Response to “The Female Oedipus Complex” by Arlene Kramer Richards Little Girls and Little Boys, Women and Men, Who are We?

In this meticulously researched and well-documented essay, Arlene Kramer Richards offers an account of the history of psychoanalytic exploration of female sexuality, of what little girls experience in their early sexual awakenings, their early desire, and how those early thoughts and feelings manifest in adulthood, in women. She also offers her own theorizing regarding female psychosexual development, the formation of early sexual desire.

Importantly, she pays attention to psychoanalytic language used in discussing female psychosexual development. Of course, the term most commonly used by psychoanalysts in discussing later stages of emerging childhood sexuality is “Oedipus complex.” Another term that Kramer Richards uses is “triadic.” Kramer Richards also refers to the term used to describe particularly female psychosexual development, the “Electra complex”. I will discuss the implications of this term shortly.

I prefer the term “triadic.” Since the classic Oedipus complex, as described by Sigmund Freud, is that of a little boy whose first love is his mother, a little boy who realizes he has to compete with his father to win the exclusive love of his mother, therefore risking the punitive wrath of his father, whom the boy fears might castrate him, is gender-specific, a term that describes a child competing for a parent's love with the other parent that is gender-neutral is “triadic.”

The most common type of a nuclear family, a “traditional” nuclear family, is composed of a cis-gender mother, a cis-gender father, and a child, perhaps more than one child. Thus, a child is embedded in a triadic situation of two adults with the child. In her summary of the developmental factors for the child in this situation, Kramer Richards points out that the child may experience a spectrum of desires for both mother and for

father, for Mommy and for Daddy. As each parent is desired, each parent also is a rival.

Kramer Richards focuses on the actual context of a child's desire. Since the theme we are discussing is female psychosexual desire, when I refer to a child, I will consider the child to be a girl and use the pronouns indicating the child is a girl. Kramer Richards notes that the child is aware of her own genital, her genital sensations, and wants genital stimulation. She not only wants to provide genital stimulation to herself, but she also wants her early love objects to provide genital stimulation for her.

Kramer Richards elaborates on the ramifications of a little girl wanting genital stimulation from her love objects. Most little girls may want to grow up and marry Daddy. Some little girls may want to grow up and marry Mommy. Some little girls may want to marry both Mommy and Daddy. Complicating this broadening spectrum is the fact that attractive traits found in one parent may also be seen in the parent of the opposite sex. Kramer Richards focuses on one particularly important issue for little girls. Both little girls and little boys find their first love object to be Mommy. Yet while most little boys retain Mommy as their first love object, and want to grow up and marry Mommy, most little girls find themselves giving up Mommy, their first love object, for an increasingly important love object, Daddy.

I think perhaps the most difficult aspect of the switch from wanting to grow up and marry Mommy to wanting to grow up and marry Daddy is the little girl's establishing her own gender identity. To feel female, a little girl has to identify with her same sex parent, Mommy, and thus, she has to identify with her Mommy's choice of sexual partner, she has to want to grow up and marry Daddy, to be just like her Mommy.

A particular insight that Kramer Richards offers is that psychoanalysts think like psychoanalysts, aware of a complex body of theory, and who usually have significant clinical experience with adults who speak of their memories of their childhood, yet, in contrast, an infant/toddler/three- to six-year-old child may think, feel, and experience in a significantly different way. Of course, some psychoanalysts work with children, even very young children. They need to be able to empathize with, perhaps even identify with, the very young child.

I serve on the Advisory Board and faculty of the Harlem Family Institute (HFI), which is located in New York City. HFI describes itself as offering community services “for children, their parents and adults in need, providing affordable long-term therapy in neighborhood schools and community centers.” In its mission statement, HFI says, “The Institute takes psychoanalytic work out into the community where it gives youngsters a safe space to voice their feelings, learn to use their strengths to manage the challenges they face each day, and discuss new ways to relate to the world.”

As a faculty member, over many years I have supervised a number of HFI candidates who have worked with young children. A few of the candidates actually worked with children in the three-to-six-year-old range, children attending kindergarten and first grade public schools, although most of the children they worked with were older. Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic candidates who work clinically with young children may use a number of techniques such as sand tray play, art therapy, the squiggle game, collaborative storytelling, playing competitive games, playing with toys, and in so doing, hear children share their phantasies, tell anecdotes about family life, and of course share their deepest feelings. Yes, working psychoanalytically with young children means that the clinician draws on a bank of psychoanalytic theory, and clinical experience with adults. Nonetheless, these clinicians also have direct interactions with young children and learn from the children themselves how to work meaningfully with them.

Playing and Reality, by D.W. Winnicott is a masterpiece most psychoanalysts can draw on if they want to consider how to work with children, and Melanie Klein and Anna Freud specifically wrote about working psychoanalytically with children.

There are quite a number of more recent books written by psychoanalysts that address how to work psychoanalytically with children, such as The Psychoanalyst and the Child: From the Consultation to Psychoanalytic Treatment, by Michael Ody, Routledge, 2019; The Thinking Heart: Three Levels of Psychoanalytic Therapy With Disturbed Children, by Anna Alvarez, Routledge, 2012; Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work, by Kerry Kelly Novick and Jack Novick, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Michael Eigen has written most eloquently about exploring feelings in psychoanalysis in Feeling Matters, Routledge, 2007. His book is quite useful in considering the necessity of addressing feelings in psychoanalytic work and readily applies to working with children as well as with adults. Facilitating young children becoming able to identify and explore their innermost feelings is a lifelong gift those children will be able to use.

In her summary of the three clinical cases she wrote about, Kramer Richards paid exquisite attention to the feelings of her analysands. In doing so, she exemplifies what Michael Eigen observes and recommends. As I ruminated over the empathy Kramer Richards has for her analysands, and Eigen's focus on how much feeling matters, I remembered a famous line from the 1949 play, Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller: “Attention must be paid!” Considering the triadic struggles that are both intrapsychic and externally occurring in reality, we must pay attention! There is no escaping childhood feelings of sexual desire, love, rivalry, inadequacy, fear of loss of a loved parent, fear of abandonment, fear of punishment by a rival, fear of mutilation, shame, guilt, anxiety, and a smorgasbord of defenses to ward off feeling.

I was impressed with Kramer Richards's approach to the little girl's experience by turning to mythology, just as Sigmund Freud did when he considered triadic struggles and used the term Oedipus complex. It is important that Sigmund Freud was a man, and his thoughts about childhood focused on boys. Arlene Kramer Richards is a woman, and is the Editor, with Lucille Spira, also a woman, of Myths of Mighty Women, Karnac, 2015. She knows mythology and is profoundly aware of images of women in mythology. Thus, as she discusses the childhood triadic experience faced by little girls, she considers not only the well-established psychoanalytic concept, the Electra complex, she also contrasts Electra with Persephone.

In 1915, Carl Jung introduced the concept of the Electra complex in girls, paralleling the Oedipus complex in boys. The Greek myth involving Electra is worth understanding. Electra and her brother Orestes were the children of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. Electra and Orestes believed that their mother Clytemnestra conspired with her lover, Aegisthus, to murder her husband, Agamemnon, and seize his throne, which indeed happened. So, the sister and brother murdered their

mother, Clytemnestra, to avenge their father. Thus, the term “Electra complex” describes the feelings and phantasies of a little girl who wants to murder her mother because she loves her father.

Kramer Richards offers us the myth of Persephone, daughter of Demeter and Zeus, as a more fitting image, a more powerful “mighty woman” than Electra. Persephone was a fertility earth goddess, worshipped in Greece in the Eleusinian mystery cult. She descended into the underworld every year, joining her husband Hades, causing winter, and returned every spring, bringing vegetation, thus feeding the world, to rejoin her mother, Demeter, who was the goddess of agriculture and harvest. Thus, Persephone is very much like her mother. Kramer Richards refers to a paper by Kulish and Holtzman, describing the myth as focused as a girl's separation from, and loss of, her mother. Thus, the girl is vulnerable to feeling abandoned by her mother. A girl who grows to adulthood, and marries, uses her husband as a substitute for her mother. The little girl wants closeness with both her mother and her father.

Kramer Richards explores a little girl's ambivalence regarding staying close to her mother, aligned with her mother. She says that “a girl repeats her ambivalent attachment to her mother in her relationships with female friends.” She cites Butler's idea of femininity as being based on a girl's incomplete mourning for loss of her mother as a sexual love object.

I found myself uneasy as I considered these ideas about a little girl's ambivalence and loss regarding her love for her mother. It seemed to me we might wind up pathologizing being female, being feminine, as girls grow up and become women.

Kramer Richards provides a useful summary of the importance of early childhood in shaping a woman's adult life, since psychoanalytic theorists from various backgrounds agree that this is so. They may emphasize different phases, but acknowledge, correctly, that early childhood shapes adult identity. Kramer Richards identifies key elements, such as attachment, separation anxiety, triangulation regarding love and hate of parental figures, centrality of self-esteem, and trauma. She acknowledges that some theorists try to integrate various phases and experiences into an overall theory of development.

I offer another myth, that of Cassandra, that we might consider. Here is a poem I wrote many years ago about Cassandra:

The Ecstasy of Cassandra

In considering the myth of Cassandra, I wonder if sexuality is the most important element in adult female experience or is autonomy even more important. Do we project our expectations of the centrality of sexuality onto women, as if femininity, being female, is more important than any other aspect of an adult woman's life?

Or perhaps sexuality indeed may be central to all adult life, women and men both.

Or perhaps our cultural expectations are such that men have autonomy and complexity, but women primarily are child-bearers and nurturers.

Yet Kramer Richards is keenly aware of cultural influences. She points out that the Oedipal conflict is Freud's main story line, that he wrote about “hysterical” women and used his own self-analysis. Kramer Richards identifies the need for self-esteem, recognizes intersubjectivity as part of the clinical dyad experience, and values the need for unity. She acknowledges the need for infant observation.

I taught a human development class at a psychoanalytic institute for many years, focused on early infancy through the triadic conflict, and collected “cute true stories” that I shared with the students. I now will share three stories with the IJCD readers.

A four-year-old boy said to his mother, “Mommy, when I grow up, I will have breasts just like you.” His mother spent a moment contemplating what to say, and, wisely answered, “Only girls grow up to be women and have breasts. You are a boy. You will grow up to be a man like your father, and you will have hair on your chest like Daddy has.” Her son was delighted with her answer.

Another four-year old boy said to his mother, “Mommy, you are the most beautiful woman in the world. I love you. When I grow up, I will marry you.” His mother spent a moment contemplating what to say, and wisely answered, “I am already married, I am married to Daddy. When you grow up and are a man, you will meet many beautiful women. You will meet a woman you fall in love with, and you will marry her, and you will be very happy.” The little boy was very happy with her answer.

A little girl reported to her mother her discomfort on seeing a little boy's penis for the first time. The little girl showed no feelings of penis envy. On the contrary, she expressed pity for the little boy, that he had some sort of excrudescence on his genital. She expressed pride in her own smooth genital.

In Kramer Richards's summary of her clinical cases, she says, “I hope that these examples lead clearly to the suggestion that individual experiences of what has been called the Oedipus 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.”

And thus, we have the inescapable nature nurture question, and the cultural environment. The more we are immersed in theory, in knowledge, the more we question. There is no “Guide for the Perplexed” for us. There only is our capacity to wonder, to think, to feel, to accept, to rebel, to remember.

Remember… . What do we remember? Our studies, our readings, our teachers, our clinical experience, our sense of our own expertise? And, importantly, our childhood? Is knowledge personal?

Kramer Richards shows a true sensitivity to diversity and uniqueness of individual experience. She truly listens to her analysands and respects their individuality and depth. She recognizes we learn from our analysands when we listen.

I gleaned wonderful gems of insight from her, as she points out that feelings are different from what else we learn.

“Psychoanalysis becomes one and myriad.”

Since paying attention to feelings is essential, “that attention, both cognitive and emotional, is the power of psychoanalysis.”

“…[T]heoretical concepts fit the particular patient at the particular moment.”

Our encounter with each analysand can modify our view of the world as we empathize, so that “how what we hear modifies our own feelings as well as our cognitive understanding.”

“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.”

This last particular gem reminded me of a memory of something that happened when I was a psychoanalytic candidate in the 1970's. We were discussing the Dora case, and I was appalled. How could we accept Freud's view that Dora was aroused by Herr K's embracing her, that she enjoyed feeling his erection, that she wanted to kiss him? Herr K. had been smoking a cigar. Perhaps she found his cigar breath offensive. But Freud himself smoked cigars, and he may have thought that cigar smoking was manly and enticing to young women. How could Freud have overlooked Dora's admiration of, and desire for, Herr K.'s wife's “adorable white body”?

I voiced my thoughts in class, and the instructor and my classmates dismissed my ideas. One classmate recommended that I read Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Pantheon Books, ), by Juliet Mitchell, to understand that my feminist approach was interfering with my appreciation of Freud, and another classmate began referring to me as “the feminist.”

What psychoanalytic theories would have helped us further understand Dora during my time as a candidate in that institute class? What psychoanalytic theories would help us understand Dora today? What psychoanalytic theories would help us understand the dynamics in that institute class today?

Kramer Richards's scholarship and knowledge is impressive. I learned a great deal reading her article. I (not so humbly) would like to recommend one more addition to her wonderful array of references, Female Identity Conflict in Clinical Practice, an anthology of articles by Doris Bernstein, edited by Norbert Freedman & Betsy Distler, Jason Aronson Press, 2005, Northvale, New Jersey.