Present Trends in Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice*

I find the opportunity to participate in this Symposium a particularly welcome one, as the stand I have felt compelled to take in recent years in the politics of psychoanalysis has made my scientific and ideological position appear ambiguous in the eyes of many. I would like to say at the outset that my views in these latter respects, while always, I hope, undergoing growth and development, remain essentially what they have always been.

I have found Freud's account of the Oedipus complex somewhat too cut and dried for effective clinical use, in part because of his insistence upon its biological origin and therefore its universality. The study of cultures which differ markedly in type from our own makes it very clear that the existence of an Oedipus complex is entirely dependent upon cultural factors and that it does not appear where the basic cultural unit is anything but the fairly close-knit patriarchal family. Matriarchal cultures or cultures where children have for generations been reared communally do not give rise to the Oedipus complex such as we see it in our own civilization. While I would agree that it is universal within our culture, it cannot be said that it is universal in a terrestrial sense and cannot therefore be conditioned solely by biological factors.

Within our own culture, I do not find that that aspect of the Male Oedipus complex, which consists of a drive towards the mother, is always genital in meaning, though I would agree that it is in a broad sense sexual. As I see it, the Oedipus situation is a vastly important one in denizens of our culture and consists of a rivalry situation in which, in the male, the child competes with the father for the mother, rarely, though occasionally, in anything like the adult genital sense, but usually in pre-genital terms of one sort or another; the child seeks one sort or another of sensory satisfaction by means of the mother and realizes that the mother's tie to the father obstructs the achievement of this sa