PROLOGUE

Seven of the nine articles in this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry are enlarged versions of papers presented at a conference in New York City in March 2010, entitled “Contemporary Perspectives on the Oedipus Complex.” The other two articles were written subsequently.

The conference was sponsored by the Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society and Institute of New York City, which has been mounting annual conferences for more than two decades. Not long before, at a Society meeting, Harriet Pappenheim had raised the questions: “Whatever happened to Oedipus? Where is it in our work today?” Recent psychoanalytic effort had been largely dedicated to understanding and integrating new developments in psychoanalytic and related work: attachment theory, infant research, studies of pre-Oedipal and latency developments, trauma, neuroscience, intersubjective and relational thinking, sibling and family systems, the psychology of the self, nonlinear systems theory, and so forth. With all of that, had Oedipus been shown to be redundant or had he simply been overshadowed, although without loss of potency? The conference was intended to generate discussion concerning such questions.

The evolution of psychoanalytic theory and practice in the United States has been extraordinary in the past few decades. Years ago, when the editors of this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry were in training, the teaching of psychoanalytic theory and practice was often limited to the writings of Sigmund Freud and a few other exponents of so-called orthodox psychoanalysis. The works of Melanie Klein were all but shunned. Kohut had barely published his first book. The Sullivanians and the students of Karen Horney were isolated in their own institutes. For us, Freud's concept of an instinct-based universal fantasy, the Oedipus complex, was the source of psychoneurosis, as well as the central organizing principle of development of mental and emotional life and of character formation. Today, contemporary psychoanalyst