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Freud used the concept of the Oedipus complex to represent the central constellation of impulses, phantasies and anxieties that arise out of the conflicts in the child’s relationship with his or her parents. He began to develop the notion that the child internalizes versions of the parental figures, modified by the anxieties and phantasies that attach to them. Such internal figures affect, in turn, the child’s emotional life, and his relations to the world. Building on this model, Melanie Klein substantially developed the concept of the child’s internal world, internal objects built up through the mechanisms of introjection and projection. She described how, in the child’s phantasy, these figures relate to one another in complex ways, and that some of these relationships constitute early versions of the Oedipus complex (Klein 1928, 1932, 1945). Her clinical theories about the nature and the relationships of these internal figures to one another, and the way they were projected into new relationships enabled her better to understand what was being experienced by the child, and what she could observe in the transference.
In this chapter and those that follow I hope to illustrate the way in which it is possible to explore these dynamics within the closely observed framework of the psychoanalytic session. In particular, I believe it is possible to observe the familiar but compelling way in which the patients’ experiences of the figures of their childhood remain alive in their mind and influence their current relationships, including the way they experience and use the analyst.
One of the characteristics of the Oedipal situation, which is
reflected in the analysis, is that the participants often find themselves pulled in more than one direction. Each option seems to involve a compromise and may require a blurring or avoidance of aspects of reality that arouse too much pain or guilt. In Sophocles’ play, Oedipus did not make a conscious decision to kill his father and marry