Terman, D.M. (1984). the Self and the Oedipus Complex. Ann. Psychoanal., 12:87-104

Home

Contents

Document

Logout

Terman, D.M. (1984). The Self and the Oedipus Complex. Ann. Psychoanal., 12:87-104.

(1984). Annual of Psychoanalysis, 12:87-104

The Self and the Oedipus Complex

David M. Terman, M.D.

Introduction

Freud' monumental insights into the nature of inner experience and the genesis from and continuity with the vicissitudes of childhood life have provided the means to chart the new world of the psychoanalytic situation, which he also created and discovered.

The central feature of this terrain was the Oedipus complex, first formulated in his letter to Fliess in 1897. Though his systematic use of it began with “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), the first actual publication of the term (Oedipus complex) was in 1910.

Freud' conception of the Oedipus complex emphasized the importance of renouncing the infantile incestuous aims. In the topographic model, this resulted in freedom from neurotic symptoms, whereas conversely, the retention of oedipal aims caused neurotic symptoms. After Freud introduced the structural model, he conceptualized the important structural developments, i.e., the formation of the superego, as a consequence of the renunciation of the incestuous objects. Using the mechanism he had conceived in “Mourning and Melancholia,” he postulated the internalization to be a consequence of the loss. For boys, the motivation for the incestuous renunciation was, of course, castration anxiety. This renunciation then strengthened the internalized prohibiting father by making available the aggression formerly directed to it.

Schafer (1968), in his erudite consideration of the problems of internalization, points to a number of ambiguities in this formulation. He poses a number of pertinent questions, one of which is stated as follows:

Considering that the Oedipal identifications entail major renunciations

- 87 -

and reorganizations, how can one account for the ego strength that must be necessary to effect these changes? [p. 185].

Schafer goes on to explain:

Having stressed only the strength that results from these identifications (it is the modified ego that the id turns to), Freud' theory is incomplete and perhaps, as a consequence, inexact. His reference to borrowing strength from the father is too metaphorical to be an explanation … [p. 185].

But is it? For with the concepts of the vicissitudes of the development of the self and especially the function and essential role of the selfobject in that development, I think we may be able to create a valid construct from Freud' metaphor.

In this paper, I shall try to apply the model developed by Kohut (1966, 1971, 1977) to a description, and I hope an increased understanding, of the oedipal phase. Looking at the Oedipus complex as a phase of self development rather than in object-relations terms may seem like a paradox. Yet such a view may be likened, perhaps, to looking at the terrain from another perspective.

What I am proposing, then, is that we look at the Oedipus complex as a special case of self development. I propose that it be considered as (1) a stage in which the issues are not the fragmentation or cohesion of a whole, nuclear self, but the differentiation, the addition to the self, of important gender-related goals and delineations which may be subject to disintegration; (2) the phase of true emancipation from the obligatory need for massive parental selfobject function (Loewald [1962] has described the oedipal situation as “a resumption, on a new level, of boundary creating processes”); and (3) an important phase in which the still-plastic self is molded in the form of the selfobject templates.1

The implications of using this model to understand the vicissitudes of the oedipal period are numerous, but I would like to focus on two of them in this paper.

(1) The parent has an important role as selfobject, and aspects of parental function have an impact on the formation of both subsequent structure and pathology. Specifically, some of the content of the superego derives from important mirror functions: the content of the superego is, in part, the residue of mirror experiences at the oedipal level. In particular, I shall focus on the effects

—————————————

1 After this paper was first presented in 1975, Kohut suggested (1977) that oedipal problems might have their genesis in empathic failures of the oedipal period. Though I do not think that his concept of oedipal drives as breakdown products is felicitous, I do think that understanding of the oedipal phase is incomplete without the elucidation of the experience of parent-child transactions which this paper begins to spell out.

- 88 -

of disruption on the development of the miscarriage of parental narcissistic functions. The quality of badness of self may also be derived from the mirroring experience and hence may make a significant contribution to both the intensity and the conditions of the later production of guilt.

(2) Abandonment of infantile aims depends on gratification of certain important self experiences as much as on the ultimate frustration of infantile phallic grandiosity. Another way of stating that is to say that the grandiose ambitions embodied in the oedipal fantasy become transformed by virtue of the appropriate mirroring of the child' gender-determined displays, through which the child derives the confidence to pursue the means to become a true adult like the admired parent.

In making these suggestions, I realize that I am not quite the first to do so. Schafer, in particular, has raised some of these considerations. In his 1960 article on the “Loving and Beloved Superego,” he carefully combed Freud' work on the structural theory. Schafer drew on Freud' suggestive statements to point to some potentially significant functions for the psychic economy. For example:

… normal courage, endurance and ability to withstand intense stimulation or deprivation all depend on the feeling of being recognized or attended to by the superego or destiny … [p. 175].

In other words, some of the most important ego functions depend on benevolent superego functions. Schafer made the point that these later internal functions must be derived from the parental protective functions.

He emphasized the importance of the execution of those functions when he stated in another section of the paper that:

If the parent' superego is immature, hostile and distant from his ego it will produce disruptions in crucial parent-child interactions, in particular those interactions concerning the child' budding instinctual and ego expressions. It is under these conditions that we might expect the child to develop an Oedipus complex, both masculine and feminine, that is especially difficult to relinquish, and consequently, a severe superego [p. 184].

Again this implies that the Oedipus complex and its vicissitudes have some relationship to the parental response to their manifestations.2

I wish to present a case which I think highlights two aspects of this formulation. I think it is illustrative because I believe that the trauma was

—————————————

2 Kohut in 1977 raised the question whether the traumatic nature of the Oedipus complex may in fact, have arisen from “empathy failures from the side of the self object environment of the Oedipal phase” (p. 247). This echoes the question explored here and, in this case I believe, merits an affirmative answer.

- 89 -

(1) within the oedipal context—it occurred at the developmental level after the question of cohesion of the nuclear self had been established; and (2) a failure of the mother to function as a selfobject for the specific oedipal development of this patient.

Clinical Example

The patient was a 26-year-old single, semiprofessional woman when she came for analysis. The precipitating circumstance was a holiday visit to the home of her older, married brother during which her parents were guests as well. She found herself becoming enraged at her mother as she had been as a child. Her awareness of something highly inappropriate about her rage was her most important conscious reason for seeking analysis. She also mentioned that she had a boyfriend who wanted to marry her; but although she was willing to live with him, she did not want to marry him—or anyone. She was somewhat uneasy about such a resolution, but nonetheless felt her life to be more in order if she kept it. She was working for a family personnel agency in which she held a responsible but ill-defined position. She got along well with the man who ran the shop, but disliked and was suspicious of his wife.

Miss N. was born and raised in a small New England town. Her brother was eighteen months older and her sister four years younger. Father owned a small business and was a quiet, rather contented man. Mother was irritable, dissatisfied with her marriage, and frequently told patient that she should “live” before she was married—though it was selfish just to enjoy and not marry at all. Mother was anxiously and intrusively involved with her children. She was very pleased with brother who tended to do what she said, but was angry with patient, who often opposed her. Brother, patient felt, was mother' boyfriend, while patient reached out to father who was passively accepting.

Patient' relationship with brother was worshipful and rivalrous. Her rivalry felt hopeless, however. She recalled many times an incident in which she was aggressively excluded from brother' play. She threatened to tell her mother. Brother replied that he would deny his exclusion and say patient was lying and that mother would believe him. Patient sadly and angrily swallowed her threat. She knew brother was correct about mother' attitudes.

Another frequently recalled incident of childhood centered around her sexual experimentation with a neighborhood boy. When she was discovered by her mother, she was reprimanded severely. She felt she had done something unmentionably awful, though she wasn' sure exactly what it was.

- 90 -

Later, she was accused a second time, and though this time she was innocent, her mother did not believe her. She decided that she would have to grow up herself—without being able to count on her mother.

Patient did decently in school. She was bright and felt she did not exert herself. She went away to a prestigious eastern school, then upon graduation came to work in Chicago for the firm in which she was still employed. She'd had several affairs of some duration—the first after she graduated from college. She did not want to marry any of the men.

Summary of the Analysis

The first hours illustrate some of the problems macroscopically. The patient began the first several hours telling more of her history. In the course of the third hour she wanted to change one of the arrangements we had made around the analysis. She felt uncomfortable asking about this. She was concerned in the next hour that she was being too aggressive. I linked that concern with her requests—but my lack of response implied to her that the request was not understandable and reasonable. I held the question open to see what such a request meant to her, but did not acknowledge the reality of her need.

She then reported a dream in the following hour. It was the first dream of the analysis.

Brother and sister and I were having breakfast together. Brother and sister were on one side of the table and I was on the other. Father was standing behind brother and sister. Mother was telling where things would be if she died. She gave a list and said, “We have two keys to the house; one for each of you and you know who you are.” I [patient] said to father, “See what she did. She gave keys to brother and sister and none to me.”

She clearly felt that my lack of acknowledgment amounted to a narcissistic injury which evoked the narcissistic injury of the past—mother' great favoritism toward brother and her attention to the subsequent child. She recalled the situation that precipitated the analysis, the visit to her brother in which, I then learned, her mother had reneged on the promised gift of a'rip to Mexico. She felt she had become enraged with mother after that and felt a return of the feelings of childhood that her brother got everything and she was the inferior, no-good child.

In the following hour (the seventh), she related the incident of her childhood sexual explorations—though not mentioning the time when she was falsely accused—and emphasized both her enormous feeling of badness and her bewilderment over what she had actually done wrong.

- 91 -

My point in relating this material is to show how, in these first few hours, the outline of the problem had begun to take shape. Any mild hesitation on my part, or lack of awareness of her needs, became a narcissistic injury. The injury was related to someone else being chosen, and it was also somehow connected with sexual misdemeanors. There was a suggestion that she had brought on such injury because of her sexual badness.

Paradoxically, in spite of the feeling of badness about sexuality, her subsequent hours became more filled with blatant associations of conscious wishes to seduce me, finally culminating in a brief sexual affair with a casual acquaintance in which she felt elated. She became depressed when it shortly fizzled.

At this point in the analysis, I understood the vicissitudes of her analytic experience in terms of the vicissitudes of her object relations in the oedipal and the defenses against their mobilization in the transference to me. I saw the sexual activity as an acting out of the impulses rather than as directed to me in the analysis. I saw evidence of both guilt and fear in response to either her sexual experiences outside the analysis or the impulses mobilized inside. I interpreted such guilt or bad reactions to her feelings. She responded with rage, indifference, or humiliation. That she wanted to please me and have me like her was not accepted as a good thing in itself but was experienced as a humiliation. That is, when I commented that she had a fear of not pleasing me, or was feeling something from the past, etc., she felt put off or put down. She had a dream in the fortieth hour alluding to a secret note she had written in fourth grade saying, “I love Michael.” She recalled how her teacher had found the note and humiliated her. This was how she felt in the transference.

It should be clear by now that the patient was suffering from a narcissistic character disorder and that my initial technique aggravated the narcissistic tensions. Yet the subsequent unfolding of this self in the analysis centered largely around the typical concerns of the oedipal child: the wish for a baby, the wish to be as big as mother, the wish to be important to father, the wish to take mother' place, the wish to be sexually responded to, etc. The fears associated with these wishes were also typical of the oedipal period—the fear that I would be angry, jealous, derisive—the feeling that she was bad or would be punished. She became phobic at night at times and had to sleep with her lights on. At other times she could not answer her phone. In short, she became, psychologically, an oedipal child, and what seemed central in this oedipal child was the wish for recognition of herself as a future woman, welcomed into the club, as it were, and the fear that I would punish her for it.

The interpretation of either the impulse or reactive fear or guilt over

- 92 -

the impulses only made the situation worse, i.e., the impulse heightened or the rage with herself or me increased. In essence, she felt my activity amounted to a merciless exposure of her “I love Michael” note.

After a year of this approach and increasing despair in the patient, I reviewed my notes of the analysis over a vacation break. I realized that the interpretations I had been making had had the effect of humiliating her, and that the oedipal tensions—the wish to get a loving response from me of some kind—were in the service of an important self confirmation. So I told her at an appropriate point that she wanted to be able to give herself to me as she had to her father, who was quite accepting of her, and not have me push her aside with what amounted to judgments. She cried in response and said she wondered what she'd said that made me understand.

The material following this interpretation concerned wishes to be pregnant. These consisted of relivings, in part, of her feelings around the time mother was pregnant and delivered her younger sister. As I was more empathic to her feelings of inferiority vis-à-vis a mother who could do such wonderful things, she had dreams and associations which retraced her feelings and experiences around a tonsillectomy she underwent during her mother' pregnancy. It was all quite scary and bewildering, done by the local family doctor who was a frightening, paranoid-type man, whom mother ultimately refused to use a few years later. I said to her that perhaps the meaning of that experience to her was that mother had taken away her capacity to have children because she wanted a child. She could see that, but then, to my puzzlement, she began to be afraid of acting out the impulse to get pregnant. She became afraid of both her impulse and the judgment of badness such an action would provoke.