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Does psychoanalysis have to begin and end in myth? Certainly one of its beginnings was in Freud's appeal to the gripping power of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex as evidence of the ubiquity of murderous rivalry with the father for love of the mother. But his use of myth was as polemic - to underwrite the discoveries of his self-analysis and clinical practice. Christiane Olivier's use of myth in Jocasta's Children is similarly polemical. But whereas Freud emphasised the sexual desire of children and fathers, Olivier uses myth - that of Jocasta - to underscore her observations as a psychoanalyst of the formative influence on human psychology of the mother's desire.
Evocatively and compellingly she traces her patients' and her own sexual malaise to the different early experience of men and women when, she claims, sons but not daughters are sexually desired by the mother. This initially flatters the boy's narcissism until the anal stage when boy begins a life-long struggle with women for apparently wanting to wrest his penis from him just as his mother seemingly wanted his penis along with his faeces when he was a toddler. Hence, Olivier goes on, men's endless attempt to escape women's clinging - Jocasta's embrace - through language and sex.
This struggle, she asserts, is made all the more intense because the very mothering that provokes men's flight from women provokes women demandingly to cling to men. So much have women been starved of the mother's desire along with her milk, insists Olivier, that they avidly look to men and to their children to gratify their otherwise unslaked desire. No wonder they keep child care to themselves. No wonder men are only too happy to let them do so. For they can thereby keep at bay the mothering that seemingly so threatens to engulf them. Nevertheless, urges Oliver, only through men participating equally in early child care will the ill-effects of the mother's desire - or of its lack - be offset by that of the f