Editorial

The concepts handed down from our psychoanalytic forefathers, so incredibly enriching to our understanding of the human mind, nevertheless need periodic review. The Journal co-sponsors a day conference with the Freud Museum on 31 October 1998, with the title ‘Analysing the Oedipus Complex: Why It Is Still Central’. More than 200 participants attended the Institut Français in London to hear presentations on current views of the Oedipus concept. We are delighted to be able to publish the papers in this issue. In a theoretical paper, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel writes of the structuring power of the Oedipus complex, without which desire goes unchannelled with strange results: untamed sexuality, narcissism and omnipotence, or the ‘oceanic feeling’ outside of external reality that characterizes some modern spiritual movements. Further, she goes on to discuss the way that some intersubjective analytic groups in America lack firm oedipal structuring to their disadvantage. Then, in three clinical papers, we have detailed examples of current work with patients. In the first, Julia Fabricius links the Oedipus complex to separation-individuation, mourning, and the necessity in psychic development for there to be an acknowledgement of an object separate and independent from the self, capable of having a relationship with a third object. Her patient could not relinquish his infantile dependence, both fearing and wanting the consuming mother, and lacking an internal father. Richard Rusbridger and Gigliola Fornari Spoto both use the Kleinian framework in which it is believed the outcome of oedipal love has vital implications for the urge to learn, the ‘epistemophilic impulse’, and for the acceptance of and relationship to reality. Tolerating the deprivations involved in giving up possession of parents goes together with tolerating depressive affect, loss and separation and acceptance of the world outside the self. Giving up oedipal yearnings enables a structuring of the internal wor