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Patrick Mullahy, a psychoanalytically oriented philosopher, has attempted in this book to elucidate the points of view about the Oedipus complex held by the proponents of the various psychoanalytic schools. While doing so he has summarized in an understandable fashion the more important works produced by his authors, thus providing the reader with a well-rounded review of psychoanalytic theory. The authors discussed include Freud, Adler, Jung, Rank, Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan.
The first four chapters are devoted to Freud and his disciples—notably Abraham, whose contribution to the study of character is given wide prominence. This section of the work is excellently done; Mullahy seems to have distilled the essence of Freudian theory out of the maze of obscure, elusive, and confusing ideas so often set down on paper by Freud. And he portrays very well Freud's inherent pessimism in the following passage, quoted from his paragraph on the death instinct: “In fact, in Freudian theory human nature is burdened with an insoluble and terrible dilemma: One must either divert his aggressive, destructive instincts against others or turn them against oneself. Thus, Freud finally worked out a theoretical explanation for his almost unmitigated conviction of the inherent evilness of man.”
Mullahy devotes a great deal of space to the concept of symbol, showing how the symbol is to Freud “a mode of expression which has never been individually acquired,” while to Jung it is an indication of what is to come. To Jung symptoms of neurosis (i.e. symbols) “are not merely consequences of causes that once have been…. They are endeavors toward a new synthesis of life.”
Freud's theory of the origin of the Oedipus complex as summarized by Mullahy is that the expelled sons in the primal horde banded together, slew the expelling father, and then—in order to prevent themselves from destroying each other—erected an incest prohibition. For Fromm, the Oedipus myth is not a symbol of incest but a symbol