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Donald Winnicott is known for his principled refusal to pathologise human behaviour that is merely unconventional (Anderson, 2014; Luepnitz, 2017). Nonetheless, he was wont to pathologise homosexuality—much more so than did Sigmund Freud. Known also as one of the most creative psychoanalytic thinkers of all time, Winnicott maintained an oversimplified view of the Oedipus complex. These ironies are, of course, related.
As a student of Melanie Klein, he was heir to her notion that the Oedipus complex begins in infancy—not at the age of 3-5 years, where Freud had placed it. Whether one thinks of that as a bizarre or ingenious addition to theory, there is no escaping the fact that Klein, Winnicott, and the entire British Middle Group lost sight of Freud's mature thinking about Oedipus—that is, “the complete Oedipus complex” which, while no panacea, is still useful today. A brief history of the concept follows.
An early reference to Sophocles' Oedipus the King comes in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900a), where Freud suggests that the play still rivets audiences because it resonates with childhood experience. He outlined it as follows: “boy desires mother and wants to do away with father”. This is the version of the complex that exists in the minds of most patients today—and many analysts as well. It is, of course, patently heterocentric, and as such, the source of much justified criticism. For decades, gay, lesbian, and bisexual patients either avoided the couch, or struggled with how to reconcile their desires with the often censorious views of the analyst (Dean & Lane, 2001; ).
In 1923, Freud elaborated on his early, simplified formula:
Closer study usually discloses the more complete Oedipus complex, which is twofold, positive and negative, and is due to the bisexuality originally present in children; that is to say that a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father and an affectionate object choice towards his mother, but at the same time he als