Oedipal Situation

The constraints of our Oedipal fiction, nevertheless, prevent me from exploring these possibilities. As long as I am doing a psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis, my thought is limited by the Oedipal method: insight, clarification, discovery of what is wrong, tracing back to parents and childhood.

Hillman argues that the Oedipal situation has become a methodological prison for depth psychology itself, determining not merely its content but the very meta-level structure of analytic inquiry.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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the particular myth uniting psychoanalysis with Greek antiquity is the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles. It is therefore inescapable … if we would be faithful to the project of an archetypal revisioning of depth psychology, that this Oedipus be revisited.

Hillman identifies the Oedipus Tyrannus as the founding myth of psychoanalysis and argues that any archetypal revisioning of the field requires a critical re-examination of this foundational fiction.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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by conquering the Sphinx, Oedipus becomes a hero and dragon slayer, and as such he commits incest with his mother, like every hero. The hero’s incest and the conquering of the Sphinx are identical, two sides of the same process.

Neumann transposes the Oedipal situation onto a mythological-archetypal register, reading the incest with the mother and the slaying of the Sphinx as structurally equivalent acts of heroic ego-separation from the uroboric Great Mother.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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rivalry finds expression in the Oedipus complex, which can be clearly observed in children of three, four, or five years of age. This complex exists, however, very much earlier and is rooted in the baby’s first suspicions of the father taking the mother’s love and attention away from him.

Klein extends the Oedipal situation into the earliest pre-genital stages, grounding it in infantile jealousy and the fantasy of paternal usurpation of maternal love.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis

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For there to be an analysis at all, we must find ourselves tied to the parental world as unconsciousness, incestuously (Freud), uroborically (Jung), desiring heroically to free ourselves through insight.

Hillman maps the competing depth-psychological readings of the Oedipal situation—Freudian incest, Jungian uroboros, heroic insight—as structurally necessary preconditions for analysis itself.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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The same is true of his Oedipal intention towards the mother. The faint hints of this fantasy in the child’s consciousness can easily be overlooked; all parents are therefore convinced tha

Jung acknowledges the Oedipal wish as a genuine but reduced and scaled-down phenomenon in the child’s psyche, emphasising its diminished but real sexual-affective character.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies, 1902thesis

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the tertium comparationis lies precisely in the narrow restriction of the fate of Oedipus to his two parents. This restriction is characteristic of the child, for the fate of the adult is not limited to the parents.

Jung reframes the Oedipal situation as structurally infantile in scope, arguing that it captures childhood’s restriction of the entire libidinal world to the parental dyad rather than representing a universal adult configuration.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis, 1961thesis

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It is part of the Oedipus situation that the mother responds—or is felt to respond—with hatred to the oedipal desires of the daughter.

Klein elaborates the Oedipal situation as a reciprocal drama of feared maternal retaliation, making the mother’s reactive hatred—fantasised or real—a constitutive element of the complex’s structure.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis

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The Oedipus complex focusses on the son doing away with father in order to bed mother; but looking at the myth from a slightly different angle, we come up with a ‘Laius complex’—the father who is afraid (unconsciously) that he will be ousted or destroyed by his son.

Greene inverts the classical Oedipal schema to propose a complementary ‘Laius complex,’ in which the father’s unconscious dread of displacement constitutes the other side of the triangular situation.

Greene, Liz; Sasportas, Howard, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting

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If you are truly stuck in the Oedipal stage, you will remain feeling inadequate and inferior to other people your whole life: the little boy or little girl in you is still comparing yourselves to ‘Big People.’

Greene frames arrest at the Oedipal stage as a lifelong psychological condition of inferiority and competitive anxiety, characterising the unresolved complex in terms of ego-development.

Liz Greene, Howard Sasportas, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987supporting

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Another later manifestation of left-over Oedipal feelings is the desire to be noticed for how wonderful you are without necessarily doing anything to earn that recognition.

Greene identifies exhibitionistic hunger for recognition as an adult residue of the unresolved Oedipal situation, linking it astrologically to Leo and the demand for undifferentiated affirmation.

Liz Greene, Howard Sasportas, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987supporting

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a man can have an unconscious, all-consuming passion for his mother which may undermine and tragically complicate his whole life, so that the monstrous fate of Oedipus seems not one whit overdrawn.

Jung affirms the clinical reality of the Oedipal situation by acknowledging the genuine destructive force of unconscious maternal fixation in adult male psychology.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting

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Individual patients struggling with self-knowledge are so convinced by the fictions of childhood because they are Oedipus, who finds who he is by finding out about his infancy, its wounds and abandonment.

Hillman argues that the entire apparatus of therapeutic self-discovery—developmental psychology, counselling, social work—is a collective rehearsal of the Oedipal myth’s central movement toward self-identification through childhood narrative.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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the infant, deprived of the mother’s breast, feels that someone else, above all the father, has taken it away from him and is enjoyed by him—a situation of envy and jealousy which appears to me part of the earliest stages of the Oedipus complex.

Klein traces the Oedipal situation to its oral-phase precursors, locating its genesis in the infant’s jealous fantasy of paternal possession of the maternal breast.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting

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were he to have effected such a transformation, he would have felt that he was usurping his father’s place and giving free rein to his murderous hatred towards him. Both fear of the father and the conflict between love and hatred … would cause him to retreat from so undisguised an expression of his Oedipus wishes.

Klein demonstrates how persecutory and depressive anxiety together constrain the expression of Oedipal wishes, showing the complex to be held in check by the child’s own ambivalence and dread.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting

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Freud ennobled family with a mythical dimension, for his pathologized view was at the same time a mythologized view, confirming once more the root metaphor of depth psychology: mythology presents pathology; pathology, mythology.

Hillman defends Freud’s mythologisation of the Oedipal situation as a genuine epistemological contribution—the infusion of tragic myth into bourgeois family life that gave depth psychology its characteristic double vision.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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The other pole of the dysfunctional Shadow of the Oedipal Child is the Dreamer … his isolated, ethereal behavior may mask the hidden, and opposite, pole of the Oedipal Child’s Shadow, the Mama’s Boy.

Moore maps the unresolved Oedipal situation onto masculine shadow-structure, identifying the Dreamer as the compensatory pole of the Mama’s Boy in a bipolar shadow complex rooted in failed separation.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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like Sophocles’s play, like Freudian analysis, we begin to detect a repressed or forgotten clue. Again the Oedipal imagination catches us in its atmosphere.

Hillman observes that the very act of investigating the Oedipal myth reproduces the Oedipal method—the uncovering of buried truth—demonstrating the self-reflexive entrapment of psychoanalytic thinking.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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The killing father, whether repressed, enacted, or sublimated, permeates the psychoanalytic movement, obsessing Freud … Scapegoats, expulsions, pinioned feet, sterility, narrowness at intersections … all this keeps the configuration of Laius very present in our field.

Hillman traces the father-son violence of the Oedipal myth through the institutional history of psychoanalysis itself, reading theoretical revisionism, schisms, and expulsions as enactments of the Laius configuration.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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the father-son conflict will be seen as the root when we stay Oedipal in our imagination, assuming all things start in family. Prior to that conflict is Oedipal discourse that does not hear into its own speech.

Hillman argues that the father-son conflict is itself a product of an Oedipal hermeneutic rather than its foundation, pointing toward a literalism in the method that pre-dates and produces the mythic conflict.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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incestuous involvement with the father as regenerative for a girl … incestuous fantasy around the image of father performs a similar spiritualising function for the girl as fantasies of his mother perform for the boy.

Samuels, drawing on post-Jungian work, extends the Oedipal situation’s symbolic dimension to the daughter-father axis, arguing that the spiritualising function of blocked incestuous libido is symmetrical across genders.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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For Freud, all men are either Hamlet or Oedipus—or both. The woman’s problem is exactly the reverse: she suffers the fate of Electra, who finds that Mother is her rival for Daddy’s love.

Campbell reads the Oedipal situation through its literary-mythic avatars, contrasting the son’s Oedipal bind with the daughter’s Electra complex as the two complementary forms of the parental triangle.

Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004supporting

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the hostile attitude towards the future successor on the throne and in the kingdom is projected to the outside, namely it is attributed to an oracular verdict, which is thereby revealed as the substitute of the ominous dream.

Rank situates the Oedipal situation within the hero-birth myth, reading the father’s projected hostility toward his successor as the structural precondition for the hero’s destiny of exposure and survival.

Rank, Otto, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, 1909supporting

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‘Does the Professor talk to God, as he can tell all beforehand?’ … Hans sees through to Freud’s essentia

Hillman uses Little Hans’s unwitting penetration of Freud’s oracular authority to interrogate the power dynamics embedded in the Oedipal analytic method itself.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007aside

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255-60, 355 (classic Oedipal situation); see also dreams, present-day; Freud, Jung, Oedipus, Róheim, Stekel

Campbell’s index clusters the ‘classic Oedipal situation’ with comparative mythology, psychoanalysis, and dream interpretation, marking its centrality to the hero-myth apparatus.

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015aside

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elements of the later Kleinian idea of the infant’s original (pre-Oedipal) condition, which Bergler says is one of magical omnipotence or infantile megalomania, demanding instantaneous gratification.

Kalsched invokes the pre-Oedipal condition as a developmental baseline against which Bergler constructs his theory of the sadistic superego, situating Oedipal dynamics within a broader pre-Oedipal substrate.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996aside

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