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In her approach to the fairy tale “Cinderella,” Beryl Sandford emphasized the special difficulties experienced by the youngest of the family, focusing on the dynamics of envy connected with the fantasy of a combined parent-figure.
In order to present some comments on Beryl Sandford's conclusions, I find it necessary to clarify the concept of the combined parent-fantasy. In Melanie Klein's works we find reference to the combined parent-figure in the following terms: “Among the features of the earliest
stage of the Oedipus complex are the fantasies of the mother's breast and the mother containing the penis of the father or father containing the mother. … The whole development of the Oedipus complex is strongly influenced by the intensity of envy which determines the strength of the combined parent-figure.“1
In reconsidering the combined parent-figure, I have found in my clinical experience that when a regression to an earlier position occurs, the patient (either male or female) presents an intense identification with the combined parent-figure. In this way and in consequence of excessive introjection of the qualities of the opposite sex, the patient maintains as the ideal of the ego a combined figure, that is, the fantasy of possessing breast-penis-vagina.
This observation takes us to a hypothesis in which the patient, because of excessive envy and greed, cannot overcome a feeling of rivalry and oedipal ambivalence and so regresses to an oral position. As a result of this regression the characteristics of the phallic mother are orally reinforced, and the patient feels himself in competition with her. The ideal of the ego then is to unite in itself “breast-penis-vagina,” thus becoming psychologically hermaphrodite. I believe that this is the ideal of the ego, always manifested in the deep homosexual fantasy which corresponds to a combined ego-figure. I think that the term “combined parent-figure” is limited to the fantasy of the mother containing the father's penis. Th