You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This collection of conference papers examines the place and significance—in a number of senses—of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis in France. The background, and the occasion, of the conference is particular to the French psychoanalytical scene, but the issues dealt with are not utterly peculiar to French psychoanalysis. On the one hand there are the implications, or threats, of developments away from the main line of psychoanalytic theory and practice; on the other hand there are those which come from the appropriation into the general intellectual culture of psychoanalytic theory, and its 'revisions', with the consequent intellectualization and 'linguification' (cf. the last section of the paper by Grunberger) and the prospect of dilution if not liquidation.
Thirteen contributors from the Paris Society and three from the French Society examine and develop the theory of the Oedipus complex as part of a theoretical structure, as a clinical instrument, and as a component of the psychoanalyst's identity.
In the Introduction by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel it is quite clear that the theory of the Oedipus complex and its resolution—and it is in this comprehensive sense that the concept is used—is taken to imply a system of values; but the issue is not developed of how, and how far, there is a necessary link to any particular social and cultural system whether this be felt as a lost epoch, a threatened status quo, or an unattainable ideal, although all seem to be implied.
The possibility seems to the there for a moment, of a study of those very circumstances which were the occasion of the conference, the effects and significance of the social and cultural matrix of psychoanalysis, but this fades, and the conference proceeds to a more inner-directed study of the theme.
Within this limit there is a great deal of interesting work. There are two major papers, by Grunberger and by Gammill, which constitute reference points for the conference, and interpret and develop the th