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Hans Loewald’s “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,”1 a paper of insights and departures, begins with an oddity: “Many of the views expressed in this paper have been stated previously by others in some form.” Then comes an extended quotation from Breuer’s introduction to his and Freud’s “Studies on Hysteria”2:
When a science is making rapid advances, thoughts which were first expressed by single individuals quickly become common property…it is scarcely possible always to be certain who first
Page 317gave them utterance, and there is always a danger of regarding as a product of one’s own what has already been said by someone else. I hope, therefore, that I may be excused if few quotations are found in this discussion and if no strict distinction is made between what is my own and what originates elsewhere. Originality is claimed for very little of what will be found in the following pages. [italics added]
I hear this preamble like the brief instrumental tunings that precede a virtuosic performance or a dutiful, quiet prayer before a lively feast; indeed, this was a paper first conceived and delivered as a plenary address at the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1978. I imagine, after such an opening, how little the audience could guess what they were in for. By the end of that address and paper, Loewald and his audience find themselves in conceptual terrain well-trodden and well-known as the Oedipus complex, but now fundamentally altered by Loewald’s expansions and discernment.
Ironies and paradoxes—so essential to Loewald’s thinking and which account for so much of the pleasure in reading him—abound in this introductory paragraph, not least that the author is un