Oedipus and Psyche

It is now a century and a year (October 15, 1897) since Freud wrote Fliess the oft-cited letter in which he announced the discovery of the Oedipus complex. These lines are well known:

One single thought of general value has been revealed to me. I have found, in my own case too, falling in love with the mother and jealousy of the father, and now I regard it as a universal event of early childhood. … If that is so, we can understand the riveting power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the objections raised by reason against its presupposition of destiny. … the Greek legend seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognises because he feels its existence within himself. Each member of the audience was once, in germ and in fantasy such as Oedipus.

A century and a year, this is assuredly sufficient time to render any discovery obsolete. Vet it is necessary that another discovery should arise offering a new paradigm able to account not only for all the phenomena which the preceding system made intelligible, but also at least a part of those that were beyond its scope (Kuhn, 1962). Such a paradigm, however, has not made itself known despite the multiplicity of alternative proposals laying claim on the position of Freudian theory as a whole.

One year and a century, this is sufficient time indeed for the discovery of 1897 to be either neglected or even the butt of attacks from within psychoanalysis itself.

It is perhaps not unhelpful to recall that the principal dissident voices within psychoanalysis stemmed from objections to infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. It has often been noted that the discovery of the Oedipus complex presented to Fliess on October 15, 1897 was preceded by an announcement dated September 21, 1897, that of Freud's renouncing his conception according to which the neuroses were due to the child's seduction by an adult, generally the father. “I no longer believe in my neurotica” (theory of the neuroses). In this letter, Freud left open the path that wo