Making It New Enough: Commentary on Paper by Altman

Just before this paper was first presented, I was teaching a short course on the Oedipus complex in our hospital department. Of course, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the idea of teaching the Oedipus complex is itself rather strange: After all, what else has one ever learned about, and yet how little one seems to know. What is learning about the Oedipus complex (hearing papers, doing clinical work, etc.) learning about? Do children learn about the Oedipus complex like they might learn to play basketball or checkers? Or is it something they keep bumping into: Every so often there is something they keenly want to do, and they find an obstacle there, which we call the Oedipus complex? Certainly, in Freud's view, if you don't get the oedipal story—this terrible joke of triangulation—you don't join the human community. You are left out. But perhaps we need to bear in mind, faced with what Freud called in a letter to Fliess “the riveting power of Oedipus Rex” (Masson, 1985) the part of ourselves that, like Oedipus, doesn't get it. By that I don't mean simply the part that doesn't want to believe it, or rebels against the pain of it, but the part of ourselves that is irresolvably perplexed by that fundamental drama of being included in something, only to be left out of it. Oedipus, like all of us, was from his point of view going through it for the first time. So what does knowing the story do to the story? Are psychoanalysts the people who know the story?

So, in this unpromising role as the teacher of the Oedipus complex—a role, we might wonder today, whether any psychoanalyst