Chapter 8 Reading Loewald: Oedipus Reconceived

In the history of psychoanalysis, Freud’s Oedipus complex has been reinvented several times – for example, by Klein, Fairbairn, Lacan and Kohut. At the heart of Loewald’s (1979) re-conceptualization of the Oedipus complex is the idea that it is the task of each new generation to make use of, destroy and reinvent the creations of the previous generation. Loewald reformulates the Oedipus complex in a way that provides fresh ways of viewing many of the fundamental human tasks entailed in growing up, growing old and, in between the two, managing to make something of one’s own that succeeding generations might make use of to create something unique of their own. Thus, Loewald reinvents Freud’s version of the Oedipus complex, and it is my task to reconceive Loewald’s version of the Oedipus complex in the very act of presenting it. By means of a close reading of Loewald’s (1979) “The waning of the Oedipus complex,” I will demonstrate what it is about the way Loewald thinks that leads me to view that paper as a watershed in the development of psychoanalytic thought.

The sequential nature of writing makes it difficult for Loewald to capture the simultaneity of the elements of the Oedipus complex; I, too, must struggle with this dilemma. I have elected to discuss Loewald’s overlapping ideas in more or less the sequence he presents them, addressing the tension between influence and originality in the succession of generations; the murder of the oedipal parents and the appropriation of their authority; the metamorphic internalization of the child’s experience of the parents which underlies the formation of a self responsible for itself and to itself; and the transitional incestuous

object relationship which mediates the dialectical interplay between differentiated and undifferentiated forms of object relatedness. I conclude with a comparison of Freud’s and Loewald’s conceptions of the Oedipus complex.

In order to place Loewald’s contributio