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Repression and identification are two of the crucial psychological strategies that pave the way for the dissolution of the oedipus complex. While this major realignment of the mind is being forged psychologically and emotionally, a cognitive revolution is also taking place in the developing psyche. Six-year-olds are learning to wean themselves from a perceptually bound preoperational view of phenomena and to embrace a new conceptual operational view of the world. The mental work involved in bringing about this new cognitive world view has received insufficient attention even though it bears a striking resemblance in some crucial ways to the ego psychological tasks involved in the dissolution of the oedipus complex and the promotion and maintenance of the state of latency.
In 1924 Freud wrote: "To an ever-increasing extent the Oedipus complex reveals its importance as the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early childhood. After that, its dissolution takes place; it succumbs to repression, as we say, and is followed by the latency period. It has not yet become clear, however, what it is that brings about its destruction" (p. 173).
Freud went on in this paper and in subsequent ones to describe the details of the demolition, and others have written extensively on latency. The consensus of opinion since Freud's time would suggest that the dissolution or demolition of the oedipus complex is not as absolute as Freud suggested.
A similar revision of thought has taken hold in regard to the