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The oedipal–pre-oedipal dilemma refers to the difficult clinical task of determining the developmental level of a patient's personality functioning. Clinicians will often disagree about the degree to which a patient's difficulties are oedipal or pre-oedipal because, in either the total clinical assessment or a particular session, there is invariably a great deal of data which includes both pre-oedipal and oedipal elements. While a number of contributions have focused on systematic assessment (A. Freud, 1965) ; (A. Freud et al., 1965) ; (Zetzel, 1968) ; (Greenspan & Cullander, 1973), (1975), the determination of developmental level has remained a particularly difficult problem. The following discussion will present some ideas that aim to help to clarify this complex area of theory and practice.
One way to further understand what might be called the oedipal–pre-oedipal dilemma is to view it from both instinct theory and object relations theory. As the infant or toddler interacts with adults and others in his environment, his drive derivatives are in dynamic relationship to his early objects and their beginning internal representations. The main task, however, of the earliest period in life (ages 0 to 2½ years) concerns early object relationships and is the establishment of libidinal object constancy. According to Mahler's conceptualization, in normal development the libidinal object constancy becomes established between the ages 2½ and 3 years (Mahler, 1972). Object constancy implies the capacity to have a reasonably constant internal representation of the object and a reasonably constant internal representation of the self which are relatively independent of changes in drive tensions or external stress. When object constancy is established, the growing child has a reasonably constant sense of himself and important others (who are the representatives of reality). The self-object representations are delineated from each other so that there is a reasonably const