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Psychoanalysts believe that the negotiation of the Oedipus complex is an essential developmental task which shapes and structures psychic reality, and which promotes growth and maturation. The Oedipus complex is at its heart a struggle between love and hate, which every human being has to engage in, when the narcissistic illusion of exclusive access to and possession of the primary object has to be relinquished.
A successful outcome of this struggle defines the psychic structure of the individual, establishes the difference between the sexes and the generations, promotes a move towards psychic separateness out of the mother/infant dyad and contributes to the establishment of symbolic capacities.
The move from illusion to reality is not a painless or a straightforward one. Melanie Klein (1928), who connects the Oedipus complex with the epistemophilic instinct (in particular curiosity for the mother's body and its contents, which include babies and the father's penis), emphasizes how the ‘…ego is still so little developed when it is assailed by the onset of the Oedipus tendencies and the incipient sexual curiosity associated with them’. The infant, like Oedipus trying to find out about his origins, is exposed to an ‘onrush of problems and questions’, but also confronted with his impossibility to know, because of his intrinsic position of smallness and helplessness.
The story of Oedipus is poised between the impossibility to know and the necessity to know. Money-Kyrle (1964) says that: ‘Oedipus epitomizes man at a critical stage of his development, when he is faced by a choice, that between self-knowledge and self-deception.’ Seen like this, the oedipal story can be thought of paradigmatic of the task that every analysand undertakes when he or she embarks on an analytical journey, and some of its centrality in analytical thinking derives from the fact that it symbolizes the complex endeavour to reach emotional truth about oneself and one's objects.
The need to