Since he regarded the Oedipal complex as central to the parent-child relationship, Freud viewed human aggression as a reaction to frustrated wishes, wishes directed to, but not provoked by the parents. Melanie Klein accepted and expanded upon this notion that the source of aggression is located within the child; anger and its control are seen as powerful determinants of psychic development early in infancy.

Dorothy Bloch shares much in psychoanalytic heritage with Klein in that she too stresses pre-Oedipal causality. It is her position that Freud discounted the beginning of the Oedipal myth. The myth commences with the parents of Oedipus in their attempt to thwart the oracle's prediction that their son will murder them. She suggests that the young child, in contradistinction then to