Reconceiving Oedipus: Thinking Inside the Box

[I]t was only logical that the child should refuse to grant women the painful prerogative of giving birth to children.

Only a woman can become pregnant, carry and nourish another life within her body. We take it for granted, like breathing: woman's ability to make another just is. But for a moment, try to imagine it afresh—from a woman's body another can be made … and another … and another.

A number of writers have discussed the mother's procreative capacity and its effect on the child. Chasseguet-Smirgel (/1986) discussed the defensive nature of penis envy in response to the child's essential helplessness vis-à-vis the archaic maternal imago. Lax (1997) explored in detail the boy's narcissistic wound due to the fact that he is different from his mother and will never make babies. Fast (1994) wrote of the adult male's reaction to his pregnant wife as a reawakening of castration fears and other issues connected to male identity formation in light of the differences between the sexes.

Despite these contributions, the effect of female procreativity on the structuring of personality has not been sufficiently integrated into contemporary psychoanalytic discourse. The under-representation of female potency constitutes a cover-up, a turning of a blind eye to the essential truth of woman's fecundity, sexuality, and power.

The term “cover-up” comes from Steiner's (/1993) paper that argues that King Laius, his wife Jocasta, and Oedipus recognized who each was to the other as they enacted their fates. Freud (/1985, p. 272) thought that Sophocles's Oedipus Rex1 deeply affected audiences because it tapped into the earliest of human experiences. He used the Oedipus myth to explain how desire and aggression structure human personality. However, Freud's Oedipus complex does not account for woman's sexuality and agency. A truly universal theory of the Oedipus complex would include woman's actual experience, including her sexuality, her sense of agency, and her own po