Arlene Kramer Richards begins her paper by framing this as a “conversation about the Oedipus Complex,” going on to describe it as “complicated, knotty, sometimes even vitriolic.” I appreciate this as it conveys that this is a topic worth discussing, and that we should not be content that any particular perspective—or myth for that matter—has already worked it all out. She then takes up the enormous task of summarizing and analyzing the various historical threads of how this topic has been discussed over the past hundred years or so. She distills her own thinking on the topic into a thoughtful perspective on how all children wish to be loved by their parents yet must navigate the limitations to how available this love can be. She emphasizes that one of the complicating factors of receiving such love is the vicissitudes of the triadic situations that arise between the child and her various early love objects. Underscoring the non-universal aspects of development, she draws attention to how particular family dynamics that are at play with a given child will set the stage for developmental lines that have a lifelong impact on her ability to enter into and remain in loving relationships with others. Also underscoring the non-universal aspects of development, she cautions us against seeing any particular person as merely “an example of a class,” and in doing so collapsing their individuality.
I would like to pick up on this theme of the non-universal aspects of development and focus on two topics in particular: the impact on development from trauma and from exposure to attitudes regarding gender. Since this issue focuses on the “female Oedipus complex,” I will center my discussion on the development of girls. I recognize these issues also impact development in boys and in those who come to have a nonbinary gender identity, but I do feel it is useful to have this discussion that specifically centers around girls and their development.
It is also worth acknowledging that our field has a tendency to theorize development through a heteronormative and cisnormative lens, often implicitly though sometimes explicitly. In a similar vein, our theoretical understanding of development allows us to engage with all sorts of family configurations. But there is a tendency to default—explicitly or implicitly—to discussing the Oedipus complex as a drama that unfolds in the mind of a developing child who is raised by a married mother and father. Our developmental model is certainly equipped to consider households with two mommies, or two daddies, or a mommy and a grandma, or a single parent, or divorced parents with all sorts of custody and stepparent arrangements, and households with or without siblings, etc.
I want to clarify that this paper is not intended to examine variations of family configuration and variations in sexual orientation and gender identity in depth. My discussion of these tendencies is mostly motivated by my wanting to draw attention to the unintended consequences when we engage in such oversimplifications. While these tendencies have diminished over time, they still can be seen in the classroom, in supervision, in the consulting room, and in publications. I was once treating a woman who was contemplating pursuing psychoanalytic training. She identified as lesbian and she and her wife were planning on starting a family in the near future. She took a course on child development at an analytic institute and when the Oedipus complex was being discussed, she asked the instructor a question about the implications for development of a child having a set of same sex parents rather than a mother and father. The instructor replied something to the effect of “honestly, I haven't really thought about that”. Not surprisingly this was discouraging to my patient on multiple fronts. It made her feel excluded. And perhaps more concerning was how the exchange demonstrated a lack of creativity and flexibility needed to adapt one's models to the diversity found out in the world. My patient did end up pursuing psychodynamic therapy training, but at a different institute.
Having laid out the above considerations, I now come to this paper's main ideas. Trauma is an enormous topic within the realm of psychoanalytic thinking and it has increasingly garnered societal recognition and attention. A 2025 Lancet study that collected data from 204 countries over a span of over three decades found the worldwide prevalence of sexual violence against children (SVAC) to be 18.9% for females. Also
significant was the finding of SVAC for males to be 14.8%. Considering the direct impact of trauma as well as the inter-generational impacts, any theorizing about development must be mindful of this reality. So much has already been written about Freud's pivot from the seduction model to his theorizing about infantile psychosexual development including his developing the concept of the Oedipus Complex. I am not interested in focusing now on an apology or a critique of Freud; rather I wish to emphasize how trauma and psychosexual development are not separate topics. Along a similar vein, I would like to challenge the tendency to primarily think of trauma as a kind of interrupter of development rather than as one of the potential contributors to development. In 2023 Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini published a book, Gender Without Identity, dedicated to examining how gender identity is acquired, in particular queer gender identity. Steeped in Laplanche's metapsychology, a significant part of their thesis involves examining the role trauma often plays in such an acquisition. This way of thinking of trauma opens the door for treatments that are still rooted in the psychoanalytic tradition of exploration, rather than more restrictively approaching trauma as something which requires repair. I will now present a case of my own that I hope demonstrates this way of thinking about trauma and development.
Ms. S began seeing me initially for once weekly psychotherapy when she was in her early 20s. Soon thereafter we transitioned the frame into twice weekly Transference Focused Psychotherapy (TFP). The main concerns that motivated her to seek treatment were her struggle to enter and sustain fulfilling romantic relationships, her desire to maintain a recently established sobriety from alcohol abuse that began in her early teens, and her hope to quell what had become persistent thoughts of suicide. Ms. S had an extensive history of abuse dating back to childhood. Her parents divorced when she was about 4 years old and her father left the country soon thereafter, leaving her to be raised by her mother. Ms. S suffered emotional neglect and physical abuse at the hands of her mother and her mother's various boyfriends. There were times when these boyfriends would fondle Ms. S and expose themselves to her. There were several instances of her rebuffing their sexual advances only to then be physically attacked by them. Generally, Ms. S found that telling her mother about these abuses only led to halfhearted advice that “men are pigs and all they want is sex, so you better learn to protect yourself”
without really elaborating on how a child was supposed to do this and without acknowledging that the role of protecting the child should fall on the parent. It is worth noting though that for all the ways that her parental objects were not good enough, there were loving and tender elements to Ms. S's relationship to her mother. It was harder for her to recall positive early life experiences with male caretakers, aside from some very superficial checking-in from her mostly absentee father.
Among other things, these traumatic aspects of her childhood contributed to a kind of precocious wildness in Ms. S. Around the age of 13 she began seeking out older teens to party with, engaging in binge drinking, recreational drug use, and sexual experimentation. This led to a number of experiences in her early teens of having sex with men typically 5–10 years her senior, often while intoxicated. She soon began to realize that anytime she engaged in sexual activity it would bring on a panic attack. This only further reinforced her tendency to have sex while drunk, as this tended to blunt the panic.
Around the time I began seeing Ms. S she had recently begun to identify as a lesbian. Interestingly, throughout the five or so years of our working together, she continued to have sexual attraction towards men and continued to have sex with men. What became apparent was that she had developed a kind of split: she had more flexibility in terms of how she experienced relationships with women, but with men there was always an overriding sexual character to relationships, both intrapsychically and in terms of how things unfolded interpersonally. Also, with men she experienced more visceral sexual attraction compared to woman, and the sex had the quality of being exciting albeit panic inducing. Sex with women tended to feel intimate albeit lacking passion and excitement. In large part her identifying as lesbian spoke to a way in which she could see women as potential life partners, whereas there was no capacity for partnership with men aside from the realm of sexual encounters. In fact she did have several long term relationships with women, at times living together. Whereas encounters with men tended to be fleeting or interrupted. As the treatment continued, she came to see the label lesbian as inadequate and eventually came to identify her sexuality as queer as this was less restrictive and reductionistic and as it seemed to account more for her complicated stance towards men and women.
As we continued to work together, another layer emerged: unsurprisingly, Ms. S had internalized a view of men from an early age as dangerous and predatory. In response she had cultivated ways to escape being limited to the role of sexual prey, namely she came to see herself as having a potent sexual power over men. Part of this seemed to be a way to achieve a sort of safety in place of danger. Part of it also had a sadistic quality by identifying with the aggressor. There were dreams and sexual fantasies that emerged in which she would engage in a sort sadomasochistic sexual torture of men.
Better understanding her object relationship with men helped explain a dynamic that played out early in the transference. Almost every early session would at some point include her describing past and present-day sexual experiences in graphic even pornographic detail. As I drew her attention to this to explore what was going on, she was able to reflect that whenever she meets a new man, there is an immediate pull to “get the sex out of the way.” Typically this would literally entail having sex. Once she had had sex with the man, it felt to her like where there once was danger—that the man would overpower her and take sex from her—now there was control: that she had succeeded in seducing them and by virtue of their desire for her she was “in the driver's seat.” With me, she seemed to have arrived at an understanding that I would not literally have sex with her, but by describing her sexual experiences in such detail, it became a kind of proxy by which she could sexually seduced me. While we did explore this component of the transference in depth, there was a persistent uneasiness she felt throughout the time we worked together with regard to who was in control in the room. Sometimes she felt she had succeeded in seducing me, and relished in the ways this made her feel powerful. Other times she felt more insecure about the possibility that I was disinterested or even disgusted by her, leading to worries that I would abruptly cut the treatment short and “throw her out.” This seemed to reveal a more subtle layer still, that this pursuit of control through sex appeal was also a defense against being left, much the way her father left her at such a critical age.
Unfortunately, my treatment with her had a somewhat abrupt termination when she moved out of state to pursue a job opportunity. Over the course of her treatment, though, there was a sense that exploring these developmental lines contributed to a greater flexibility she had in
how she related to herself and to others, especially with men. She did maintain her sobriety and she did find some enhanced capacity to cultivate friendships and romantic partnerships. Her suicidal urges had also greatly reduced in intensity and frequency. I have hoped to illustrate that Ms. S's trauma history can be seen in multiple ways that are not mutually exclusive. Her tendency to have panic attacks, to split, to dissociate both psychologically and with the assistance of alcohol, and her suicidality speaks to the ways in which her traumas inflicted psychological damage on her psyche. But her trauma also played a central role in her overall development, including her oedipal development. It shaped the emergence of her sexual fantasies—both conscious and unconscious—it contributed to her evolving sense of her identity with respect to her sexual orientation, and it impacted the ways she sought out love and companionship.
The next topic I want to touch on is the impact on development from exposure to attitudes regarding gender. These kinds of attitudes often contain some combination of prescriptive expectations around gender norms as well as beliefs about intrinsic endowment differences between men and women. I, like many before me, would argue that Freud's theorizing (1925) that girls end up with a diminished superego vs boys on account of their differential oedipal task is itself an example of how societal attitudes influenced Freud's observations. Attitudes regarding gender are highly regional, with cultural, ethnic, religious, institutional layers all at play. These attitudes can also vary greatly from household to household and at times vary greatly between parents and caretakers within a single household. Like trauma, this too is an enormous topic. A 2022 book titled Psychoanalytic Explorations of What Women Want Today, edited by Cereijido, Ellman, Goodman, explores the very vast territory of how conceptions of femininity, gender identity, gender dynamics, gender roles, misogynistic power structures all shape how woman develop and move through the world. Arlene Kramer Richards herself penned one of the chapters titled “What women want and what men want of women”. I will now present another case that takes a look at just one slice of this topic: how an adult patient came to discover and contend with a set of views about being a woman that she had not even realized she had been internalizing since childhood.
Ms. O began seeing me in analysis around the time she was finishing law school, just as she was set to begin a position with a big law firm. Much of the early work centered around her frustrations around experiencing unfair treatment at work. Another early theme was Ms. O's tendency to treat romantic relationships with a kind of adversarial stance. Ms. O is bisexual and whether she was in a relationship with a man or a woman, she tended to feel like there was always a power imbalance inherent in relationships, and she was determined to be the person occupying the position of higher power.
As we explored these tensions a number of childhood associations emerged. Ms. O spoke about the unfair treatment from her parents she experienced compared to her younger brother. She was expected to set the table and wash the dishes while her brother was allowed to watch tv and play games. He was allowed to date as an early teenager whereas she was discouraged from dating until she went off to college etc. Ms. O remembers a few times she tried to address the unfairness, but the prevailing response was some iteration of “there are ways girls and boys are different, so you can't expect us to treat you and your brother exactly the same”. This created a lot of resentment, much of it conscious. But it also seemed to contribute to a less conscious sensibility in which Ms. O was primed to see future relationships as being inherently unfair and power-imbalanced. And I believe this exacerbated her struggle with the unfairness present in her job environment, and it contributed to the characteristic unbalance of power present in her earlier romantic relationships.
Eventually Ms. O entered into a relationship with a woman that was surprisingly different in character. Her partner tended to be deferential, which Ms. O initially experienced as a kind of weakness. But eventually what emerged was a relationship that felt more mutual, more cooperative, more collaborative, than Ms. O had ever experienced before. Somewhat to her surprise the relationship matured and eventually they married. Within a few years, Ms. O had become pregnant via IVF, and a huge part of our work together then involved working through thoughts and feelings brought up throughout her pregnancy.
Generally speaking, Ms. O had viewed herself as a fairly liberal woman, in the tradition of third wave feminism: rejecting prescriptive norms and
celebrating individual freedom and empowerment. She felt she arrived at this set of principles mostly through exposure during her educational, professional, and social journeys.
This was in contrast to her experience of her parents as being old fashioned and conservative. Much to Ms. O's surprise, as she traversed the path of becoming pregnant and anticipating the birth of her child, she found herself repeatedly grappling with questions having to do with gender roles and gender norms. More than just grappling, she found herself feeling a kind of pull to identify and align with certain gendered norms that she did not recognize as belonging to herself. This was bringing about increasing intrapsychic tension and at times tension with her wife. One example was when Ms. O and her wife were deliberating about whether to move to a new neighborhood. Her wife preferred staying put while Ms. O wanted to move to a more expensive neighborhood to gain access to a better school district. Eventually, Ms. O in a fit of frustration declared “as our boy's mother, it's my job to make sure he attends a good school!” Both Ms. O and her wife were taken aback. Stating the obvious, Ms. O and her wife were both going to be the baby's mother, albeit with the asymmetry introduced by Ms. O being the one carrying the pregnancy. But also contained in the statement was the idea that ensuring the child has a good school is a mother's responsibility, as opposed to the other parent/father. This became a recurring theme in which Ms. O could not help but to conceptualize the family unit with herself as the mother, her partner as the father, and with a set of expectations about whose job is what.
In exploring this material new associations came forth. Ms. O's own mother was very much the one in charge of ensuring the well-being of the children and in effect ran the household. Even though Ms. O's parents both worked full time, it was her mother who would get her ready for school, take her to the doctor, pick out the school she would attend. As the pregnancy advanced, Ms. O began to worry about how to handle work and family responsibilities. She stressed over the idea of taking more than a few weeks of maternity leave but she also felt tremendous guilt imagining a scenario of “abandoning” her newborn for someone else to look after. When discussing this topic with her mother, she discovered her mother herself only took a few weeks of leave before returning full time to work. Interestingly this was a more nuanced position
than could be captured by just seeing her mother as old fashioned or conservative. Ms. O came to see that on the one hand her mother did very much identify with the gender norm that expects a mother to be the primary, nurturing caretaker of the baby. But, as the first women in her family in several generations to have a full time job herself, Ms. O's mother also identified with the idea that women need to fight for their spot in the workplace. This combination sets up the kind of impossible stance women often find themselves in wherein they must do it all and somehow do it all without compromise, including fully occupying the roles of working mom and caretaker mom. Not surprisingly, Ms. O was feeling trapped by this configuration and she struggled to see a tenable way forward.
There was another interesting way that this topic made its way into the treatment. I, myself, became a first time father about a year prior to Ms. O becoming pregnant. When I took my own paternity leave, she became enraged and nearly fired me. At the time, I mainly understood this as her struggling with feelings of abandonment and perhaps feelings of competition as my attention would be diverted to my own child. In light of the above material though, I did come to also see part of Ms. O's reaction as containing the gendered sentiment that taking care of the baby does not fall to the father. So why should I need to take paternity leave? And going one step further, some envy that I, as a father, might provide more hands-on parenting than she had received from her own father. She and I did return to thinking about this episode and there were fantasies she had that my wife was doing all the hard work while I was essentially taking something akin to an extended vacation to “have fun” with the baby. In retrospect she was quite taken aback and even ashamed of how activated she became.
One of the more interesting aspects of this material was Ms. O's coming to realize the many ways she had unconsciously identified with her mother, especially since consciously she preferred to see herself as being more in counter-identification when it came to attitudes around gender. She also found that exploring her own impossible dilemma brought about some newfound appreciation for the similar struggle her mother had to navigate in her own life. Exploring this material did help Ms. O introduce some more flexibility and grace into her approach of how to navigate the transition into motherhood and the demands that come
along with it. And it gave her much to think about with respect to how she wants to raise her own son.
On a final note, I would like to revisit Arlene Kramer Richards's encouragement to allow ourselves “to see the uniqueness in each patient rather than see the person as an example of a class.” Ironically, what we often find when we do this is that there are a set of formative experiences in which our patients were treated by her caretakers and by others in a way that negated her uniqueness, and in which she was treated as an example of a class. This ends up being an area where the impacts of trauma and gendered attitudes overlap. Both have the potential to exert an impinging, restricting effect on development. I believe this is one way treatment offers therapeutic potential. When we truly listen to and “see the uniqueness in each patient” we can avoid recapitulating old experiences and instead can achieve a novel and mutative developmental experience with our patients. One of the most important ways for an analyst to refine their ability to be attuned to a given patient is to be a voracious consumer of stories. We do this when we listen to our patients, our friends, our family members, our neighbors, and when we consume fiction, nonfiction, stay abreast of current events, etc. Returning to the topic of this issue, we do this when we more broadly listen to women.