OEDIPUS COMPLEX DURING PHALLIC STAGE:

It seems more than likely, as we have come to realize in so many areas of development of psychoanalytic understanding, that we will be less likely to abandon earlier understandings and more apt to realize their complexity and the limitation of their application. As far as I can tell now, analytic thinking is moving toward a more complex appreciation of the factors in the oedipal involvements, both from our increasing depth and sophistication in understanding preoedipal factors, and from post-oedipal influences. The latter would include a variety of learning, educative, social, and cultural dimensions which were only rudimentarily understood in Freud’s time and which currently contribute much more significantly to our understanding of the functioning of human beings and their complex interrelationships. Undoubtedly, this dimension of the overall problem will continually yield more knowledge and insights.

Obviously, the psychoanalytic perspective cannot remain isolated from these evolving contexts of understanding, nor is there any need for it to do so. Rather, analysts remain sensitively attuned to the clinical evidences brought to the analytic couch by their patients in the contemporary setting. Thus, the analytic understanding of the processes by which sexual identity, both male and female, are established, consolidated, and reinforced, are continually being revised and expanded. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that the classic concepts, let us say of penis envy or castration anxiety, will be eradicated from this evolving perspective. It seems much more likely that their interplay with other complex factors and their position in the consolidation of healthy personality organization and functioning, in contrast to the more pathological manifestations in various levels and ranges of psychopathology, will be more clearly discriminated and differentiated. At this point in our clinical experience, the classic paradigms certainly cannot be unequivocally applied without carefully considering the patients’ individual variance and modifying circumstances.

Undoubtedly, in Freud’s thinking, the Oedipus complex served as a central organizing point for his views about personality development and for the organization of various forms of pathology. He saw the Oedipus complex as the nucleus of the development of the neuroses and other forms of symptom formation. In addition, the admixture of libidinal fixations, object attachments, and identifications with which the child emerges from the oedipal situation are important to the development of character and personality. The crucial introjections, for example, accompanying the resolution of oedipal fixations provide the nucleus of the emerging psychic substructure serving as the core of the organization of the superego. The resolution of oedipal conflicts at the close of the phallic period is the basis for the development of powerful internal resources to regulate drive impulses and their channeling in constructive directions. The superego is one such internal source of regulation based on identifications with the parental figures, but it is also accompanied by complex internal acquisitions which contribute to the organization and critical internal integration of the child’s emerging personality.

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