failed to do. Freud put his finger on a central conception in psychoanalytic work though he formalized it in a way that needed a great deal of correction. Laplanche and Pontalis say (1973):

The Oedipus complex is not reducible to an actual situation – to actual influence exerted by the parental couple over the child. Its efficacy derives from the fact that it brings into play a proscriptive agency (the prohibition against incest) which bars the way to naturally sought satisfaction and forms an indissoluble link between wish and law (a point which Jacque Lacan has emphasized).

(286)

So, it is replaceable, and was replaced.

There are three issues to mention about Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex. He discovered it through his auto-analysis – i.e., it has a personal stamp on it. In order to introduce it to the theory as a psychoanalytical issue he gave it the metaphorical representation derived from Sophocles’ play of Oedipus Rex, hence the impersonal name came about. Freud’s subjective experience in his own family was a starting point, but analysts were able for years to find it in their clinical work, and to explicate its meaning and demonstrate its theoretical importance (see Bion in his Learning from Experience, 1962). Freud’s explication of the Oedipus complex is founded on an arbitrary link he created between the myth and his understanding of the interfamilial dynamics. In his conception he suggested a desire for the mother and jealousy of the father, which, if both exist, could be because it is the fate of all boys and girls in the family although in different forms. The myth became the reference to the actual experience after having been chosen by Freud to represent it. It was not clear at first that the Oedipus, as stated in Freud’s version, will not continue – as is – to be the main formative episode in the development of the intrapsychic. Thus, he anticipated that there will be different outcomes to its dissipation and resolution, showing in the type of consolidation of events that shape the level of maturity and mental health in individual. Freud built ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Introduction: deviation or revision
• 1 The Oedipus complex: keep or abandon?
• 2 Metapsychology: a puzzle of a proposition
• 3 Narcissism: identity and identification
• 4 The clinical protocol: a basic proposition
• 5 Clinical practice: the analytic situations
• 6 Applied psychoanalysis
• Epilogue
• References
• Index