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Five years ago, at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a panel convened on “Current Views of the Oedipus Complex” in which, despite its aspiration to currency, the “female” version of the Oedipus complex was never mentioned. Freud's original conception of the universalized male epitomized the discussion in 2006 just as surely as it had when Freud coined the phrase in 1910. The possibility that half of the human population may diverge from the masculine paradigm patterned by Freud's interpretation and application of Sophocles' tragedy was simply not taken up as a “current” view. Nancy Kulish and Deanna Holtzman, in A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed, address such gendered myopia. They assert simply but emphatically that “the Oedipal story does not work as a touchstone against which to measure and understand females, either theoretically or practically” (183).
The authors claim that the Oedipus complex as it is classically conceived and applied in psychoanalytic practice derives from the male situation both in its mythic articulation and in its clinical extensions. This is a fatal flaw from the standpoint of female experience. At the core of the authors' critique and contribution is sexual difference, and this difference makes all the difference. When the Oedipus conflict is applied to women, it is mediated by male rivalry and desire, and then awkwardly appended to female development. The phallocentrism most obviously articulated by Freud's proclamation that “the little girl is a little man” (1933, 118) has left its residue throughout the vocabulary of psychoanalytic theories of development, and nowhere more evidently than in discussions of the female Oedipus complex. As Kulish and Holtzman write: “Language shapes perception and expectation; it organizes our thinking. When we think about ‘Oedipus,’ we think about ‘castration’ and ‘penis envy,’ not about pregnancy or vagina; when we talk about the ‘phallic-Oedipal’