Language shapes perception and expectation; it organizes our thinking. When we think about “Oedipus,” we think about “castration” and “penis envy,” not about pregnancy or vagina; when we talk about the “phallic-Oedipal” phase in little girls, we distract ourselves from—and thereby foreclose on—the girl's crucial developmental need to identify with her mother (Kulish & Holtzman, 2008, p. 184).
In 2008, Nancy Kulish and Deanna Holtzman described the implications of using the myth of Oedipus as a reference point for female development. Nearly 20 years later, in this issue, Arlene Kramer Richards continues this effort in “The Female Oedipal Complex.” While doing so, she illustrates the challenge of evolving beyond foundational theories, those Greenberg (2015) referred to as controlling fictions. In my response, I will show how this problem surfaces in the paper and explore the relatively recent addition of matrescence to the psychoanalytic literature as a potential counter to the shadow cast by the Oedipal myth over psychoanalytic understandings of female development. Investigating matrescence, or the process of becoming a mother (Raphael, 1975), with a focus on the complexities of how mothers come to inhabit their maternal bodies, may be one means of countering the Oedipal reference point, as doing so deepens our understanding of what is available to girls as they go through processes of identification and disidentification with their mothers and, in particular, their mothers' bodies.
In “The Female Oedipal Complex,” Richards begins by reviewing variants of the Oedipal myth for girls, wrestling with how female anatomy is conceptualized in a phallocentric frame (e.g., as damaged, deficient, disappointing) and whether instead to focus on the aspect of Oedipus that represents negotiation of triadic space. Richards describes the various ways of framing girls' relationships to their mothers, including
those that center girls' identification with—as opposed to their competition against—them. She ultimately seems most comfortable with the focus on the creation of triadic space and relies on it to interpret four clinical examples. However, she then pans out and suggests that it is not necessarily useful even to view patients as men or women, but rather to approach them as unique beings in need of affective engagement to solve problems. Richards ultimately suggests we evaluate theoretical concepts according to whether they make sense to the patient, whether they fit their stories, and whether they address their pain. She ends with, “Does it make sense to her?”
It is the paradox between Richard's ultimate destination and her clinical examples that I am most interested in, as I believe it illustrates the difficulty of working toward something new within an established frame. The inverse of a frame still evokes the frame as well as the original social systems it was developed in. I will refer to this as Oedipus's shadow.
In the first clinical illustration, a woman struggles with her daughter's reaction to a “strongly Oedipal situation” and is helped by a transference interpretation based in an Oedipal formulation. In the second, a woman has turned away from being physically attractive to her father so as to maintain her mother's affections. And, in the third, Richards attributes change in a patient to the development of insight about the woman's struggle to develop femininity while simultaneously identifying with her father and disidentifying with her mother who was hoarding. In the final example, Richards begins to outline an alternative to an Oedipally-based formulation but then returns to incorporate it. This patient had initially perceived insistence on Oedipal interpretations as attacks on her experience. Richards suggests that recognizing the patient's reality rather than twisting it to fit an Oedipal frame was helpful in so much as it helped the patient understand her ambivalence toward her father in multiple ways including, however, the original Oedipally-derived formulation regarding the incest taboo.
Although Richards concludes this part of the paper with a statement reminding the reader of the range of components that might contribute to the conflicts presented in the clinical examples (e.g., attachment, genetics, parental characteristics and fantasies of the child, personality, and cultural factors), the most explicit features she attends to are
aspects of the Oedipal frame (i.e., competition for and fear of parents' affections). As such, readers must wrestle with the gap between the theoretical material Richards presents to challenge the Oedipal frame, her clinical examples, and her ultimate conclusions. One way to understand it is as a demonstration of the difficulty of thinking outside of a dominant frame despite an explicit and educated commitment to do so.
The myth of Oedipus clearly served a vital function in psychoanalysis, consolidating a model of psychosexual development that paved the way toward psychoanalytic inquiry into ways children use important people in their lives to think, enter into language, define themselves, and separate from their families of origin. It took male children, their minds, and their bodies seriously and centered questions of children's affections, identifications, and sexualities—as well as the ways adults respond to them.
However, the Oedipal myth inevitably reflects Freud's sociocultural position and time. Its Western European origins are clear in its privileging of separation, murderous envy, and desire, and patriarchal in its equation of the male body and power; further, it is rooted in heterosexuality and the gender binary. Most relevant to this paper, Oedipus is a story of an active father and a passive mother (Sidesinger, 2024) that contributes to the vanishing of the maternal body (Balsam, 2013). It does not account for girls' subjective experiences of their bodies, for mothers' experiences of their bodies, or for maternal subjectivity and its impact on girls' development otherwise.
Early efforts to develop variants of Oedipus to account for female development were met with considerable controversy. Carl Jung (1915) briefly attempted to develop an inverse narrative, the Electra Complex, in which girls competed with their rival mothers to attain the attractions of their fathers and, by proxy, gain their fathers' phallic power; however, Freud (1931) dismissed the effort as inaccurate in applying a model based on the male child to female children. He wrote:
We are right in rejecting the term “Electra Complex” which seeks to emphasize the analogy between the attitude of the sexes. It is only in the male child that we find the fateful combination of love
Page 31for the one parent and the simultaneous hatred for the other as a rival.
Instead, Freud (1925, 1933) recast female development in terms of the feminine Oedipus attitude and the negative Oedipus complex and then remained largely silent on the subject. As such after insisting on meaningful sexual difference, Freud continued to reify the Oedipal reference point. Feminist scholars have pointed to the Electra Complex and the discussion of it as an inflection point in the development of psychoanalytic theory, a type of placeholder marking—if nothing else—the lack of understanding of female development. Jill Scott (2005) wrote, “Electra is complex, even if she does not have a complex” (p. 10).
Others have carried forward the tensions in accounting for female development in an Oedipally-derived frame, focusing—for example—on the importance of girls' pre-Oedipal experiences with their mothers (Chodorow, 1978). In these models, girls—relative to boys—are conceptualized as having closer and extended ties to their mothers before whatever separation occurs in the female equivalent of the Oedipal period. Kulish (2022) articulated the implications of psychoanalysis having situated girls and women in this way. She suggested doing so implies girls and women are more needy than boys and men; have weaker superegos; must renounce active, masculine impulses; and need substitutes for, or means of, accessing phallic power, including having a baby. Other scholars have also expressed concerns about locating the uniqueness of girls' experiences in the pre-Oedipal period when resolving the Oedipal dilemma is otherwise conceptualized a means of entering linguistic frameworks, thereby either locking women into phallic linguistic frameworks or out of language altogether (Irigaray, 1977/1985). Stone has questioned the Oedipal framework's requirement of separation from, if not killing off of, mothers as a form of matricide (2012).
In contrast, Kulish and Holtzman (2008) elaborated an alternative Greek myth to address female development, the story of Persephone. In the myth, a young maiden is abducted into the Underworld by Hades while picking flowers. Hades takes her as his spouse, presumably they consummate the marriage and she loses her virginity, and—upon their union—she takes the name Persephone. Enraged, Persephone's mother, Demeter, spreads drought and famine as she searches for her
daughter. Zeus directs Hades to release Persephone; however, Hades tricks Persephone into eating pomegranate seeds, which violates the mandate against eating in the Underworld and, thus, binds her to him. The gods ultimately achieve a compromise in which Persephone spends part of the year with her mother and part of the year in the underworld with Hades.
In adopting the myth and exploring its implications, Kulish and Holtzman (1998; Holtzman & Kulish, 2000, 2003) attempted to address girls' simultaneous identification with and separation from their mothers, their movement from dyadic to triadic relating, as well as unique female concerns associated with the loss of virginity (e.g., the breaking of the hymen), fertility, and periodicity. Kulish (2022) later suggested the myth of Persephone could be used to understand female pleasure and power, as well as applied to the negotiation of conflicting loyalties to two same-sexed parents.
However, like Oedipus, applying the myth of Persephone to female development has not been without controversy. Scholars have discussed whether Persephone's eating of the pomegranate was a voluntary move toward separation (Foley, 1994) or a division of femininity in the service of patriarchy (Irigaray, 1980/1991). As a representation of menstruation and initiation into femininity (Lincoln, 1991), they have considered whether the myth normalizes Hades' abduction and presumed rape of Persephone (Camden, 2011), thus not only eclipsing her subjectivity but also suggesting girls must assume sexuality in a violent patriarchal frame, adapt, and ultimately renounce ties to their mothers.
Psychoanalytic elaborations of the myths of Oedipus and Persephone both nearly eclipse their mothers. In Oedipus, Jocasta is subject to an unintended pregnancy, her husband banishing their son to a violent death, and then unknowingly bearing four children with her lost son before ultimately committing suicide. In the story of Persephone, Demeter's primary role is destruction borne of helpless rage and adaptation to Hades' behavior. Beyond these two myths, psychoanalytic writers have addressed the consequences of mothers being treated as objects rather than subjects in psychoanalytic theorizing. Benjamin (1995), for example, focused on contributions to sexual functioning, and Hoffman
(1996) argued specifically about implications for women's exertion of agency in the service of sexual pleasure. Grill (2019), Sidesinger (2023), and Young (2020) have all written about the clinical consequences of overfocusing on patients' experiences as daughters rather than mothers, exploring analysts' failures to be interested in decisions about mothering. Attempting to confront the psychoanalytic erasure of the female body in particular, theorists have written about the clitoris (Kulish, 1991), menstruation (Kolod, 2010; Lupton, 1993), the uterus (Kostaras, 2021), childbirth (Balsam, 2013), and menopause (Hettlage-Varjas & Kurz, 1995), as well as generated metaphors based on lived experiences of female bodies like the cervix and the speculum (Goodman, 2020).
Further, over the last 10–15 years, psychoanalytic writers have expressed interest in the persistence of the erasure. Balsam (2012; 2015b, 2017, 2018) cites its origins in Freud's rejection of Rank, Adler, and Jung for addressing childbirth and female genitalia and traces it through the denunciations of Hilferdig, Horney, and Rank for including the female body in their developmental theories and into more contemporary writing. In this way, she demonstrates the recapitulation of Freud's “phallo-centric certainties” (Balsam, 2013, p. 695) and suggests that the erasure is motivated as a means of delegitimizing, if not altogether undermining, the power of the female body to create life, to expand and to contract, and to birth. She deems it psychoanalysis's “war on women” (Balsam, 2015b).
One might wonder what might motivate such apparent commitment. On one hand, it could be attributed to the inevitable reference point of an origin story. As he began to take seriously and organize patients' speech, Freud's use of Oedipus as an organizing myth captured what he was observing of his patients and the world around him. However, returning to Balsam's assertion that the erasure of the female body since has been too persistent to ignore, we might continue to wonder what drives it. Here, Balsam (2015b) and Kulish (Kulish, 2021) cite Julia Kristeva's (1980/2010) work on the abject. Applied to this problem, the abject describes the conflation of the mother—and her body—with the horror in the identity disturbance that arises when considering the corporeal realities of birth and the maternal body that births. Others have cited
the impact of similarly dreadful fears in discussions of the uterus as a site of, and potential container for, archaic fears (Kostaras, 2021). Kulish (2022) ultimately goes further and states that some stories are “bulwarks against change, for individuals and for groups” (p. 839). They provide narratives that maintain and protect self-cohesion and esteem, and for groups, they foster cohesion and preserve identity so as to keep others out in the service of maintaining power.
A recent example of how the Oedipal myth is maintained is an article in The American Psychoanalyst (TAP) where MILF (Mothers I Would Like to F—) pornography is used as proof of Oedipal dynamics, and critiques of the use of pornography as evidence for Oedipus are preemptively dismissed as denial, discomfort, or disgust (Ratner, 2024). Barring the possibility that the numbers of adult men the author cites as using MILF pornography are developmentally arrested, perhaps there may be motivations outside of the developmental stage described in the Oedipal myth. Further, the author's denunciation of even potentially legitimate critique magnifies the assertion of power perpetuated by the Oedipal story. Each time we apply the Oedipal myth, we carry forward and are subject to the power structures within it.
Reconsidering maternal subjectivity, contemporary authors have begun linking erotic aspects of the maternal and embodied capacities to mother (Celenza, 2022; Gentile, 2016; Kristeva, 2014). They have suggested girls' identifications with their mothers (Balsam, 2015a; Benjamin, 1986), maternal bodies (Balsam, 1996), and other untold aspects of female development may be important ways of understanding girls' psychic development and correcting the negative implications for girls embedded in psychoanalytic models based in the Oedipal frame. Rather than overfocusing on girls' separation from and subsequent rejection of their mothers and their mothers' non-phallic bodies, these writers argue for attention to the particularities of the female body as means of understanding female development and the patriarchal systems perpetuating its erasure.
One example of increased attention to the maternal body is the recent psychoanalytic focus on matrescence, a term developed based on the intersection of the maternal body, maternal subjectivity, and sociocultural
factors observed in the study of breastfeeding (Raphael, 1975). Beyond generating theory based on the lived experience of female bodies, Sidesinger (2023) suggests that incorporating matrescence into psychoanalysis is a means of confronting the current sociopolitical moment and interrupting cycles of violence.
Athan and Reel (2015) describe pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period as accelerated change manifest in cycles of disorientation and reorientation, including in a mother's experience of her physical body. Matrescence describes mothers' processes of integrating these changes into their embodied selves, which ultimately forges the bodies they bring to their daughters' development.
With the concept of matrescence, Raphael and Athan not only deconstruct the process of becoming a mother but also they implicitly articulate the ways motherhood is constituted and situated within existing power structures (Jones, 2024; Sidesinger, 2024). They extract the active act of mothering from the more passive, objectifying frame of motherhood (; Sidesinger, 2024) and, in doing so, address traumatic objectification and loss of agency (Sidesinger, 2024).
Sidesinger (2023) describes investigating matrescence as a means of recognizing interconnectedness versus subjugation and of linking mother and child versus focusing on either mother or child. Further, she suggests we extend this thinking to include a variety of maternal subjectivities, including step-mothers, mothering post-divorce or after the death of a spouse, and mothers in non-conventional family structures. In these ways, understanding matrescence goes beyond just understanding the transitions of an individual mother and her body to include understanding how society shapes what is ultimately available to girls.
As one means of illuminating Oedipus's shadow, I have argued that we might focus on matrescence as the process that shapes the body a mother inhabits during her daughter's development. Without explicit focus on maternal subjectivities and embodiments, we risk perpetuating the passage into erasure associated with becoming a mother in Western patriarchal cultures (Jones, 2024) and forego opportunity to develop our understanding of girls' development. Returning then to the clinical
examples in Richards's paper, I wonder what details, formulations, or interventions might emerge if the particularities of female bodies and subjectivities—both the patients' and their mothers'—were elaborated and conceptualized in terms eclipsed by Oedipus's shadow.
In an interview with Michaela Chamberlain, author of Misogyny in Psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips (2023) suggested that to acknowledge the misogyny in psychoanalytic theory would force the field to re-absorb the shame it has cast onto mothers. Similarly, Sidesinger (2023) suggests that recognition of maternal subjectivity is less about promoting insight into a mother's narrative about herself than developing the Other's ability “to imagine, understand, and relate to her as a subject” (p. 296). To re-integrate shame is a formidable task, particularly when attempted alone. I am grateful for the invitation to join Dr. Richards in questioning the relationship between the Oedipal myth and female development, and I hope, in response, to continue the work being done to shift women and mothers from object to subject (Orbach & Eichenbaum, 1995), to explore the psychic impact of developing in a female body, and to generate more expansive theories (Nadler, 2023) into psychoanalytic discourse.
Christina Biedermann
Illinois School of Professional Psychology at National Louis University
The author has no known conflict of interest to disclose.
Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to: Christina Biedermann, PsyD, ABAP. Email: