Looks that Kill the Capacity for Thought

My area of concern in this paper is the complex interrelationship between innate life and death forces on the one hand and, on the other, impulses projected from external objects which are internalized by the subject as unconscious life and death wishes. I shall be exploring ways in which a fundamental balance between life and death forces is portrayed within the Oedipus myth and I shall be showing how there are times when, as theorists, we are blind to the on-going dynamic polarities contained within the myth.

The crucial question which binds the polarities is: What gets constellated and in whom in the interaction between nature and nurture?’

When, years ago, I attended my first seminar on Freud's theory of the Oedipal conflict, I read the myth itself in preparation. At the seminar I was surprised to find that the beginning of the myth had been entirely omitted from Freud's theory. Puzzled by this, in the discussion following the lecture I asked this question: ‘In the story, the parents want to kill the child first. Why did Freud leave this part of the story out?’ The unsatisfactory response which I received was that it was omitted because it was not relevant. This question continued to haunt me intermittently but I never seriously focused on it until the time was right for me to confront the infanticidal impulse, and the child's fear of it, and its painful implications for me in my own analysis. Once I became aware of this I was able to see more clearly its emergence in certain cases in my clinical practice.

The Greek myth begins with the conspiracy of the parents of Oedipus to do away with him in order to defeat the prophecy of the Oracle that, when he grows up, he will kill his father and marry his mother; it is their act of abandoning him on a hillside to die, in order to outwit the prediction, that sets in motion the events which subsequently lead to the fulfilment of the prophecy. This story underwent a dramatic transformation in Freud's hands. His t