Chapter 7 The Invisible Oedipus Complex

A current controversy about the Oedipus complex is whether it is indeed universal and of central importance, still to be regarded as ‘the nuclear complex of development’. It is a clinical fact that there are long periods of analysis – possibly, some have suggested, even whole analyses – in which there seem to be little or even no Oedipal material. In trying to account for this fact, analysts have taken different ways. One way, taken by Kohut and his followers (Kohut 1971), is to set the Oedipus complex aside, posit a theory of self-psychology and advise a new clinical technique, which focuses on deficit and offers restoration. Kleinians take an opposite way. Their approach, when the Oedipus complex is what I am calling ‘invisible’, is that this is so, not because it is unimportant, but because it is so important and felt by the patient (from whatever causes) to be so unnegotiable that he employs psychic means to make and keep it invisible.

In this chapter I focus on one small area of the Oedipus complex: its first stages, when these are reached after a disturbed early development. When Klein (1928, 1932) added early stages and later linked the Depressive Position, on which in her view mental health depends, to Freud’s nuclear complex, she expanded the emotional constellation from which the Oedipus complex of each patient takes its very individual form. The patients I describe are struggling to obliterate an early Oedipal situation, which feels continually to be threatening. As will become apparent, feelings of exclusion, problems of separateness and of being single in the presence of an Oedipal pair, and, above all, a distinctive type of sexual splitting are foremost in these patients.

I begin with a detailed account of Leon, who at 11 years of age is nearing puberty, but whose mental life is still largely occupied by

defences against his disturbed relations to his primary objects and a traumatic early Oedipal constellation. His presenting problem was panic at any n