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Citing Gaddini's Montreal paper, the chairman thought it timely to address the Oedipus complex amid changing socio-cultural patterns, family break-ups, and the influence of mass media: the core conflict of neurosis needs reassessment in terms of narcissistic and borderline pathologies. He then argued that, epistemically, the Oedipus complex is a sort of ‘frame’ theory making a place for different conceptual levels, open to clinical data and to other fields of knowledge and their ongoing research findings. Inviting the panellists to give their contributions, he noted their diverse approaches.
The first panellist, Isidoro Berenstein, focused on power, which, he said, psychoanalysis overlooks. The classical Oedipus complex involves three ‘places’: the desiring son, the desire of the mother, and the father standing for the prohibition, the law: Berenstein suggests a fourth ‘place’—that of absolute power. He differentiates two types of power, those of the life and the death instincts: the exercise of power by the father who represents the law to which he himself is subject, and the exercise of power putting individual will above the law, leading to omnipotence and megalomania, to the destruction of any subjectivity alien to the self, in short, to the destruction of links. More radical than the opposition sadism-masochism where each needs the other to exercise his power intersubjectively, absolute power finds parallels only in mythology.
Berenstein traces these two types of power in Sophocles' tragedies, in the struggle between Oedipus and his descendants, heirs to the Labdaco lineage, and Creonte, Jocasta's brother, who annihilates it. In Oedipus Rex, when Oedipus finds out his origin, his parricide and his incest, he accepts the law, blinds himself and goes into exile with his daughters. In Oedipus at Colonus, the struggle for power to dominate and control Thebes happens between Creonte and Oedipus' two sons. Creonte arbitrarily sequesters Oedipus' daughter, Antig