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Dr. Schlesinger has done the cause of applied psychoanalysis a great service in bringing to our attention the psychological themes that are the basis for the play King Lear and the application of those themes to some of the phenomena of present American culture. He has reemphasized an oedipal pattern that even psychoanalysts are prone to forget. It always has been known that parents, for their own conscious and unconscious gratification, often try to force their children—particularly during adolescence and young adulthood—to live the way the parents want them to and to have interests and vocations exactly like those of the parents. The important psychoanalytic discovery that the child has strong sexual desires for the parent of the opposite sex, and strong hostile feelings
as well as libidinal desires for the parent of the same sex, has so centered our attention on the child's side of the oedipal struggle that we often forget that the parent has similar unconscious, and sometimes quite conscious, impulses toward the child.
All psychoanalysts could give many examples of parents' incestuous feelings for the child. I will mention only a few: (a) A wife told her husband that unless he stopped being so affectionate to their four-year-old daughter she would divorce him; (b) The father decides which young man his daughter may date or with whom she may fall in love. Although he really is trying to prevent his daughter's falling in love with any man but himself, he may rationalize that such choice is made on religious grounds (particularly if he be Roman Catholic or Jewish); (c) The father quarrels with his wife and assures his five-year-old daughter that he and she will leave mother and go away together; (d) The father takes his late-adolescent daughter on a cruise, shares a cabin with her, dances with her as with a date, and kisses (even tongue-kisses) her passionately; (e) the father actually has sexual relations with his daughter.
The incestuous nature of these behaviors