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.
The Oedipus complex may be said to represent a cornerstone of analytic work, and most patients will bring Oedipal problems at some time during their analysis. For Freud, it was the central complex from his discovery of it in his self-analysis throughout his life. In Jungian terms, it is probably universal and undoubtedly archetypal.
As the title of the book conveys, its focus is on a contemporary understanding of the Oedipus complex from a Klcinian point of view. The impetus for publication came after the three core papers were presented at a successful conference in September 1987, organised jointly by the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College, London, and the Melanie Klein Trust.
The theme of the book highlights the vicissitudes of early Oedipal relating arising out of Klein's belief that there are early and primitive forms of the Oedipus complex which start in the first year of life and are affected by the infant's experiences with the mother. All three papers focus on patients whose early experiences have led to disturbed, primitive and sometimes psychotic forms of the Oedipus complex which can function as regressive defences or, in some cases, prevent the Oedipal situation from emerging at all. In Kleinian terms, the authors focus on paranoid-schizoid mechanisms. They also look at the link between espistomophilic drives and the discovery of parental intercourse, drawing heavily on Bion's ideas of the relation between the container and the contained as a prototype for the relation between penis and vagina and his ideas on the development of thinking.
To set the papers in context, they are preceded in the book by a seminal paper by Klein written in 1945 entitled ‘The Oedipus complex in the light of early anxieties’, together with a helpful introduction by Hanna Segal. Segal thinks that the three recent papers extend and develop Klein's work and she makes the point tht while Klein linked the working through of the Oedipal situation with the depressive position, s