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Where Has Oedipus Gone? A Turn of TheCentury ContemplationRosemary H. Balsam M.D.

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To cite this article: Rosemary H. Balsam M.D. (2010): Where Has Oedipus Gone? A Turn of The CenturyContemplation, Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, 30:6,

511-519

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Where Has Oedipus Gone? A Turn

of The Century Contemplation

Rosemary H. Balsam, M.D.

Sigmund Freud’s King Oedipus is still alive and well at the beginning of this second century of

psychoanalysis. He has undergone multiple transmogrifications, but he is still with us. He hasbeen analogized, metaphorized, and split into bits of conscience, guilt, fear, omnipotence, power,

powerlessness, fate, helplessness, dominance, submission, archaic chaos, and rage. As a father, he

was both lost and found recently (Kalinich and Taylor, 2009). He has taken a lowly back seat to his

father, Laius (Munder Ross, 1982); been pushed aside for his mother/wife, Jocasta (Stimmel,

2004); been levered out of the central inner drama for women by the Goddesses Demeter and

Persephone (Kulish and Holtzman, 1998); turned into a marionette (Cocteau, 1934); contextual-

ized in the nineteenth-century German literary tradition (Rudnytsky, 1987); polygendered as allu-

sive to analyst and analysand’s intersubjective impact (Benjamin, 1998); been demanned; and,

above all, rendered a castrati (Brook, 1988), in exile self-blinded and leaning heavily on the devo-

tion of his daughter/sister, Antigone (Almansi, 1991). He has been held up to society as an exem-

plar of the universal workings of the unconscious, of the repetition compulsion; of denial; of sado-

masochism; of splitting and isolation of affect; of sexual impulsiveness and violence. He has been

described as the “Scapegoat of Fate” (Pollock, 1986, p. 104), of Tiresias, or the gods; or used to in-

terrogate psychoanalytic theory itself and the current chasm between drive and interpersonalism

(Greenberg, 1991). But as a powerfully self-punishing and tragic icon, especially of a boy strug-

gling to become a man, we have all seen his image linger on our couches: that is, if we have eyes

that are willing to see and accept his form and pattern.

Our gradual attempts of incorporation and integration into the psychoanalytic field of the vary-

ing theoretical pluralities that have developed over the last century have been accountable for the

changing faces of Oedipus. Most reformulations have vigorously deemphasized the defining raw

biological male sexuality that was so important to the Freudian drive/conflict theory. As well asthe many mainstream famed drive/conlict ego psychologists of the ’60s and ’70s who developed

further the Freudian structural model, another author contemporary to them was Hans Loewald,

who, if also an ego psychologist, has been called a theoretical radical conservative, because of his

two-person integrative theory of the instincts developing in the crucible of the earliest object rela-

tion. Others, such as Margaret Mahler (1975), had heavily emphasized the pre-Oedipal stages of

infantile separation/individuation, thus spotlighting the mother with the child and putting in the

shadows additional father involvement and Oedipal integration. Loewald (1979), in spotlighting

the original caretaker together with the infant, additionally maintained the vigor of the Oedipus

Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 30:511–519, 2010

Copyright © Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald Silver

ISSN: 0735-1690 print/1940-9133 online

DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2010.518532


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complex. He elaborated dramatically on the impossibility of growing up without internally killing

off one’s parents. Within genuine creativity was utter destruction. Parricide in the unconscious

mind (rendered symbolic by the tempering of reality and superego control of course) was an es-sential feature of Loewald’s vision of the continuing generations of socialization and vitality of

the psychic apparatus.

There have been many rich meandering avenues of avoidance or contradiction of Freud’s origi-

nal emphasis on the power of intrapsychic conflict that concerns burgeoning sexuality within rela-

tionships. Those who focused on the role of the early caretaking mother, for example, dwelled

more on pre-Oedipal registers of nurturance or abandonment, or the affect of shame associated

with struggles with the archaic externalized and primitive superego, and less on the sharply sexu-

ally charged negative Oedipal complex with its attendant guilts and specific sexuality and aggres-

sion. For example, Kohutian self-psychology naturally finds narcissism as the fundamental issue,

especially for theubiquitous-seeming individuals whohave unempathic andself-involved, uncon-sciously exploitative parents. In agreement, it is not putting too fine a point here to claim that poor

Prince Oedipus’s biological parents were certainly unempathic, and criminally so by our contem-

porary standards.

Dunbar-Soule Dobson (2007) notes that, taking a fresh look at Sophocles’s whole cycle of dra-

mas, including Oedipus Tyrannos and Oedipus Coloneus.

In The Restoration of the Self , Heinz Kohut (1977) claimed to havea fuller understanding of the

Oedipus complex than does Freud. In his discussion, he supplemented Freud’s notion of Guilty

Man. “Guilty Man directs his life energy toward the activity of the drives; Tragic Man directs his

life energy toward the fulfillment of the self. … Oedipus’s apotheosis at the end of Oedipus

Coloneus is conceived in self-psychological terms as what it means to be fully human” (p. 53).

Guilty Man was thus accorded lesser centrality than Tragic Man.Other contemporary schools have approached Oedipus to demonstrate their own characteris-

tics and insights. I will choose just a few examples. I am sure the reader will think of many others.

Perhaps it is a mark of Freud’s genius in utilizing Sophocles’s play as a claim to universality in hu-

man inner life that it has stood so very many interpretations, each angle probing the aims and char-

acter of the benighted King in multiple, and often enlightening and productive, ways. If anything

can challenge the fundamentally awry notion that a given psychoanalytic interpretation is either

correct or incorrect, it can be approached through the contributions to Oedipus scholarship over

the last half-century.

Many, if not most, psychoanalysts today will challenge Freud’s claim about the utter centrality

of the Oedipal complex in everyday psychological life. Renee Girard, the prominent academicFrench literature critic, for example, recalls that Oedipus is a scapegoat for a community plague.

For Girard (2004), the main focus isnot ondesire for the mother, but ona desirebased onrivalryof

the other for any element that the other possesses that one may wish to possess oneself. His fasci-

nation is with the connections between imitation and rivalry. The late Ruth Stein, in her most re-

cent 2010 book, believes, for example, that although Loewald has merit, we should return for

foundational insight to Freud’s more primitive father of Totem and Taboo (1913), in which killing

the father was an actuality and more than a mere dream. “It has been said that nothing binds a

group together more than a shared crime,” she says (p. 87).

Knowing that, in no way, can I do an iota of justice to the creative and brilliant contributions of

the postmodern psychoanalytic thinkers, I will mention but a few. Adrienne Harris (2005), whose

offering of chaos theory sees the bidirectional libidinal forces between the child and his parents as

512 ROSEMARY H. BALSAM


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“kinds of strange attractors, fractal structures that can disequilibrate and reform with dazzling un-

predictability” (p. 207). If I understand her accurately, she believes fervently in the radical uncer-

tainty of psychic existence, and that clinging to developmental trajectories such as the classicalOedipal story strongly suggests that the need arises from a defense against a resistance to a com-

mon terror in ourselves about bearing uncertainty. Psychic patterns, for her, are evanescent and

evoked often in interaction as coconstruction. North American intersubjectivists, I believe, often

seem to refer to Oedipal with a small “o” these days, using it loosely as a shorthand adjective, syn-

onymous with descriptions of here-and-now sexual or sexualized qualities in an interaction, with

perhaps a hint of forbidden fantasies of incest. Harris (2000) speaks to the general postmodern

project of separating off the biological body from what is then said to be of much more genuine

psychological interest to the mind’s workings, when she states, for example, that “a potential for

the fates and consequences of desires and identity is possible if one unyokes, or at least unsolders,

gender from body and desire” (p. 246). For many, following Foucault, and in contrast to Freud, theanatomical biological body itself is the very least of the important inner signals that the mind reg-

isters. One can see how strained it would be to reimpose Freud’s raw and intricate sense of the bio-

logical body and its sexuality on such contemporary psychoanalytic understandings, in addition to

the critique of most contemporary analysts that his fin-de-siècle bourgeois Viennese view of sexu-

ality and gender was far too polarized—the literal Oedipal myth for a boy being a good example of

idealized masculinity, and the awkward notion of his ideal feminine girl as sexually yearning for

her father, while repudiating her mother for not making her a boy. It is no wonder that in one con-

temporary psychoanalytic institute that I site-visited, the candidates had requested that they read

in class nothing that was written before 1950, because what came before had been rendered irrele-

vant! Some of the older teachers did have a few questions about that, however, and managed to at

least include some papers of Freud’s to enrich the discussion about “where we came from.”I find myself neither totally committed to the past nor to the present trends in theory. I see my-

self as a contemporary ego psychologist who is very interested in culture and how it affects pro-

cesses of internalization and object relations and, therefore, also the psychoanalytic theories we

hold dear. I think that it is important to teach a great deal of Freud’s work as foundational knowl-

edge, so that we can knowmore about how and where the subsequent shifts have taken place in the

history of the field’s ideas. I see a value in tracing developmental sequences in intrapsychic life as

they reverberate with the macroscopic biological evolution of growth, and as a way of thinking

about parent/child interaction that becomes encoded intrapsychically. I think that King Oedipus,

in his positive and negative original fantasy forms, has a definite place in the inner life of men es-

pecially. If further complicated and offered with a variety of other myths such as Demeter andPersephone, Oedipus may also play a role for certain women, either as an expression of her bisex-

uality or as cast in the roles of Jocasta or Antigone.

Some of the aforementioned points are illustrated by the following three examples from my last

twenty years of teaching and supervising psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

1. PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY TEACHING

In 1984, I wrote material for a second edition of my first book, for the University of Chicago Press,

called Becoming a Psychotherapist: A Clinical Primer. I added a few chapters. One of them was

entitled, “Women Therapists and Women Patients.” I noted how, since the second wave of femi-

WHERE HAS OEDIPUS GONE? 513


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nism and the social turmoil of the ’60s and ’70s, so many female patients, especially, would insist,

“I need to work with a woman.” A common notion abroad in the lay public was that only a woman

could truly understand another woman. Although, to some extent, there may be something of sub-stance to that fantasy—for example, in imaginatively tapping into the vagaries of being born into a

similar body as the patient—an analytic therapist obviously needs to be very cautious about ac-

cepting such a statement at face value. Countertransferences that can become ignited in that situa-

tion may be fueled by a sense of camaraderie and sisterhood, set against the folly of generic males

who stereotypically, publicly or secretly, regard themselves as superior to the female of the spe-

cies. In other words, one’s usual alertness as a therapist may become numbed and limited to seek-

ing out only the admiring aspects of such a transference. The defensive aspects of the alliance,

however, need attending as well. The example that is still cogent these days, and frequently ob-

served with inexperienced therapists, is that such a cozy female alliance can cloud awareness of

the mutual components of insecurity. “Many who were consciously discovering women,” I wrotethen, referring to trends I noted in working with a university student population in the late ’70s and

’80s,

found themselves in therapy eventually confronting the choice of a woman therapist as being a sad

choice to work with, a “fellow second-class citizen.” These patients were unconsciously afraid of

these disturbing feelings. The disappointment and rage that the patient would experience when en-

gaged in an interpretation of these wishes instead of being enfolded in a defensive union, could then

result in constructive self-reflection and examination of how automatically she thought of herself as a

“second-class citizen.” [p. 310]

The general lack of comprehension in the psychoanalytic theory of the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s

femalesexual development becameobvious with the help of these young feminist students. Part of this critique of Freudian psychosexual theory involves, of course, for some of us, the folly of using

the Oedipus myth as a mirror image for girls, ignoring that their psyches are integral to their fe-

male bodies as female, however they may ultimately interpret their biological housing. As one

woman patient said, “I never did see why a fight at a lonely crossroads between some angry old

guy and someyoung punk upstart had much todo with me!” I concur—if wewere to take the myth

literally. Manyanalysts, especially since the ’90s, have helped make rich advances in areas of how

females develop psychologically within their own female bodies. I myself am still working over

that theme and still puzzling about the varying and multifarious angles of gender, identity, aggres-

sion, and the psychic integration of the female body.

2. CLINICAL EXAMPLE #1

Here is an example of a supervisory experience that starts off as a common and often discussed

theme in any therapeutic relationship—one of distance and closeness. In this instance, there was

an issue actually of fusion and merger between the female patient and the female therapist, an is-

sue that, for the purposes of this article on Oedipus, I would like to stress as either usually a

pre-Oedipal fixation in development, or perhaps a preciously guarded defense against anal and/or

especially so-called Oedipal anxieties. I am using Oedipal here in the way that I think of it these

days—a stage in development in which an internalized triangulation of objects becomes a possi-

bility as a progressive reintegration and forward emotional trajectory, and that for an individual

grows out of an inner state of dyadic preferences. In this state of development, there is often avail-



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able more awareness of the child’s own sexed body, tinged with rich fantasy. Winnicott (1958) has

said that the hardest thing a child copes with emerging from early caretaking, focused as it is on

one-to-one relations, is the ability to include a third party, usually the father figure (or as we seenowadays, in any adult partnership, the adult who has been less central in hands-on caretaking of

the infant).

This recently divorced woman of 32, the mother of a 4-year-old, had been in twice-weekly

therapy with a woman therapist the same age as herself. She missed three consecutive sessions

and, in behavior unlike her usual devotion to the process, she left no message for this puzzled ther-

apist. As the therapist grew worried that perhaps she’d been in an accident, she tried phoning her

with no result. This happened a few times, with no response. This was the issue we focused on in

supervision.

The prior atmosphere had been one of a very positive transference, especially as Ms. A. had felt

helped in the trauma of her divorce and achieving sole custody of her 4-year-old daughter. We de-cided in supervision, as this patient was known by other patients of my supervisee, that the

chances of her having had a sticky end were minimal. I thus encouraged the therapist to adopt a

wait-and-see policy at this point, as I felt she’d already signaled her genuine caring.

The next session, at the usual time, the patient appeared. The therapist, trying overly hard to im-

itate what she perceived was a pure psychoanalytic stance that might please me, greeted the pa-

tient with total silence. The therapist maintained this rather stony silence over the next few ses-

sions, in the guise of discovering as much as possible about the situation. The patient unfolded her

story. While playing, her 4-year-old had inhaled a button that obstructed her airway, and the dis-

traught mother had spent the previous week by the child’s bedside in the hospital because she had

developed pneumonia after the operation to extract the object. The scene brought up the patient’s

agonized deep fears about being solely responsible for the child, painful regrets about her divorce(even though the ex-husband was a neglectful absentee Dad), and terror at being separated from

her little girl. She described, at length, intense yearnings for her ex-husband, whom she had frus-

tratingly attempted to contact many times during this frightening experience. She longed for her

mother, who had died many years previously, but there was no mention at all of the therapist. The

conflicted aspects of the patient’s not phoning the therapist becameclearer. In this traumatic situa-

tion, she had regressed. Anger at the therapist, previously viewed as herall-protective heroine sav-

ior/mother in fantasy, now became more available consciously. In the subsequent sessions, Ms. A.

became furious at the therapist who had failed magically to know that the patient needed her. The

patient had felt bereft, abandoned, and utterly alone. Her rage at the disillusioning therapist was so

great that, in fantasy, she had killed off her internal image. Since, in her regressed state, fantasywas reified, there became no point in using the telephone to contact a murdered internal therapist.

For example, she suppressed any knowledge that the therapist had tried to phone her, although af-

ter the episode she found the phone record. Ms. A. had vividly transferred her yearning to the fa-

ther figure, the ex-husband, in lieu of the disappointing mothers. In this case, we grew to see this

shift as an awry attempt on the patient’s part to push forward defensively into an Oedipal position,

looking desperately for the missing father, to try to solve the dilemma of the poorly integrated and

now “all-bad” abandoning mother. Such an Oedipal complex in women is fraught with a mater-

nally derived intense singularity carried over from the original dyadic situation. She tolerates in

her inner world, for example, either an all-good father or all-bad mother. In later talking about the

therapist’s reactions to this incident, some understanding of the nature of this complex triangu-

larity and the Oedipal situation became an aid to this therapist’s understanding of the contrast be-



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tween the now touted virtues of the ex-husband, actually bitterly resented, it turned out, by the

therapist.

This was the therapist’s situation: Dr. B. was definitely on the side of female emancipation.Like her patient, though without children, she too had been divorced from a man she currently de-

spised. She had a strong identification with Ms. A.’s struggles to work and support her child. She

enjoyed being admired by Ms. A., and felt useful in the role of the all-good and wise mother.

The therapist herself was mainly comfortable with a form of strongly attached infantile

mother–daughter bond with mutual admiration, some underlying homosexual currents. She ex-

pressed her mutuality by a tendency to overreadherself into the patient’s problems. She frequently

in supervision would say, “Well, if it were me, I’d have done suchand such” or “I was so tuned into

what she was saying, because I know just what it’s like to have had a rotten husband, too.” Direct

aggression between people was clearly very difficult for the therapist to bear. She feared criticism

from me and often began by saying, “I hope you’ll like what I did in the hour today.”In supervision, I focused on her unusual silence when the patient returned after the absence.

She declared that she did not want to “gratify” the patient. Dr. B. averred that she thought I’d be

pleased, and that it was good technique and that it would be more likely to reveal the original ma-

ternal deprivation that we had suspected in this case. I sensed her anger at me, a possible identifi-

cation with the aggressor/bad mother supervisor, and we talked of the meanings of giving some-

one the cold shoulder. The supervisee had felt my encouragement to wait-and-see was giving her a

cold shoulder. We talked about how her interacting in her usual friendly way with her patient

might have had enabled her even more to alert Ms. A. to how unusual her own telephone silence

had been and piqued further exploration. My supervisee was involved in an enactment that in-

volved unusually stiff and rigid behavior on her part.

On reflection, Dr. B. made very good use of this incident. Her silence had begun as a plannedstrategy, but when the patient began to berate her for being a distant, cold, unfeeling woman and

insensitive, the therapist became wracked with self-doubt. She was insecure about not yet having

children. Perhaps Ms. A. was right—maybe she could not imagine what it was like to have a sick

child? She began to regress in the sphere of the patient’s aggression and believe the patient’s accu-

sations. She fulfilled the patient’s view of her as cold by being too paralyzed to speak. A mutual

enactment of archaic maternal transference and countertransference raged between them.

The center of the therapist’s rage at the patient involved her reaction to the patient talking so

lovingly and sexually yearning for the touch of her ex-husband. How could she be so dumb? What

ingratitude for all the good feeling they’d had before! Hadn’t they agreed he was good riddance?

The invocation of the Oedipal third party in the dyad, therefore, caused this mother–therapist furyand envy, exclusion, and extrusion.

My supervisee had read some Freud and knew about Oedipus in an intellectual way. I used this

incident to teach her about her emotional reactions as signifying an enacted response to a (specula-

tive) dyadic possessive object relational family pattern in which a mother deeply resents a father

and is envious of his power to attract the daughter and her interest in him, whether affectionate,

sensual, or sexual. We went on to have interesting talks about how, in Dr. B.’s urge to gain equality

with men, she was part of a social group who downplayed any sexual and gender differences be-

tween men and women as being an old-fashioned trap. This started musings between us about

early childhood development and the ways a child perceives a mother, in fact, as distinct from a fa-

ther both in the interactional arena and kinetic feel of the body difference. Dr. B. decided to enter

analysis as a result of her deepening interests. The therapy story had a happy outcome. Once Dr. B.



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began to be interested in her own reactions, and with some perspectiveon their depth and with a bit

of applied theory teaching, she became much more her old friendly self again with the patient, and

was able to listen to the pain of how abandoned Ms. A. had felt. In turn, this led to deepening thegenetic exploration, especially with new material about her teasing father within these old, re-

peated, well-worn patterns.

3. CLINICAL EXAMPLE #2

This is a general set of comments about some practicalities encountered in current analytic educa-

tion. This story is based on a typical generic supervision case of a contemporary young female an-

alyst in her late 30s, analyzing a male schoolteacher slightly older than she. In a word, the patient’s

problem is that he finds himself abidingly and frustratingly in “second place”—whatever the situ-ation, whether in line to buy the latest home equipment in IKEA, or applying for a job, or in pub-

lishing an idea. His father looms vast in his pantheon of inner objects. Father was boastfully the

leader of all he undertook. He always landed a bargain, say, unlike the patient’s fee to the analyst.

He was premier in his field, unlike the patient’s “pipsqueak teaching job.” An older analyst, edu-

cated 25 years ago, listening to the story would have little difficulty in anticipating the inflamed

Oedipal situation that could be crucial in the inner life of this patient. The neophyte analyst these

days, I find in contrast, is very likely in theory, in her head, to be thinking of, say, problems of

“containers and containment,” puzzling over alpha and beta elements (after Bion); or looking for

primitive rage, guilt, andreparations (after Klein) while using every communication in the session

as a symbol of the war of inner objects (after Joseph); or she is thinking of the composition of the

patient’s superego, technically obsessively focusing on the break-points in the train of association,

straining to detect the subtleties of anxiety that signal the operation of a specific defense (after

Gray). If the young analyst is thinking of transference, she is usually preoccupied by what kind of

attachment this actually is—is it insecure or secure? And what consequences should she be look-

ing for (after Fonagy and Target).

She may well struggle in her role as analyst as trying to think about and undo these traumata

within her interaction with the patient on the couch in the here and now. Analytic teachers who

say, “Everything outside the room is a distraction” with injunctions to “stay in the present interac-

tion if you want tomake a therapeutic gain!”may ring inher ears. Inother words, there can besuch

a cacophony of a vast variety of (possibly cogent) but differing theoretical perspectives for a

young analyst to contend with that the very last element that seems to be on anyone’s mind in thesedays of “more-than-widening scope” patients is the possibility that sometimes one just manage to

have on one’s couch a patient, such as this male schoolteacher, who has many minor and interest-

ing developmental traumata, but had good-enough devoted parents and a reasonably stable home

environment. He is far froman archaic empty shell of the kind ofblitzed mind(it seems tome) that

Bion or Fairbairn were encountering while treating and helping their in-house inmates of British

mental hospitals of the dark days before socialized medicine. There are differences in mental

health culture, as a whole, in Great Britain and in North America in contemporary times, too;

hence I believediffering emphases in theory may havearisen. The idea that there can, indeed, exist

analysands these days who are in the neurotic spectrum, and, therefore indeed may have internal

dynamic conflicts stemming mainly from an Oedipal complex like this teacher—with attendant

work inhibitions, sexual inhibitions, castration anxieties, andgreat fears of aggression andcompe-



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tition with other men might seem strange. This patient also has a history of being quite erotically

attached to his adored mother, a relation of which his father seemed (to him) to be jealous and an-

gry and forbidding. Even the pattern of this man’s dating, for example, is rich with attempts to se-duce women who had previously been with powerful men. There are manyapproaches to such dy-

namics, such as through the lens of puzzles in how to be a man, or identity issues, or though the

vicissitudes of his homo- and heterosexuality. But without having a living portrait of the vitality of

the Oedipal situation in mind, it is amazing how, say, an intense erotic maternal transference to a

female analyst can be perceived and described and subtly dismissed as sexualized or rendered in

more archaic terms, described as a reaction against profound unconscious fears of being swal-

lowed up by the archaic witch-mother.

We have become so expert, I believe, in treating and theorizing the most archaic parts of our

analysands, often with benefit, of course, that in restoring the viability of the Oedipus complex—

such as in the work of Hans Loewald (1960), who made ample room for all levels of integrationwithin the same person with a sense of growth toward maturity and triangulation—we can become

somewhat blinded to a generation of analysands who may well be actually “better put together in-

ternally” (to use the vernacular shorthand) than our current theories, which are in vogue, can toler-

ate. I end where I started. Oedipus, as a measure of advanced ability to integrate both a mother fig-

ure and a father figure in inner life, is still with us if we have eyes to see him and have ears to hear

him.

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