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The natural history of the Oedipus complex has been debated since Strachey (1961), editing Freud’s (1924) paper on its ‘dissolution’, raised the question of whether such dissolution in fact occurs. In Chapter 5, reference was made (p.72) to discussion of the Oedipus complex as a lifelong developmental process (Parsons, 2000: 105-27). Just as that chapter revisited psychoanalytic concepts of sexuality in order to develop them further, so this one is a revisiting and fresh exploration of the Oedipus complex.
Newly qualified analysts naturally base their way of working on their experience in their own analyses. They tend to do what their analysts did, and this identification is a necessary springboard for the development of an analyst’s identity. Then comes the important moment of deciding to do something differently: to deal with fees, or holiday dates, in another way; to make the sort of interpretation that never happened in one’s own analysis, or not to interpret what one’s own analyst certainly would have done. The identification with one’s own analyst has been essential, but this moment is a threshold of freedom. Likewise, in the early stages of their careers musicians play, artists paint, scientists design experiments in the kind of way that their teachers did. This is inevitable and, as with analysts, it is how they begin to form themselves as musicians, painters and scientists. However, to develop their individual identities they have to free themselves from this identification. More accurately, they have to free themselves from its inevitability. Doing things the way one’s teacher, or one’s analyst, did needs to become a matter of choice, which implies the freedom to do them differently. From having been a functional necessity, identification becomes a constraint from which liberation is needed, so that it can finally be made use of autonomously.
It is a revelatory experience to listen to the piano sonatas of Beethoven in chronological order. From 1795 to 1800,