A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed (review)

Five years ago, at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a panel convened on “Current Views of the Oedipus Complex” in which, despite its aspiration to currency, the “female” version of the Oedipus complex was never mentioned. Freud’s original conception of the universalized male epitomized the discussion in 2006 just as surely as it had when Freud coined the phrase in 1910. The possibility that half of the human population may diverge from the masculine paradigm patterned by Freud’s interpretation and application of Sophocles’ tragedy was simply not taken up as a “current” view. Nancy Kulish and Deanna Holtzman, in A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed, address such gendered myopia. They assert simply but emphatically that “the Oedipal story does not work as a touchstone against which to measure and understand females, either theoretically or practically” (183).

The authors claim that the Oedipus complex as it is classically conceived and applied in psychoanalytic practice derives from the male situation both in its mythic articulation and in its clinical extensions. This is a fatal flaw from the standpoint of female experience. At the core of the authors’ critique and contribution is sexual difference, and this difference makes all the difference. When the Oedipus conflict is applied to women, it is mediated by male rivalry and desire, and then awkwardly appended to female development. The phallocentrism most obviously articulated by Freud’s proclamation that “the little girl is a little man” (1933, 118) has left its residue throughout the vocabulary of psychoanalytic theories of development, and nowhere more evidently than in discussions of the female Oedipus complex. As Kulish and Holtzman write: “Language shapes perception and expectation; it organizes our thinking. When we think about ‘Oedipus,’ we think about ‘castration’ and ‘penis envy,’ not about pregnancy or vagina; when we talk about the ‘phallic-Oedipal’ phase in little girls, we distract ourselves from—and thereby foreclose on—the girl’s crucial developmental need to identify with her mother” (184). Drawing from the research of psychoanalyst and linguist Bonnie Litowitz, the authors affirm the power of language to influence perception, while distancing themselves from the dire Lacanian theories that suggest “women are locked into a foreordained phallic linguistic.” They also resist Lacanian feminists who valorize presymbolic modes of communication that lock women out of language altogether. “Clinical practitioners and theorists cannot rely on poetry or silence; thus we are seeking a new language of female development” (64).

Their comprehensive “reexamination” of psychoanalytic theories of feminine sexuality since Freud leads to what the subtitle to their book rather disingenuously calls a “renaming” of reigning theories of the “female Oedipus complex.” Yet what they offer is clearly more than that. As they point out, the “female triadic situation” does not have its own name but floats, rather like an obscure signifier of “something that is not nothing” (59). With an urgency and practicality that is drawn from their daily work as analysts, the authors combine an encyclopedic review of the literature on the female Oedipus complex with a bold critique of its masculine premises. Included are detailed clinical illustrations that concretely demonstrate, on the one hand, how early paradigms have blinded us to the realties of female experience and, on the other hand, how new paradigms and alternative mythologies allow the analyst to listen with fresh attunement to the narratives of girls and women, and thus to make different interpretations and interventions.

Kulish and Holtzman then advance a new conceptualization and propose a renaming of the female “triadic situation” according to a myth that more accurately accords with the developmental characteristics and compromises of the female. They propose the myth of Persephone, whose story goes like this: while picking flowers in the meadow, Kore, the maiden daughter of Demeter, is abducted and raped by her uncle, Hades, god of the underworld. She is forced to live...