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I am attempting to sum up. Not only the Oedipus complex is a constituent of normal psychic life of the adult and, as such, again and again active. A psychotic core, related to the earliest vicissitudes of the ambivalent search for primary narcissistic unity and individuation, also is an active constituent of normal psychic life. Its activity, through a variety of investigations into archaic mental life, has become more apparent and—partly in their wake—more prominent in the pathology of patients and in modern life in general. These deeper unconscious currents, having been uncovered and reentering modern sensibility, influence the organization of mind, experience, and action.
Our hitherto normal form of organizing reality, aiming at a strict distinction and separation between an internal, subjective, and an external, objective world, is in question. Our psychotic core, as it comes increasingly into view, prevents us from being as much at home and at ease with this solution as our scientific forefathers were. I believe that our quest for individuation and individuality, and for an objective world view, is being modulated by insights we are gaining from the "psychic reality" of preoedipal life stages. We even need to re-examine Freud's distinction between psychic reality and factual, objective reality. Not that this distinction might be invalid. But its validity appears to be more circumscribed and limited than we assumed, analogous to Newtonian physics: the new theories and discoveries of modern physics do not invalidate Newtonian physics, but they limit its applicability.