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In her presentation Dr. Jody Messler Davies, Co-Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and author of Treating the Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse, spoke of expanding the way we define sexuality, eroticism and desire. Davies sought to move away from the view that adult sexuality develops out of a linear course of events. Rather, Davies enlarged the concept of sexuality to reflect her belief in our inherent bisexuality, and relational psychoanalysis' notions of the infinite complexity of gender and self/other configurations. She reconceptualized positive and negative Oedipal configurations of identification and counter-identification as “a lifelong struggle to sustain erotic, romantic and sexual attachments across the lifecycle.”
Davies's first goal was to deconstruct Freud's formulation of The Oedipus Complex. For Freud, in the “positive Oedipus complex,” the child's attachment to the opposite sex parent is erotic while its tie to the same sex parent is “competitive hostile” because he/she is “viewed as an intrusive interloper into the child's erotic conquest ….” In the negative Oedipus complex, the erotic and hostile ties to the parents are reversed. For Freud, the negative Oedipus complex was outgrown in the normal heterosexual adult.
Davies disagreed with Freud's normative linear description of events and with the terms positive and negative as they reflect a struggle that is value laden. Instead, she suggested renaming them as primary and secondary, respectively, adding that throughout the life cycle “each plays a role in texture of ongoing erotic experience.” This means that the primary Oedipal configuration for a homosexual child “involves the erotic experience of self in relation to opposite sex parent and significant others with the secondary form involving same sex erotic experience,” while for the homosexual child the primary and secondary Oedipal configurations are reversed. Davies was less concerned with sexual object choice and more with our capacit