Since the beginnings of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex has been seen as a central, structuring point in the development of identity, sexual differentiation, the construction of desire, the establishment of the symbolic law, and insertion into socialization. However, few dimensions of Freudian thought have been so vigorously debated, elaborated, and questioned as the female Oedipus. The question of femininity, the girl's relationship with mother and father, the passage between primary and secondary bonds, and the symbolic function of maternity have been revisited throughout the history of psychoanalysis from clinical, cultural, and gender perspectives.
The debate surrounding the female Oedipus complex continues to be one of the most controversial nuclei of psychoanalytic thought. More than a century after Freud's formulations, Arlene Kramer Richards's text, The Female Oedipus Complex, brings back to the contemporary scene the need to reconsider this problem not only in its theoretical dimension, but also in its clinical and cultural dimensions, as well. Kramer Richards proposes an approach that restores the structural complexity of the female Oedipus in a context where identities and desires present themselves in forms broader than those upon which classical theory was built.
In this context, her article constitutes a highly valuable and timely contribution. It recovers the discussion of the female Oedipus not merely as a historical vestige of early Freudianism, but as an essential clinical organizer whose meaning is continually reactivated in the transference and in the singular ways each woman negotiates their place in the original love triangle.
At a time when many people live their gender identity as a structuring center beyond the chosen sexual object, both clinical work and theory require us to reconsider how the Oedipus is constituted today and to
analyze whether we can still speak of the Oedipus as a universal matrix or, rather, as a plural field of possible configurations.
Kramer Richards expands the female Oedipal complexity through different lenses, mentioning key authors who have developed the topic. She illustrates this with clinical vignettes from her own professional experience inviting readers to deepen their understanding of the female Oedipus complex.
According to the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, the etymological root of the word complejo (complex) comes from the Latin complexus, meaning “to embrace” or “to intertwine.” It implies a composition of heterogeneous, multiple, interwoven elements. Thus, Kramer Richards states that we cannot conceive of a single theory of the Oedipus complex, a point sustained by the term's etymology itself. The Oedipus complex is constituted as a fact made up of interlaced aspects and, from the Freudian conception, when we refer to the female Oedipus complex, the displacement of libido from the primordial maternal love object to the paternal object makes it even more complex.
In her article, Kramer Richards brings the Oedipus theory back into focus as a structuring axis of psychic development, something that seems to have been relegated to a less relevant plane in some psychoanalytic training programs, and which I believe, remains a structuring concept of the psyche, alongside narcissism and identification.
Kramer Richards enters into dialogue with Freud and with an entire tradition of psychoanalysts that includes Horney, Kulish and Holtzman, Buchberg, Blass, Maguire, among others. Her central thesis holds that the female Oedipus cannot be reduced to a single explanatory model, nor to anatomical binarism, nor to a linear narrative about penis envy or castration. She also argues that the girl does not necessarily abandon her love for the mother when she chooses the father as a new love object; rather, she is confronted with a tension between both bonds. She describes how the shift from love for the mother to love for the father is not a simple substitution but an interweaving of bonds, identifications, and mourning. In that movement, the girl does not abandon maternal love; she transforms it: she both loves and enters a rivalry with the mother, desires the father, and fears losing the love of both. Her text
is inscribed in a line that runs from Freud to object relations theories, emphasizing clinical singularity and cultural variability. That coexistence of desires and rivalries constitutes the female Oedipal plot.
Her clinical vignettes reveal how the Oedipus is reactivated transgenerationally and how each woman negotiates her place between two figures of love and identification, showing that the triangular conflict does not obey a universal or rigid order but is inscribed in subjective and cultural singularities.
From this perspective, it is pertinent to mention the dimension of psychic transmission between generations. As René Kaës argues, we inherit not only traits or mandates but also unconscious alliances and pacts that distribute psychic functions within the family group, sustaining zones of the unthought and of desire that may reappear as Oedipal repetitions (Kaës 2012). In turn, the contribution of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok on the crypt and the phantom allows us to conceive that certain unresolved losses and family secrets can return as intrusive presences in the psychic life of descendants, shaping particular ways of loving, engaging in rivalry, excluding, or feeling excluded (Abraham & Torok). From this vantage point, Oedipal reactivation is not reducible to an intrapsychic dynamic but can be read as an enactment of an inherited scene in which each subject reinscribes their place in the generational and affective chain. The clinical vignettes presented in Kramer Richards's text—Y., Sara, and Martine—illustrate variations of the female Oedipus and show how each subject uniquely organizes desire, identification, and fantasies in relation to parental love.
Kramer Richards's reading thus offers an opportunity to revisit the Oedipus today, in a world in which the experience of gender and identity has diversified. We must admit that although Freud conceived the Oedipus complex as a universal structure, contemporary thinking compels us to recognize the need to rethink that structure in the light of modern cultural transformations, without losing sight of its symbolic value as a matrix that organizes desire and sexual differentiation.
According to Freud's formulation, the Oedipal scene posits sexual differentiation, the prohibition of incest, and the institution of the law of a third as essential conditions for integration into culture. Female
development is subordinated to the male; the girl appears defined in terms of a lack, of an “incomplete” anatomy that would determine her position in relation to desire. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (1925), Freud maintains that the girl discovers her lack of a penis and reacts by displacing her libido from maternal to paternal love. In this way, femininity would be structured by penis envy, and its resolution by the acceptance of maternity as symbolic substitute for the absent organ. This interpretation reduces female experience to the negative of the male model, generating a multitude of critiques within psychoanalysis itself.
From my point of view, it is entirely understandable that this proposal of penis envy has provoked so much controversy. Why should we think today that the girl is defined by what she lacks and not by what she is, what she feels herself to be, and her singular ways of loving and desiring? Why assume it is the girl who envies the penis, and not the boy/man who envies pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding?
In contemporary culture, the penis has lost part of its value as a univocal symbol of power and subjective plenitude. As authors such as Alizade (2007), Glocer Fiorini (2010), and Butler (1990) have argued, the phallus—more than the anatomical penis—operates as a signifier of desire, recognition, and symbolic agency, so its “possession” is not circumscribed to a male body. Thus, subjective potency progressively detaches from anatomy and is articulated with modes of being, desiring, and inhabiting the body.
It would therefore seem that we can no longer sustain the traditional notion of the desire for a child as a substitute for the penis when maternity has ceased to be a symbolic destiny and has become a choice—something that also obliges us to separate reproductive function from the constitution of female identity and from the “resolution” of the Oedipus.
Kramer Richards revisits the Freudian tradition and its later developments, illustrating them with clinical vignettes: In the case of Y., she observes how infantile desire within the Oedipal conflict is reactivated across generations through the bond between daughter and father. The girl who longs to be “the most loved” is revived in the mother, who
confronts her own place as excluded daughter. In the vignette of Sara, a compulsion to accumulate objects seems to represent her ambivalent identification with the mother and a way of defending herself against the fear of losing her femininity. In Martine, rivalry with the mother and the search for the father's love reveal the persistence of an un-mourned loss that is perpetuated in adult relationships, showing how Oedipal structure is reactivated at each experience of exclusion or loss of love.
Through these cases, Kramer Richards demonstrates that the clinical manifestations of the female Oedipus mean working with simultaneous, contradictory desires, far from obeying one linear sequence. The girl does not choose between mother or father; rather, she tries at all costs to preserve both as objects of love and identification. This tension—formulated by Freud as ambivalence—acquires in Kramer Richards's an amplified dimension: being loved by both parents and loving both is an originary fantasy that no Oedipal resolution fully suppresses.
The reference to the myth of Persephone is interpreted in her proposal not as a forced passage to heterosexuality, but as a metaphor of double belonging: remaining tied to the mother while entering a new order of bonds. The myth thus expresses the wish to preserve the primary union without renouncing it, while moving towards heterosexuality. This ambivalence in the female Oedipus seems to differ from the male model, where the father appears as an intrusive figure in the child's illusorily exclusive relationship with the mother. We can say that the female Oedipus is configured as a dialectic between permanence and loss, between identification and desire, in which—far from resolving a conflict—one must learn to inhabit it. These ideas open the view to a multiplicity of ways in which each woman—and today, we might say, each person—negotiates affective belonging, identity, and desire.
Extending the frame even further, in light of new gender identities, the classical Oedipal theory proves insufficient. The chosen love object no longer seems to be the primary factor. For many people today, identity as the central axis is independent of the choice of object. Although anatomy-based identity has traditionally been the structural foundation of desire, today anatomy has ceased to be the center of identity, which is no longer necessarily conceived within the man/woman binary.
In “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914) Freud had already anticipated that object love is supported by narcissism: the subject loves what they would like to be or once were. Hence identification precedes desire and object choice. I still consider it valid, following Freud, to think that identity—being a man, being a woman, being a person—is constituted in the fabric of early identifications, while object choice represents a second operation derived from that first experience of identity.
Among a growing number of adolescents and young adults, we observe a heightened preoccupation with defining one's identity, an interest in the self, independent of anatomical body type or the gender of a romantic partner. For many, the question of identity—“Who am I?” (Am I a man? A woman? Both? Or something else?) —overshadows their chosen love object, as if the gender of their partner were irrelevant.
Traditionally, when someone spoke about a sexual experience, a relationship, or a romantic encounter, the gender of the partner was taken for granted and functioned as an almost self-evident fact: if the person identified as heterosexual, they spoke of “the other sex”; if they identified as homosexual, they referred to a partner of “the same sex.” Today, however, among a growing number of adolescents and young adults (and not only them), the emphasis appears to have shifted: the gender or sex of the partner becomes secondary—whether man, woman, nonbinary, trans—and what takes center stage is one's own self-definition (“Who am I?” “How do I name myself?), rather than “Who do I love?” In other words, the axis of the narrative no longer revolves around the object, but around the identity from which one desires, accompanied by a relative indifference toward the partner's traditional gender categories.
Several adolescent patients have been surprised and sometimes irritated while telling me about their romantic or sexual adventures. When I inquire about the gender of their partners, they regard it as totally irrelevant whether these experiences occur with a man or a woman. Below I share two brief clinical vignettes that illustrate this regressive shift in emphasis from the object to identity, and the generational sensitivity regarding gender language and ways of naming oneself.
Some years ago, my first adolescent patient who identified with the pronouns “they/them” was deeply offended when I asked about her
partner's gender, replying irritably: “Who cares?” It is worth mentioning that that was our second and last session, as she stopped seeing me before we could even begin treatment, claiming I was too old for her—and it seems she was right. At the time, I struggled to understand that it might be of no importance to her, and I confess that even today, I haven't improved much in accepting the idea that the gender of the object someone chooses is not crucial to understand.
Another adolescent patient, who was biologically female, with very feminine features, who adopted the pronouns “he/him”, when I tried to explore what attracted her to being a man, she replied: “I don't want to be a man, I AM a man; I don't need an explanation for what I am” — although over time we were able to understand some reasons underpinning her identification with the male sex.
In contemporary discourse, the emphasis is not on the person with whom one maintains a romantic or sexual relationship, but on who one is: man, woman, both, neither. There is a search for identity without a desire for understanding.
As we know, for Freud, identification is primary and “object choice is based on the model of self-love.” In other words: being precedes loving; identity comes first, and only later does object choice emerge. In “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Freud writes that “from the beginning the individual carries with him a core of self-love” from which the capacity to love objects will later be constituted.
However, some contemporary approaches have proposed processes of becoming without stable identity anchors. From the psychoanalytic clinical perspective, however, it is essential to distinguish between the multiplicity of identifications characteristic of a developing and transforming ego and the absence of a sufficiently cohesive self. Subjectivity may indeed be fluid and plural, but it requires a psychic framework that enables continuity, differentiation, and a coherent sense of history.
That is to say, the capacity for becoming presupposes a subject capable of absorbing experience without fragmenting. When identity fails to form, anxieties of annihilation emerge, along with self/non-self-confusions, failures in symbolization, and archaic defenses. Conversely, denying identity does not free the subject; but rather exposes them to the
disavowal of their most basic need: to exist as someone. We cannot deny that identity, narcissism, and the Oedipus Complex remain key concepts for understanding the psyche in psychoanalysis.
The contemporary viewpoints do not annul the Oedipus; but rather shifts the focus from the anatomical axis in order to situate it within the complex articulation between identity and culture. The Oedipus remains structuring; the need for a third remains as does the unavoidable acknowledgment of anatomical difference. Yet in a world of immediate satisfaction, in which everything seems possible thanks to new technologies and scientific advances, it becomes more difficult to accept what has been anatomically inherited, clinging to the illusion of being whoever one wishes or believes oneself to be.
Latin American psychoanalytic thought has made fundamental contributions to understanding this complexity, particularly by integrating the cultural, historical, and gender dimensions that traverse the Oedipal conflict. Leticia Glocer Fiorini (2002, 2010) proposes an in-depth revision of the concept of sexual difference and the notion of gender identity. For her, subjectivity is constituted as a network of multiple, shifting identifications that are not reducible to the man/woman binary. From this perspective, the Oedipus complex remains a symbolic structure but ceases to be a closed model: it becomes a matrix to be read through cultural configurations and new forms of difference. Glocer Fiorini underscores that identity is not an essence but a position within the discourse and the desire of the Other, and that object choice does not define the subject's identity but expresses it in a transitory way.
Emilce Dio Bleichmar (1997, 2006) proposes that the constitution of the sexed subject is a process of symbolic and relational attribution that does not derive automatically from anatomy nor from a presumed symbolic “lack.” In her view, sexual identity results from an “attribution of meaning and desire” through which culture and family inscribe differences. She stresses that a fundamental theoretical error has been the conflation of gender identity with object choice.
Her thinking therefore converges with the perspective developed here: identity is the structural basis of desire, not its consequence, reminding us that being and feeling precede object choice.
Along the same lines, Mariam Alizade (2007), the first chair of the IPA's Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP), addresses femininity not as a destiny but as a subjective construct that articulates desire, pleasure, and symbolic power. Her reading of femininity highlights the role of aggression, rivalry, and autonomy, dismantling the classical notion of female passivity. Alizade notes that, in the analytic experience, women do not seek to complete a lack, but to elaborate their unique way of desiring within a symbolic fabric that does not always include her. This idea resonates with Kramer Richards's stance, which recognizes in her patients the need to reconstruct their place in the love scene without reducing it to an ideal derived from the norm.
Patricia Alkolombre—also a former COWAP chair—introduced (2015) the concept of “symbolic motherhoods” showing how the wish to be a mother—traditionally conceived by Freud as a substitute for the penis—is transformed in the current context. Today, many women choose not to have children or experience motherhood outside the heterosexual and biological model. This cultural shift, Alkolombre notes, requires a revision of the classical Oedipus, since the desire for a child as symbolic compensation for the lack of a penis has lost its relevance. Many women experience a sense of completeness oriented toward aspirations far removed from becoming mothers. We might consider that a re-orientation toward new forms of creativity and filiation is taking place.
Likewise, the Venezuelan psychoanalyst and writer Ana Teresa Torres (1998) has explored how cultural narratives shape female subjectivity. In her studies of narrative and psychoanalysis, Torres shows that myths, among them that of Oedipus, are not only psychic structures but also cultural devices of meaning that organize collective desire. In her reading, the female Oedipus cannot be understood without considering the discourses of power, morality, and gender that each era imposes. Although formulated nearly three decades ago, these ideas remain relevant to the current situation of new gender identities.
These authors converge on a central idea: female Oedipal experience is not resolved in anatomical difference nor in heterosexuality, but in the symbolic configuration of identity and in the diverse ways the subject appropriates her desire. They therefore coincide with Kramer Richards
in that psychoanalytic theory must open itself to the plurality of subjective experiences without losing its clinical anchoring.
Other authors writing on gender diversities and the contemporary Oedipus argue that the emergence of trans, nonbinary, and fluid identities does not negate the Oedipus; rather, it reveals it as a symbolic, not anatomical, structure.
Judith Butler (1990, 2004), in Gender Trouble, proposes a performative theory of gender according to which the categories “man” and “woman” do not reflect an inner essence or biological truth, but are an effect produced by the repetition of acts and socially regulated meanings. From this perspective, identity does not emanate from the body nor is it an interior substance; it is constituted in relation to language, norms, and the desire of the Other. Consequently, there would be no gender identity “prior” to acts; on the contrary, acts (practices, modes of naming oneself, positions) are what progressively constitute identity in its becoming.
For his part, Ralph Roughton (2018) proposes that trans identities illustrate a variation of the Oedipal process and suggests understanding trans identities not as failures in Oedipal resolution, but as variants of the identificatory process.
Ken Corbett (2009) critiques the heterosexual normative ideal of classical theory. For him as well, masculinity and femininity are subjective projects.
These authors propose that the Oedipus does not determine gender; rather, it frames it as a symbolic problem, involving being someone in relation to another who also desires. Today identity operates in such a way that first I am someone and then I love someone—but unlike the classical model, “who I love” does not necessarily correspond to a specific gender. Whether or not we agree with these proposals, it is clear our theories must expand to account for new clinical modalities.
We can conclude that Kramer Richards's reading restores to the female Oedipus complex its clinical and structural complexity and enables its metapsychological updating. It is not a matter of abandoning the Oedipus, but of expanding it—extending it beyond anatomical determinism and reproductive teleology—to situate it as a symbolic matrix
in which anatomy, identity, desire, and law are worked through under multiple configurations.
It no longer seems feasible to follow a linear or universal path of the Oedipus complex to account for the outcomes of sexual identification. Instead, we analyze the complexity of each individual case. Clinical listening precedes theory. This doesn't mean we underestimate importance of theory, but rather we are embracing it within a broader context that encompasses new variables.
In contemporary experience, marked by plural identities and evolving gender configurations, the central focus no longer orients to “who I love” as a sign of normality, but rather around “who I am” and from which place I desire. This does not dissolve the structure; it presupposes it. Clinical practice shows that Oedipal triangulation, the experience of exclusion, rivalry and the aspiration to be “the most loved” persist as core elements that are rewritten in each individual life.
The challenge for psychoanalysis is to sustain an expanded metapsychology capable of maintaining our roots while also accommodating differences and comprehending the dynamics of suffering and desire.
We, psychoanalysts are called upon to rethink the concept of Oedipus, given its enormous complexity, precisely so as not to relegate it to the background, but to keep it alive where it has always belonged: at the intersection of anatomy, identification, desire, love, rivalry, ambivalence, loss, and law, so that each person may find their own place in relation to their desire, the desire of the other, and their place in the world.