You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Criticism of psychoanalysis by feminists, queer theorists and others has long targeted Freud's Oedipus Complex. Writers from Luce Irigaray in Speculum de L'autre Femme to Carol Gilligan in The Birth of Pleasure (2004) have renounced Oedipal theory as not simply flawed but positively harmful—reproducing the culture of envy, violence, and heterocentrism it purports to describe.
The charge of heteronormativity, while not baseless, is actually more salient in post-Freudian perspectives (e.g., Bergler, 1956; Socarides, 1995; Khan, 1989) than in Freud. What the former hold in common is the belief that homosexuality is a bad outcome of Oedipal and/or pre-Oedipal exchanges. Analysis must discover what went wrong, not what went right.
Those who would do away with the complex entirely, however, tend to define it narrowly—ignoring Freud's most useful elaboration—thus reducing it to what I have called “Oedipus Simplex” (Luepnitz, 2019). For example, they sidestep his 1923 description of the “complete Oedipus Complex” with its “positive” and “negative” sides. I will summarize that Freudian paradigm and add Jacques Lacan's 1953 elaboration, before moving to contemporary examples.
One of the first references to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in Freud's writing comes in The Interpretation of Dreams, where, after summarizing the action of the play, he explains that: “[A] girl's first affection is for her father, and a boy's first childish desires are for his mother. Accordingly, the father becomes a disturbing rival for the boy and the mother to the girl” (, p. 257). However, 20 years on, Freud writes: