Pregenital Patterning

This paper is based on a more condensed presentation of the same material at the meeting of the International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Amsterdam this summer. At that meeting it was striking that the interest in the pregenital development was widespread. Indeed the greater number of papers at the Congress dealt with some aspects of pregenital developmental problems, and one heard occasionally among the unofficial comments some concern that the interest was veering away from the Oedipus complex. My own investigation offends in this respect in so far as it focuses chiefly on questions of pregenital patterning rather than on specific variations of the oedipal period and the fate of the Oedipus complex itself. That the oedipal period is the most momentous era of psychic and emotional organization and the Oedipus complex the most significant network of conflicts throughout the entire life has been amply verified throughout the years. The crossing of this boundary between infancy and childhood is more perilous even, though less dramatic in physical and direct behavioural changes, than the somewhat comparable epochal passing from childhood to young adulthood at puberty. It also has much greater and more lasting resonances throughout the entire life. The interest in the pregenital appears to arise from the generally increasing awareness that the experiences which have already been accumulated may be as important in the fate of the Oedipus complex as the special outer circumstances which are present in the oedipal period itself. It is often the special struggles of the oedipal period, re-enacted in puberty or in the early years of expected social maturity of the twenties, that precipitate the overt psychotic or neurotic break, and the relatively sudden eruption of disturbances which previously may have been more or less concealed though the symptoms themselves will ultimately unfold the hidden preoedipal history.

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