The conversation about the Oedipus Complex in girls has been controversial and complicated, knotty and sometimes even vitriolic. Beginning with Freud's early ideas about penis envy as bedrock and suppression of the clitoris as ideal adulthood and coming to present day emphasis on relationships, variability and individuality, passion on this topic has run high. A kind of watershed appeared as early as the International Psychoanalytic conference in Marienbad in 1936 when Karen Horney presented a paper contradicting Freud's ideas and, in turn, was highly criticized by Freud. Despite Freud's plea for female psychoanalysts to enlighten him and their colleagues about female sexuality, he summarily rejected Horney's contentions that a girl's relationship with her mother was formative and that the father was less important in her view of herself and her world. A second watershed was Applegarth's (1977) review of a book by Nagera called Female Sexuality and the Oedipus Complex. Applegarth noted Nagera's reliance on the ideas of castration and penis envy to understand female development and posited the importance of relationships with the parents. In this, she was following Horney and leading a new parade of analytic thinkers.
By 1998 Hopwood responded to Halberstadt-Freud's contention that the female developmental story needed to include a place for aggression and resolution of hatred of the mother as exemplified in the Electra story. Hopwood compared Halberstadt-Freud's view with that of Kulish and Holtzman (1998). The latter authors proposed the Persephone myth as a model for female development. As will be clear later, these other myths have never attained to acceptance for female development that Oedipus has long had as a model for male development. And the consideration of the female development has led to a re-thinking of the male version as well (Munder-Ross 1992).
Lauffer (1986) reconsidered the idea that the female psychosexual development results from a girl's disappointment in her mother for not having provided her daughter with a penis. Lauffer posited a female phase
of awareness of her body as a receptacle as a developmental step toward accepting adult femininity and heterosexual desire and pleasure.
My own work on female psychosexual development (1990, 1996, 2003) has had some implications for the understanding of the female Oedipal story. If a little girl experiences pleasure in her own genital, it follows that she will want genital stimulation. Wanting that stimulation from others is the next step in development. Experiencing gratification as love and longing for it gets expressed as wanting to grow up and marry Daddy. Many girls want that; and some want to marry Mommy.
In her recounting of Freud's Oedipal theory for college students, Blass (2001) differentiates between an Oedipal theory based on castration fears and one based on conflictual love-hate for the father. She bases her theory on an earlier paper (Blass 1992) that focuses on the Dora case .
In that earlier paper Blass makes the case that Freud actually came to the idea that Oedipal wishes were the best explanation of a girl towards her father are the core of neurosis.
Blass puts it this way:
With his insight that the origin of neurosis is not necessarily associated with an actual event of seduction, Freud sought to assign the girl personal responsibility for her fantasies and actions. Her intra-psychic fantasy, supplied by her fixated infantile drives, fixated as a result of her perverse sexual desires, lay at the foundation of her neurosis. It is interesting that in ascribing responsibility to the patient, Freud not only facilitates the transition to his later oedipal formulations but also inhibits it. The focus on the girl's responsibility was intimately tied to the complete absolution of the father (p. 180).
Blass then contends that all the later theorists who asserted that Freud had a complete Oedipal interpretation of Dora's neurosis were wrong in that Freud actually interpreted the transference not as a transference from father to Freud, but from Herr K., a later seducer to Freud. She seems to insist on ignoring or refuting what the other readers of the case have inferred: the transference from Herr K. was based on a transference from father to Herr K.
Is it possible that the other readers had an understanding of the complexity of transference, a multi-step process with possible iterations? Or that Freud understood things that way?
In her later paper on the teaching of the Oedipal complex Blass makes the point that:
In the face of the emerging sexual love for the father, the mother becomes a hated rival and yet a beloved one. Since love for the father entails betrayal of the mother it cannot be completely attained and in its place internalization occurs (p. 1112).
Following the complex conversation about the place of the Oedipal conflict in establishing femininity asserts that:
Marie: The idea of a (heterosexual) parental couple and a split between identification and desire is intrinsic to oedipal theories. The girl is expected to desire her father and become like her mother. Heterosexual ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ are seen as the more ‘secure’ and ‘mature’ identities, though. many patients do not identify themselves—or their parents—in this way (p. 532).
But this complication has clinical implications for treating women who do not conform to this pattern as less “normal” than those who conform to it. And theory to include other patterns of development. And what could those be?
Buchberg (2014) regards the development of femininity as the outcome of a turn away from the mother and thus toward the father as a melancholia or pathological mourning. Thus, this underlines Freud's idea that what starts a separation process results in dissatisfaction with the female body and results in a sense of castration. The damaged object relation fuels a damaged self-image. In her words:
Following the course of pathological mourning, the refusal and loss of the girl's mother is preserved in a melancholic structure—the residue of her grudge and her renounced love—and her femininity is thereby founded on a search, which Freud calls penis envy, for an irretrievable past. The damaged object relation is thus the
Page 4inscription on the headstone of this internal burial site, and an imagined body defect both marks the loss as well as designates the path to its imagined repair (p 129).
But Freud's idea was that a girl's fantasy loss of the penis (which he confounded with castration) was the cause of her turning away from mother and toward father, while Buchberg contends that turning away from mother was the cause of disappointment with her own self and turning to father. In other words, where Freud saw disappointment with anatomy as the cause of change in love object, Buchberg proposes that that loss of the original love object causes disappointment with the anatomy.
Buchberg does not mention a precursor and source of support for her argument in a paper by Kulish & Holtzman (1998) in which they posit an alternative to the idea of the Oedipal constellation in a girl. They conclude that a girl's path to femininity is through her difficulty in separating from her mother; they think Electra is not the model for female development: Persephone is that model. They argue that Persephone's separation from her mother when she falls into Hades is the cause of her sadness and loss of her mother the cause of her becoming prisoner to Hades. Her anger and fear at this loss of her love object make her an involuntary wife, a woman forced to accept a man as a substitute for her mother. In this scenario a girl becomes a woman by being harmed. But the Persephone story has her biting into a pomegranate and staying in Hades for as many months as she had seeds in her mouth. She has six seeds. But she could have taken a tiny bite with no seeds or at less than six. Her part in the story is choosing a big bite and a life spent half with her mother, half with her husband. In the story her husband is her father's brother. That suggests that her choice included both/and rather than either/or. I believe that this implies that a woman integrates ties to her mother as well as her father and wants closeness with both as well as identifications with both.
Camden (2011) argued against the idea of regarding this myth as a template for normal female development. In her view, rape is not the normal introduction to adult sexuality. Nor is the observation that some women seem to reconcile themselves to being raped as Persephone seems to have eventually done in the myth to be taken as making this an acceptable part of normal female development. Thus, the substitution of this
myth for an inversion of the Oedipal myth has not gained traction in current psychoanalytic thought, yet object relations theory has.
The many variations on the Persephone myth used by different analytic writers suggest that the story is neither simple nor parallel to the male Oedipus story. Does culture influence what myths are important in a person's view of their world? Does development after the age of six years determine what the wishes and fears are that a child brings into their life as an adolescent and an adult? These questions are answered differently by different analytic theorists. Object relations theorists point to the earlier stages of development as laying down the primary personality and character traits of the person. Theorists who place more importance on cultural influences emphasize later events and relationships in a person's life.
Could current ideas about how traumas in adulthood affect mental life give therapists a better way to understand what can go wrong in development and cause emotional pain and discontent?
Haute (2005) sees the Oedipal and castration complexes in a historical context:
…problems to which every human child has to give an answer: the inevitable disillusionment of the primary object-love and the confrontation with adult sexuality. I will interpret the Oedipus and castration complexes as a historical as well as a contingent answer to these two problems. In this way, they become much more dependent on culture than Freud could ever admit (p. 1662).
In Buchberg's view a girl repeats her ambivalent attachment to her mother in her relationships with female friends. In Lena Dunham's very popular TV series “Girls” Buchberg notes the opening scene of two female bodies entwined naked and indistinguishable from each other. As the series progresses, they separate, become involved with men, make love, and progress toward maturity. Buchberg, uses a similar but more nuanced idea, that of the melancholy separation in which the loss of the mother is complicated by hostile feelings accompanying love for the mother. This is the female trajectory: Persephone willingly going down into Hades to get away from her mother while also mourning losing her. In essence, Buchberg uses Butler's (1990) idea of femininity based on
incomplete mourning for the girl's loss of her mother as a sexual love object.
Still wrestling with the idea of a female version of the Oedipus story Zepf and Seel (2016) come to this conclusion:
The forms of processing the positive and negative Oedipus complex show that these forms do not end in efforts that are mutually exclusive and that neither wards off the other. Both occur simultaneously and both are warded off. The heterosexual as well as the homosexual shape of the drama are not enacted with the original object in later life, but with its substitutes (p. 415).
They seem to be saying that what have been called the positive and negative forms of the Oedipus complex are really both forms of the triadic situation. This implies that they are understandable without the use of erroneous suppositions about vaginal awareness, awareness of the father's penis, or fantasy of a mother who could only be sexually satisfied by the father's penis. This conclusion seems to me to both simplify and support the idea that the little girl like the little boy wants to be the best beloved of both parents and struggles with the awareness that the parents sleep with each other and exclude her from their nighttime pleasures (p. 416).
All of this hypothesizes a degree of fantasizing and sophistication of logic characteristic of a psychoanalyst, but I submit, not of an infant, toddler, or even a three- to six-year-old child. The cognitive capacity demonstrated by this tour de force of reasoning is beyond that of adolescence, even in the most brilliant child. Attributing such mental gyrations to a young child is not supported by any evidence I know of.
I think the point of so many variants of the female Oedipal myth is that clinical work as well as personal experience cannot be reduced to one story. All of the attempts to understand it get to some of the truth, but individual differences account for so much of observation that any single underlying story is always inadequate to explain female development. At the same time, it is useful to recognize that a person who recognizes herself as female has something important in common with others who recognize themselves as female. That said, it seems to me that compromising between the Oedipal story and the Persephone myth, the story
of female development is different from the male because the first love object for a girl is her mother or mothering person, while the father or non-mothering person comes second. Unwilling to give up her mother, a girl wishes for both mother and non-mother to love her best. For a boy, the father is more of an intruder on his exclusive relationship with his mother. Thinking of it in this way, the more usual pattern for a girl is to want to retain her mother's love at the same time as she acquires that of her father. The Oedipal story fits a male identified person so that a boy has a different agenda: that of keeping mother all to himself. The Persephone story understood in in terms of negotiating a triadic situation by spending half the year with mother and the other half with a husband provides a way of understanding female development in general.
The following clinical examples provide evidence for this formulation. A clinical example of the female Oedipus was recently presented to me by a patient from California whom I will call Y. Her daughter had a third birthday party where she insisted on being fed her birthday cake by the patient's husband who was her daughter's father. Y became very angry with her husband who she accused of being stupid in encouraging the child's regression to infantile behavior. This woman hated her own mother for being bossy and for being loyal to her own family of origin rather than to Y and her father.
I thought that her daughter's entry into an Oedipal love affair with her father reawakened her own feelings for her father. Those feelings had been especially intense earlier in the treatment when she had strong feelings of contempt for her husband and fantasies of being with an older, more experienced man. Those feelings and fantasies had abated somewhat after interpretation of her wish to seduce my husband and humiliate me. But that led to intense rejection of her father and resentment of what she recalled as his seductive treatment of her when she was a child.
Together, Y and I reconstructed a scenario in which she and her father had blamed her mother for her devotion to her family of origin. I suggested that she might have resented her mother for not loving her best in all the world. I thought she loved her daughter best and that she could resent her daughter loving her father more than she loved her mother. This exacerbated her resentment of her mother. It was especially painful because Y had no family of origin to protect her.
I thought but did not say that she was in the position of the boy who murdered both of his parents and pleaded for mercy because he was an orphan. Her resentment of both parents left her an emotional orphan. In her mind only her daughter could love her. She could not believe that her husband could love her best in all the world if he too loved their daughter more than anyone in the world.
In the strongly Oedipal situation, with her old longings reawakened by the sight of her daughter's longings, she was able to recognize her hatred of her mother as a reflection of her mother's envy of her and her envy of her mother. She allowed herself to know how powerful she is and to see how she had structured her own life to repair the loss her mother's exclusive love and necessary rejection of her father's intrusive love.
All of this had to do with the triadic situation and the wish to be both mother's and father's best beloved. It suggested to me that the Oedipal situation was a developmental step necessary for both boys and girls. Contrary to the view that a girl blamed her mother for not giving her a penis, it suggested that a girl would blame her mother for not loving her exclusively and eventually blame her father for the same thing. And now, writing about this recalled to me the great pleasure I had felt as a little girl when walking between my parents, one hand clasping my mother's hand, the other clasping my father's. In that moment I could fantasize being both of their best beloved.
Do we need a Greek myth to embody this fantasy? If we take seriously the idea that the Oedipal story is one of revenge against Oedipus' father for having seduced a little boy long before Oedipus was born and for having lamed and exposed Oedipus to death as an infant, we can see that the intergenerational transmission of trauma is the core of the story. Then the wish every child has for being the best beloved of both parents, a wish that had to be frustrated for normal development to take place, is transmitted and frustrated in every generation especially by the most loving of parents.
Another variant of Oedipal imagery and conflict comes from a young woman, who I will call Jane, who believed that she was too ugly to be a girl. She recalled being told by her mother that she as less beautiful than her sister, less beautiful than any of the girls in her class in school, less
beautiful than her mother had been as a girl. Although she looked fine to me and to her husband, she dressed drably, wore no makeup or jewelry, and seemed to avoid being noticed. When she wondered why her mother had compared her to others so often and so disparagingly, I suggested that she herself might have been afraid of being too attractive, especially to her loving but distant father she cried.
Over time we constructed a version of her story of a domineering but reliable and caring mother. Jane recalled that her mother had told her that their larger family had been disappointed with Jane for being born a girl and rejected her mother for giving birth to a girl. Jane understood this to mean that she and her mother were the only sources of love for each other. As she understood it, her father was too weak to defend them against the rejection of the big family and too undependable to be trusted. She felt safer not being close to joining her mother as an ally against him. By being unattractive she could defend herself against her wish to be close to him.
Yet another woman, Sara, suffered from compulsive shopping and hoarding. She recognized that she hated her mother's hoarding old clothes and household utensils even to the point that she had filled her bedroom with so much stuff that she had to sleep on a bench in the kitchen of her two-room apartment. Yet she only saw her own hoarding as sensible. The things she wasn't using in the present might come in handy someday. Fashions changed so that what was out of style now could come back next year, or the year after that. She would be ready, on trend. As we worked together, she saw that her identification with her mother was stronger than her distaste for clutter and the fear that she could lose her mother to insanity was impelling her need to keep what she could of both feminine clothes and provisions for the future.
Sara expressed awe of her distant but very successful father. Accepting her father's distance, yet longing to be closer to him, she became an academic with very high standards for herself. She married late, chose a husband who was less educated than she was and less successful at his job. She struggled with resentment at her husband for not being as successful as she or her father was. In the course of analysis, she realized that she had identified with her father and married someone more like her mother. Her mother was a nurturing but fearful and uneducated
woman. Sara's identification with her centered on her hoarding. The hoarding was a defense for her mother. It was a response to her fear of the poverty she had experienced as a child. But for Sara it was a way of defending herself against fear of the loss of her femininity. Identifying with her father made her femininity problematic. Understanding this gave her the courage to clean out her closet of old, outmoded clothes. She ultimately ended her analysis with a gift to her analyst of a beautiful blouse.
Sara's analytic journey illustrates her ultimate gain in understanding herself. By untangling the complications of her attachments to each of her parents, and her identifications with them, analyst and analysand were able to allow her to accept a compromise that allowed her to be a more loving wife, a freer person, and a woman with both self-esteem and the capacity for nurturing others. I think her analytic journey shows a courageous and intelligent adaptation to a very painful triangular situation.
In another example of the variants of a girl's development in the time when she discovers and experiences the intensity of love for someone other than her primary caretaker, the time Freud called the Oedipal stage of development, Martine experienced an abandonment when her parents took a trip to another country to explore the possibility of immigrating to that place. Left alone with a nanny she had never met before the day they left, Martine shut down. She stopped playing with her toys, refused to go to nursery school, and refused playdates with her buddies. Although she gradually softened her attitude toward her nanny, she retained her resentment toward her mother whom she believed had wanted the trip as a respite from taking care of her.
By the time I met her as an adult, she had established a part-time career. She had married and had a child of her own. But she was very discontent with both her career and her marriage. She believed that her child loved his father more than he loved her. She also believed that her colleagues at work liked each other more than they liked her. And she believed that her husband loved his family of origin more than he loved her. She saw herself as an unlikeable person. She did all she could to make me dislike her, demanding constant changes in schedule, paying late, refusing to accept my way of focusing on her feelings by constantly asking questions about my life, my thoughts, my feelings.
All of this replicated the way she alienated her parents, siblings, colleagues, and even her customers. But it was especially evident in the way she treated her mother. While she identified with her mother's secret extravagances, she also bitterly scorned her as wasteful. And while she regarded her mother's power over Martine's father, she also resented any move her husband made without her permission. She put down his tennis playing yet indulged in her own hobbies. She hated the same traits she identified with, then hated herself for them.
Repeated suggestions that she longed for her father to love her as much as her mother believed that her father had adored and indulged her seemed to her to be attacks rather than attempts at understanding. Her point was that she had really been treated contemptuously by her father. When I finally understood that her need was to have her own reality confirmed, she had taught me something that I have used in my own work ever since. Once that was established, she became more able to tolerate seeing her understanding as only one way of way of understanding, one distorting way of seeing an “objective” reality, one way of blaming her father for her misery rather than recognizing it as distorted by her wish to be his best beloved. The reality was that she was not and never could be more loved by her father in the way that her mother was loved by him. And that was too painful for her to accept. It caused her pain. She tried to alleviate the pain by blaming him, but eventually she could see that the incest taboo was not his invention.
I hope that these examples lead clearly to the suggestion that individual experience of what has been called the Oedipal conflict is determined partly by the universal experience of attachment to the early nurturer, partly by the infant's genetic endowment, partly by parental characteristics, partly by parental fantasies of the child, personality, and partly by the cultural expectations and restrictions that the child is born into.
While all analytic theorists agree on the importance of early childhood in shaping a woman's adult life, some lean more heavily toward emphasizing early infantile attachment, some toward emphasizing toddler phase separation, some toward prioritizing the triangulation of the young child's love and hate, and some toward the centrality of self-esteem, and some point to the disruptive and reorganizing effect of trauma. Recent attempts at integrating some or all of these points of view by Wallerstein (1990),
Rangell (1996), and Pine (2006) have widened the range of understanding of what happens in the analytic situation and what happens in the course of human development.
The main story line in psychoanalysis has been the Oedipal story, mostly derived from Freud's original understanding of the hysterical women he analyzed early in his career and formulated again as a result of his self-analysis. Since then, the Oedipal story has been expanded, supplemented by infant observation, attention to issues of self-esteem and self-cohesion, and focus on the immediate situation of two people in a room having a conversation that focuses on their interaction and how it meshes with the story of one person's past. This gradual change has led to different schools of psychoanalysis with very different theoretical explanations for mental illness and for theories of cure. All of this has led to a search for a psychoanalytic theory that unifies the diverse theories.
Wallerstein (1990) brought together psychoanalysts from three continents to discuss how their theories affected their analytic understanding and their analytic work. He was attempting to unify theory despite cultural differences. The theorists discussing the issue of the female Oedipus have understood the concept differently in response to cultural changes over time. Both have paid attention to feelings.
Rangell (1996) emphasized the importance of the analyst's experience in shaping the theory he used in analytic work. He could have, but did not explicitly, cite the case of Kohut (1979) who used his own experience of narcissistic injury to formulate a theory of cure based on the analyst's empathic stance. Or the example of Melanie Klein who found it impossibly difficult to tolerate her own children as babies and formulated a theory of pathogenesis in the aggressive impulse of the infant.
For Pine (2006) the idea of a unified theory of psychoanalysis maybe unattainable and unnecessary. He rejects specifically a main story line that could unify developmental, conflictual, relational, narcissistic and similar theories. He contends:
Clinicians often simply collect it, because they find it useful to do so, never knowing when this or that piece may rise out of their preconscious to clarify a clinical moment. These multitudes of clinical
Page 13and conceptual bits will all be viewed here as part of a psychoanalytic “dictionary.” Given the uncertainties and variations in psychoanalytic clinical work, the dictionary view is often more fruitful than a view of our massive collection of observed and theorized bits as pieces of a novel, even a complex novel, with a known, main explanatory story line (i.e., a general theory) (p. 465).
Pine agrees with and extends Waelder's idea of a unifying theory thus:
I agreed that every psychic act can indeed be viewed as an attempted “solution” to problems besetting us from the standpoint of the drives, the superego, and external reality, as in Waelder's formulation. But in a modification of his formulation, I proposed that every psychic act can be viewed as an attempted ‘solution’ (in his phrase) to the compulsion to repeat and argued that this most clearly refers specifically to the repetition of internalized object relationships” (Pine , pp. 480–482).
“And finally, in an addition to Waelder's formulation, I suggested that every psychic act can also be viewed as an attempted solution to problems regarding several forms of disturbance in self-state. Diversity is thus readily incorporated into his scheme (p. 485–486).
Diversity is also essential to the view of treatment as an accumulation of experience on the part of the patient just as much as an accumulation of experience on the part of the analyst or therapist. Just as each therapist has her own accumulation of experience, so each patient does as well. Therefore, each pair has multiple sets of ways to view the past and anticipate the future and the combination is unique. That is why it is not useful to view a patient as “a man” or “a woman”. What is interesting and useful, in my experience, is to see the uniqueness in each patient rather than see the person as an example of a class. This applies to the therapist as well. It serves the therapist well to remember that our own experience is unique and therefore limited. The interesting part of our work is the addition to our own experience that comes with each patient and modifies our view of the world inasmuch as we can empathize with what we hear from the patient and how what we hear modifies our own feelings as well as our cognitive understanding.
In this regard we can, if we are open to it, see the possibilities for the patient to solve her problems by reaching her own unique compromise formations. Similarly, we construct our own solutions, our own compromises, out of our previous experiences in life and in treatment and, most importantly, the immediate experiences with the particular patient. A therapist who was herself a patient, once told me, “I like free stroke, not synchronized swimming.” She was talking of the pleasure she got from using her unique experience to fashion a therapy that responded to her own immediate problems and those of her patient.
If each patient has her own history, her own understanding of that history, and her own experience of the therapist's or analyst's reactions to what she says and does, then the story of that therapeutic narrative will be engrossing to the therapist and enlightening to the patient. Analytic work of this kind never becomes too confusing for the novice analyst and never goes stale for the experienced analyst. As Fenichel put it, all one has to do in analysis is listen to the patient's feelings, talk about the patient's feelings, and try to reach a mutual understanding of those feelings. Cognitively simple, but emotionally demanding, this way of treatment is reached independently of the theory the therapist has learned from classes and books. When we treat women, we see them not in contrast to men or other women, we do effective treatment when we allow the patient to become a problem solver rather than a student who learns from us.
Working this way we can answer Wallerstein's conundrum in “One Psychoanalysis or Many?” (1988). Psychoanalysis becomes one in that all psychoanalysts focus on the patient's feelings, and many in that the stories of patients' lives are unique. Psychoanalysis becomes one and myriad. Because it is one, it can be learned and taught, because it is many, it can be useful in different cultures and for the many varieties of sexuality and ways of living as they evolve in the world around us. The way we understand women changes as the culture that shapes us changes so that over space and over time, different theories seem to fit our patient's needs. But the basic idea of paying attention to feelings remains the same. And that attention, both cognitive and emotional, is the power of psychoanalysis.
Pragmatic theory uses patient satisfaction as criterion of truth. What of resistance as a bar to satisfaction? As long as we cannot be sure of a philosophic criterion for science or scientific truth, we are committed to a reliance on process rather than outcome, and relevance rather than predictability, as an assurance of understanding. Is the theoretical concept relevant to the patient's present view of her history? Is she satisfied that she has been understood? Does she feel confident that continuing the process will be useful for her? These questions point to the individual as criterion of truth. In plainer words: Does it make sense to her? Does it fit her story? Does it address her pain? I think this is what Pine meant when he advocated using whatever theoretical concepts fit the particular patient at the particular moment.