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The author proposes that the boy who enters the oedipal phase has the dual task of distancing himself from the overwhelming preoedipal mother while he takes the oedipal mother as the object of his strivings. While the little girl takes a new object that is uncontaminated by preoedipal experiences or fantasies, the boy initially regards oedipal gratification in terms of the simultaneously blissful and terrifying loss of ego boundaries that characterizes the earlier developmental phases. Primal scene fantasies help the boy mediate between the two internal views of mother. Initially, the child perceives himself as an actor in a primal scene that is a frightening battle among sexual and aggressive part-objects. Then, through a series of transitional fantasies and complicated identifications with his mother's internal objects, the little boy discovers his own position as a phallic third party in the family setting. In the differentiated primal scene fantasies that follow, the boy casts himself as an outside observer. This creates sufficient distance from incestuous wishes so that the boy may identify with the phallic individual, the father. He can then take the mother, and, by extension, another woman, as the objects of his phase-appropriate desires.