Chapter 3 Oedipus in the Depressive Position

Here is the instance, here is Oedipus, here is the reason

Why I will call no mortal creature happy

The earliest version of this chapter was a paper I read in Vienna (Britton 1985), which was modified and published as ‘The Oedipus situation and the depressive position’ (Britton 1991). In that I said that we resolve the Oedipus complex by working through the depressive position, and the depressive position by working through the Oedipus complex; that neither are ever finished and both have to be reworked in each new life situation.

The Oedipus complex has occupied a central place in psychoanalytic theory from the beginning, and though much has changed it remains so. What substantial additions have been made to our knowledge about it since Freud? I consider that the most significant new additions to our perspective on this were made by Melanie Klein, partly in her clinical observations of Oedipal manifestations in very small children, partly in her papers on the Oedipus complex (Klein 1928, 1945), and indirectly by her concept of the depressive position (Klein 1935, 1940). Donald Winnicott considered that her most important contribution to psychoanalysis was the concept of the depressive position, which, he wrote, ‘ranks with Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex’ (Winnicott 1962:176).

In this chapter I will describe some of what she added to the understanding of the Oedipus situation, what is meant by the depressive position and how in my view the introduction of this concept necessarily changes our understanding of the Oedipus complex.

As I see it, these two situations are inextricably intertwined in such a way that one cannot be resolved without the other; we resolve the Oedipus complex by working through the depressive position and the depressive position by working through the Oedipus complex.

A century has passed since Freud first put pen to paper to describe the complex. In May 1897, in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Flie