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Moving from his revolutionary self-analysis to his clinical psychoanalytic experience and considering both culture and myth, Freud took the Oedipus complex to be central to human life. However, questioning that drastic inference has never disappeared from the front lines of analytic debate. Do oedipal issues stand at the heart of the psychoanalytic venture, defining an individual's character (as some believe), or (as others are convinced) does such a view wrongly exclude vast areas of human experience?
The controversy is centrally a problem of definition having to do with levels of abstraction, with the difference between unique phenomenological experiences and the theorizing generalizations drawn from and about them. Human experience is always specific, singular, particular, unique. Just as no two snowflakes are exactly alike, no two anything are exactly the same. Generalizations are essential to the recognition of patterns, yet no two instances can be identical.
The Oedipus complex in individual lives differs from that spoken of by theory. While the specifics of any individual's oedipal constellations can deviate vastly from the abstracted norm, far from Psychology 101 simplistic models, essential aspects of that infinitely varied human life that we also call oedipal may nonetheless indeed be universal, even inevitable.
Freud's personal and clinical work led him to take one specific myth as a model metaphor for development. To the extent that the narrow tale of Oedipus fit him and his experience, it is specific and appropriate. Nonetheless, the manifest myth that best captures one person's life and times may not be most apt as the metaphor for another person's life. Indeed, humanity has created many myths precisely because individual constellations