The Living and the Dead Father: Some Oedipal Knots in the History of Psychoanalysis

This article sets off from the connection between Freud's understanding of the Oedipus complex and the structure of the psychoanalytic movement itself. Just as Freud based the Oedipus complex on antagonistic opposites and imagined its overcoming to be a single and brutal chop, so he hoped that the destructive feelings that were thriving within the psychoanalytic movement would disappear all of sudden, once he himself had died.

Those who apply the Oedipus theory today mostly trace it back to gender and generation polarities. In the present work, it is argued that the practical value of that conception, contrary to general belief, is not owing to some modern understanding of the incest barrier. Rather, it receives its psychodynamic significance from its roots in what is here termed the cryptographic Oedipus conception in Freud. According to this understanding the Oedipus complex ultimately rests on the active–passive polarity, and the

gender and generation polarities only become oedipal when they, within the conceptual framework of the child, are colored by the active–passive polarity.

This new conception of the Oedipus complex also leads to a more adequate understanding of the overcoming of the complex, where the superego is not seen purely as the dead father, but rather as a cluster of forms of interaction arising through learning how to master symbolic exchanges by assuming the active and the passive positions, respectively.

The more primitive Oedipus theory, however, continues to exercise its influence upon the hierarchical and often undemocratic structuring of psychoanalytic societies, as is seen when the positions of the living and the dead father are confused in the training analysis.