Chapter 4 Subjectivity, Objectivity and Triangular Space

realism and idealism both go too far.

A first version of the present chapter was read as a paper at a conference on ‘The Oedipus Complex Today’ at University College London in 1987 and later published as a slightly modified paper called ‘The missing link’ (Britton 1989). I suggested that for some patients the emergence of the Oedipus situation is not simply unwanted because it is painful, but that it is dreaded as a catastrophe. This was so, I maintained, because these patients had encountered the primal scene in phantasy or fact without having previously established a securely based maternal object through the process of containment. As a consequence, belief in a good maternal object had been retained only by splitting off the experience of misunderstanding and attributing it to a third object, the father of the primitive Oedipus situation, the partner of mother in the primal scene. So the father in such cases becomes the incarnation of malignant misunderstanding. Then the phantasised union of the parents unites the understanding object with the malignant misunderstanding object, creating a combined figure that personifies contradiction, meaninglessness and chaos.

In normal development the perception by the child of the parents’ coming together independently of him unites his psychic world. It creates one world in which different object relationships can occur, rather than monadic serial worlds each with its own object relationship.

The primal family triangle provides the child with two links connecting him or her separately with each parent and confronts the child with the link between the parents, which excludes the child. Initially this parental link is conceived in primitive part-object terms, and in the modes of the child’s own oral, anal and genital desires, and in terms of his or her hatred expressed in oral, anal and genital terms. If the link between the parents

perceived in love and hate can be