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THE CENTRAL FOCUS OF THE PANEL WAS a portion of Freud's 1920 footnote to "Three Essays on Sexuality":
It has been justly said that the Oedipus complex is the nuclear complex of the neuroses, and constitutes the essential part of their content. It represents the peak of infantile sexuality, which through its after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on the sexuality of adults. Every new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis. With the progress of psychoanalytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has become more and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents [S.E., 7, p. 226].
Bennett Simon began his paper, "The Oedipus Complex is a Hard Act to Follow," with an examination of the social psychology of the Oedipus complex within the psychoanalytic movement. Using the myth of the candidate to the priesthood succeeding to office by the slaying of the incumbent priest from James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1900) as a paradigm for the dynamics of leadership change within a group or culture, he argued that a similar dynamic might be at work within the psychoanalytic movement with regard to the Oedipus complex. Freud, in defining the Oedipus complex as the "shibboleth" of psychoanalysis, equated it with his own authority. To challenge its