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“For the times, they are a'changing”
Once upon an Analyst, the acceptance of the oedipus complex was the shibboleth for entering Mainstream Psychoanalysis’ gate. Without it, one was an Auslander. Furthermore, it made a difference how one perceived its structure. Anna and Sigmund? Yes. Melanie? No. Or vice versa, depending on the locus of your encampment in the Psychoanalytic Civil War (Frosch, 1991). True. During the era of ego psychology, the oedipal was barely mentioned and, betimes, not even indexed in major books (Covitz, Ch. 2, 1998) but my own training in the mid-70s still measured most everything through the lens of oedipality or preoedipality. There were, of course, the Jungians, the Sullivanians, the Horneyans and the other supposedly perfidious therapists who questioned the centrality of the sexual theory of neurosis. The theoretical centrality of sexuality, Freud had argued, was a necessary bulwark against the rising tides from storms that sought to drown his ship that was “knocked about by waves? But never sunk!” (The City of Paris’ motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur, cited by Freud, 1914a, p. 7).
By the late 1970s, some who lived within the mainstream had begun using different language in describing the oedipal. Loewald (1979), for instance, spoke of the difficulty of a child maintaining the split-image of the Sacred Mother of Symbiosis with the later-developing but consubstantial image of the Mother of Desire. Castration anxiety as a reason for relinquishing oedipal desires might be there but was no longer central in Loewald's or others’ writings. Indeed, very moved by Loewald's 1978 arguments, I began (1982, 1998) to suggest that the central oedipal dilemma had to do with sexuality only secondarily and in situations of severe pathology. I postulated a primary conflict between the instinct-based dyadic relationships (where all others were seen as objects of the prey, predator or kin variety) and a new capacity to see the other as a subject in their own right