Oedipus conflict

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Gustave Moreau's painting Oedipus and the Sphinx in the Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York 1864

The Oedipus conflict or Oedipus complex is a psychoanalytic concept that was first developed by Sigmund Freud on the basis of his observations on patients, children and self-observation and has since experienced various modifications through various discourses within and outside of psychoanalysis . The concept has always been the subject of critical debate.

Freud originally described the Oedipus conflict as an incest fantasy of the child between the ages of three and five in relation to the parent of the opposite sex, combined with rivalry against the parent of the same sex and the associated fear of revenge. Because of the analogy to the figure of Oedipus in Greek mythology , Freud called this constellation Oedipus complex or Oedipus conflict. The assumption was that it was a universal phenomenon and that the opposite constellation, love for the parent of the same sex and the corresponding rivalry with the other parent, was also a rule.

By overcoming the Oedipus conflict and identifying with the parents and internalizing the limits set by them, the super-ego develops as a stable, inner-soul instance, which faces the instinctual claims of the id . After the latency phase , the Oedipus complex undergoes a resuscitation during puberty and then leads to detachment from the parents and to the respective form of adult object choice. The Oedipus complex not only plays an important role in the sexual orientation of adults, but also in the structuring of personality and the development of neuroses .

The term Oedipus conflict emphasizes that it is a conflictual constellation in a triangle that replaces the mother-child dyad and is called triangulation , while the term Oedipus complex is more related to the creative interaction of different aspects.

Wolfgang Mertens summarizes the current state of psychoanalysis under different aspects: The Oedipus complex encompasses the totality of all feelings of love and hate of the child towards the parents and the feelings of guilt that develop from them . It is the result of the personal relationships experienced, including the unconscious intersubjective and family dynamic processes. Coping with it includes recognizing the generation boundaries , recognizing the parents as a sexual couple, working through the grief over the erotic ties to the parents that are not fulfilling, and the aggression due to the rivalry towards one parent. From the parents' point of view, it is important to deal with the ambivalent impulses of love and hate, care and destruction that are always associated with the birth of a child. Unresolved oedipal conflicts from one's own childhood can also be reactivated and have to be reworked. The coordination of affect between parents and child develops the ability to form triadic relationships and to deal with conflicts.

Clinically, the unresolved Oedipus complex persists in the unconscious clinging to the idea of ​​being the better partner, the better partner for a parent. Likewise, the excessive occurrence of feelings of envy and guilt, the feeling of always being excluded, or of being the excluded third party or being ignored, can indicate that the Oedipus conflict has not been adequately overcome. The importance of the oedipal conflict for psychoanalytic pathology is shown by the fact that it was included as one of seven conflict classes in the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics (OPD).

Origin of the term

→ Main article: Oedipus , King Oedipus

For the formation of the term Oedipus complex , Freud relied on the figure of Oedipus handed down from Greek mythology , whose tragedy for posterity and the like. a. remained in Sophocles ' drama King Oedipus . Oedipus had - without knowing it - killed his own father, King Laius of Thebes , in a scuffle. Later, after successfully solving the riddle of the Sphinx , he received his own mother Iokaste as a wife as a reward - again without his knowledge. When he realizes that he had lived incest with his mother for years , he stabs his eyes out and goes into exile as a blind man . Oedipus' story is often understood as a tragedy sealed by fate from the start and foretold by an oracle , which happens to Oedipus more or less involuntarily.

The unconscious desire of the male child

Freud's first works were based on a model developed for the boy. Oedipal desire occurs for the first time in the third to fifth year of life, what Freud called the “phallic” or “oedipal phase”.

Freud takes up the figure of Oedipus in order to use it to describe an observation that he first made with himself and then with his patients in the course of his psychoanalytic therapy work. According to Freud, there is a sexual desire for one's own mother in the patient's unconscious , but this is usually suppressed . Because the desiring child rivals the father for the mother's favor, it unconsciously wants to kill the father in order to take his place. As a result of their desire for their mother, boys develop feelings of guilt towards their father as well as a creeping fear of being punished by the latter ( castration fear , see below).

Case study "Little Hans"

The case of "little Hans", who Freud was mainly known from the reports of Hans' father, one of his pupils, is considered to be particularly important "evidence" of the Oedipus theory. Hans developed a horse phobia after witnessing a traffic accident in which a horse pulling a cart fell over. In the course of the psychoanalytic therapy that Hans' father carried out on the boy, the father explained to the child that the fear with his masturbation (which the father forbids him at the same time) and with sexual fantasies about the mother as well as hatred of the father or fear had to do before him, for which the horses symbolically stand. The child himself claims, however, that his fear of horses stems from the incident described, and the mother also confirms that it happened that way and that the fear first appeared immediately afterwards. Wolpe and Rachmann (1961) judge that Freud's interpretation of the case as a support for his Oedipus theory cannot be maintained.

Castration Fear and Overcoming the Oedipus Conflict

The favorable outcome of the oedipal conflict is that the child renounces the desire for incest and ceases to fight the father as a rival. Instead, it should grow into its gender role precisely by identifying with the father . The enemy becomes a role model that the child tries to emulate. The infantile desire to own one's own mother turns into a more mature desire to own someone like one 's own mother and imitate the father - but outside of one's own family.

According to Freud, the means by which this necessary step in the child's development - overcoming the Oedipus conflict - is made possible is the threat of castration . The child is afraid of being punished for his wishes and his rebellion against the father with castration , the loss of his sexual organ. To avoid this threat, it subordinates itself to the authority of the father and ultimately accepts the inaccessibility of the mother. In experiencing the benevolent recognition of the father in this way, it gains the power and potency that it has apparently given up.

Incest and incest prohibition

Child, mother and father form an “oedipal triangle” from which the child wants to exclude one person in order to own the other exclusively. Ultimately, according to Freud's thesis, which was not only provocative for the time, the child unconsciously wishes for a situation of incest to arise. Freud saw this observation, gained from the associations and dreams of his patients, as evidenced by the social institution of the prohibition of incest , which can be traced back to archaic societies.

The Bible already warns urgently against the " incest ". If, however, the avoidance of incest must first be enforced through a strict social norm , then, according to Freud, there must also be a tendency that counteracts this norm and is kept in check by it. According to Freud, Oedipal desire is precisely the challenge that the Oedipus conflict poses to every family and which ideally ends when it is overcome.

The ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss identified the social function of the prohibition of incest in guaranteeing exogamy , that is, in opening up the family to their social environment. The incest taboo secures the cohesion of the social in an elementary way. For Freud, on the other hand, the main focus was on the individual function that allows the child to identify with his gender role and thus to find an identity .

The female Oedipus conflict - Electra complex

Later Freud described a pre-oedipal phase in girls, which is just like the boy's mother is the first love object viewed, and a subsequent Oedipal phase in which the girl of gender differences will consciously and unconsciously the mother of the "absence" of a penis responsible power. As a result, his interests and desires are now directed towards the father whom the girl would like to have; as a result, it unconsciously rivals its mother, as Freud explains in his work Das Ich und das Es (1923).

While the fear of castration marks the end of the oedipal phase for the boy , the imagined castration for the girl, because she regards it as already completed, determines the change of the love object to the father and thus the beginning of the oedipal phase, in which the love object changes from takes place from mother to father.

Carl Gustav Jung and other psychoanalysts in Freud's time called the complex, which was similar in girls, instead of Oedipus " Electra complex ". Freud, however, always resolutely rejected this designation.

The seduction theory as the predecessor theory of the Oedipus conflict

In his early reflections on the aetiology of hysteria , Freud developed the theory that the development of mental disorders is based on repressed , actually experienced sexual abuse , which he believed to have tracked down in all of his (mostly female) patients.

This theory , much more scandalous for its time than that of the Oedipus conflict, which locates incest at least on a purely imagined level, was sharply criticized by Freud in his lecture to the Vienna Association for Psychiatry and Neurology on April 21, 1896. Freud's motives for turning away from the seduction theory and replacing it with the construct of the Oedipus conflict are still highly controversial today (see Jeffrey Masson , Sandor Ferenczi ).

The Oedipus conflict with other authors

Lacan

With Jacques Lacan , Freud's portrayal of the Oedipus conflict undergoes an important reconstruction. First of all, Lacan points out that the Oedipus conflict is a myth ; H. a linguistic fiction . The decisive event does not take place on the level of the real , but on the level of the symbolic . The father is not necessarily a real person, but a function . This function can be fulfilled by various representatives or it can only arise indirectly from the mother's rejection of the incest wish.

According to Lacan, the only decisive factor is the fiction of an authority representing the law (the prohibition of incest). Lacan calls this entity the great other , whereby this other can be represented by various figures of authority such as teachers, police officers, judges, clergymen, etc. The great other is not necessarily the father, but he speaks, according to Lacan, “in the name-of-the-father ”. By submitting to this authority and recognizing the law, the child is at the same time introduced and accepted into the order of the symbolic - the order of language , discourse , the social and its norms .

For Lacan, the favorable outcome of the Oedipus conflict means, above all, the possibility for the subject to be able to free himself from childlike narcissistic attachment to the desire for the coveted object, the so-called object small a . It only grows up when it gives up its original object, the mother, and begins to exchange it for other objects.

Erich Fromm

Also Erich Fromm interprets the Oedipus myth different from Freud. He does not see it primarily as a symbol of the son's sexual desires towards the mother. It is true that Freud discovered an important phenomenon in the bond between the son and later the husband to the mother. However, this is not a sexual phenomenon and the hostility towards the father is not related to the attachment to the mother and a consequent sexual rivalry with the father. Rather, the Oedipus myth is a symbol of the son's rebellion against the father's authority in a patriarchal society.

Alexander Mitscherlich: Kaspar Hauser or Oedipus?

In 1950, Alexander Mitscherlich drew attention to a time-specific shift in the central area of ​​conflict from Freud's Oedipus to problems of lovelessness and abandonment, which he called the Kaspar-Hauser complex of modern mass people. Characteristics of this new type are anti-sociality and cultural negation; it is about "momentary instinctual beings" without historical self-consciousness. The prerequisites of the Oedipus conflict, in particular comprehensive parental love and care within the framework of the classic bourgeois family, which only gives rise to Oedipal desire, are largely overridden by the historical development of the modern affluent society (e.g. by the employment of both parents). This development is reflected in the orientation of contemporary depth psychology towards questions of “specific humanity”.

“It is a matter of the fact that from the very beginning man must be more than just physically satisfied, that the abilities of his disposition only acquire their historical form through the overflow of interpersonal feelings. In other words, the denial that is opposed to the original instinctuality in every culture must find its balance in the granting of being able to be at home in the hearts of others. "

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Charles Brenner: Principles of Psychoanalysis. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. 1968, pp. 126-127. Current edition 2017, ISBN 978-3-5963-1659-5 .
  2. ↑ Charles Brenner: Principles of Psychoanalysis. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. 1968, p 135. Current edition 2017, ISBN 978-3-5963-1659-5 .
  3. ↑ J. Laplache; JB Pontalis. The vocabulary of psychoanalysis. stw Suhrkamp-Verlag, 1973, p. 351.
  4. ^ Wolfgang Mertens: Oedipus complex. In: Wolfgang Mertens; Bruno Waldvogel (Ed.): Handbook of basic psychoanalytic concepts. 3rd revised and enlarged edition. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 2008, pp. 532f. Current edition: Mertens Hrsg., 2014, ISBN 978-3-1702-2315-8 .
  5. ↑ Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Collected Works, Volume II / III. Fischer-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1999, pp. 267-270.
  6. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from April 10, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Ibid., P. 353.
  8. ^ Vienna Association for Psychiatry and Neurology ( Memento from December 9, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ Jeffrey Masson: The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory . Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1984, ISBN 0-374-10642-8 German translation: What has been done to you, you poor child? Sigmund Freud's suppression of seduction theory , Reinbek bei Hamburg, (1st edition) 1984, ISBN 978-3-498-04284-4 .
  10. ↑ Jeffrey M. Massons: The revocation of the abuse theory ("seduction theory") by Sigmund Freud. ( Memento from August 16, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Rudolf Sponsel, Department of Critical Work on Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychotherapy. IP-GIPT. Gain.
  11. ^ Sándor Ferenczi: Confusion of language between adults and children. (The language of tenderness and passion). ( Memento from March 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) International Journal of Psychoanalysis, XIX. Volume 1933 Issue 1/2 (PDF, 11 pages, 3.2 MB).
  12. ↑ Hans Waldemar Schuch: Significant Accent Shifts - From Genital Theory to Elastic Psychoanalysis. ( Memento of March 18, 2019 in the Internet Archive ) Chap. 6 Trauma Theory, July 12, 2003.
  13. ^ Sándor Ferenczi: Confusion of language between adults and children. ( Memento from March 18, 2019 in the Internet Archive ) dissoziation-und-trauma.de , from: Sándor Ferenczi: Infantil-Attacks: About sexual violence, trauma and dissociation , Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-923211-36-4 ( PDF, 150 pages, 1.6 MB) .
  14. ↑ Erich Fromm : Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalysis. Size and Limits , Stuttgart: DVA 1979.
  15. ↑ Alexander Mitscherlich: Oedipus and Kaspar Hauser. Depth psychological problems of the present (1950) . In: Ders .: Collected Works , Vol. VII, Ed. H. Weigand, Ffm. 1983, pp. 151–163.