Current Views of the Oedipal Complex

In his introduction to the panel, Warren Poland asked, “Do oedipal issues remain at the heart of the psychoanalytic venture, defining an individual's character (as some believe), or does such a view exclude vast areas of human experience?” Are there patterns innate to all human experience, issues innate to human life—inevitable forces of sexuality, aggression, distinctions between the generations? Poland distinguished between the universality of oedipal issues and the individual variability, specificity, singularity, and particularity of their expression. He proposed calling the individual clinical instance an “oedipal complex” and the broad organizing forms of psychic human imperatives the “oedipal schemas.” Poland noted that the Oedipus story chosen by Freud as a metaphor for development came from Sophocles as a play, a form of emotional participation subsequently echoed in Freud's structure of the clinical analytic experience. It represented the “tragedy of human helplessness before the inexorable power of the gods.” Poland pointed out that Freud read Sophocles' lines at the end of Oedipus Rex—“It was Apollo, friends, Apollo that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to completion. / But the hand that struck me / was none but my own”—as a declaration that there is space for personal agency alongside the powers of fate. Further, that what was inside was felt as if it were outside. “Freud did not merely move his reading of the power shaping life from outside to inside but, significantly, to an inside experienced as outside oneself, leaving one always in part a stranger to oneself.” By privileging the sources and aims of the drives over their objects, Freud emphasized a tale of “humanity's struggle shaped by the power of the biology of the body,” while Sophocles' tale is of “humanity's struggle shaped by the power of outside others, the individual defined by the influences of intersubjective forces.” Poland noted that a synthesis was provided by Loewald in his