The Oedipus Complex is one of the strangest and most counter-intuitive concepts in psychoanalysis.
First formulated by Freud in 1899, and taking its name from the mythical Greek
tragic hero Oedipus (who in the eponymous play by Sophocles unknowingly sleeps with his mother
and then kills his father), it suggests that every child goes through a phase,
normally between the ages of three and five, of physically desiring its opposite
sex parent while wishing to do away with, or kill, its rivalrous same-sex parent.
Expressed bluntly like this, the Complex tends to arouse immediately puzzlement,
ridicule - or disgust: children aren’t generally to be witnessed expressing
any kind of sexual desire and we are unlikely to remember anything in our
own lives remotely resembling what Freud insistently describes as a universal truth.
However, the explanatory power of the Oedipus Complex is likely to increase - as is often
the case with Freud’s ideas - the less literally we take it, in other words,
the more we view it as providing us with an overall picture of the
genesis of human sexuality rather than as a concrete event in a given child’s mind.
We might think of the Oedipus Complex as offering us a guiding narrative about how we come, through
the varied experiences of childhood, to have our own distinctive approach to sexuality. The Complex
shines a light on a range of questions: - How confident do we now feel in
our powers of attractiveness? - Are we disgusted or broadly
at peace with our sexuality? - Do we think that other people
are likely to reject or accept our advances? - How much are we intimidated by our desires?
What is telling is that a huge range of responses are to be found here:
some of us labour under critical degrees of shame and terror. Others have no particular
difficulty making our appetites known and acting on them in reciprocal situations. Sex
may be a source of exceptional joy - or the locus of boundless masochism and paranoia.
With Freud’s ideas in mind, rather than imagining that we actually wanted to sleep with anyone as
children, we might say that we went through a phase of exploring what it might mean to prove
attractive to a man or a woman. Importantly, we did so in the form of a game, one in which we no
more wanted things to become real than we would - when we played pirates or jungle explorers
in the kitchen - have wished to join an actual Caribbean drug cartel or a trip down the Amazon.
Little boys and girls will, in a limited way, try out what happens if they attempt
to charm mum or dad; at a given point, they might pull a highly endearing smile and say
they want to spend the rest of their life with only one parent, or send the other one away or
muse that it might be nice if they could have a little wedding ceremony with one parent only.
And here - for better and for worse - the games can unfold very differently according to the
emotional maturity of the parent. In an optimal scenario, when a small child initiates a game,
the adult will be exceptionally careful neither to shame nor to excite them. They won’t say ‘Don’t
be so silly’ or ‘How repulsive’. They won’t get furious or punishing. They will be resolved enough
about their own sexuality not to take fright at its first echoes in their child. They will notice
what’s going on, smile indulgently and go along with the game just long enough for the child to
feel acknowledged and heard. And yet they will naturally not do anything remotely seductive
back. They will, with great kindness, ensure that the game always stays very much a game.
So much is, however, liable to go wrong. There are mothers and fathers too fragile internally
to allow a child to flex their faculties of attraction; they get bitter or snide,
dismissive or angry; there can only be one chief or one queen bee. There are parents too deeply
swallowed up in cares and depression to allow themselves to be charmed. And then there are
parents whose loneliness and confusion means they mistake a child’s game for some form of
genuine desire for sexual contact - with all the obvious tragic life-long repercusions that ensue.
If we as adults have difficulties around sex, we might - with Freud’s Oedipal concept in mind - ask
ourselves some of the following: - How much did I, as a child,
feel able to charm my mother or father? - Did they seem to take pleasure in my existence?
- Were they angry, sad or simply elsewhere? - Was my same sex parent able to tolerate my games
or did they respond with bitterness or bullying? - Concurrently, how much did my parents give me
a sense that they knew boundaries and would stop any game when it needed to be stopped?
Freud understood that adult mental health depends on the early expressions of our desire having been
handled with particular skill by those around us: without excessive punishment or licence, without
neglect or enticement, without anger or shame. The healthy adult is someone who can feel potent
without being terrified or guilty. Their games went well; now their reality can follow suit.
Freud’s Oedipal Complex becomes a source of valuable insight once we
separate it from its more literal formulations. It might show us why
sex has ended up a lot more complicated for us than it should ever have been.