The Oedipus Complex Made Simple

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 4, fall 2003 NAOMI MORGENSTERN The Oedipus Complex Made Simple When we study a mythology, for example one that might perhaps appear with respect to a Sudanese population, we discover that for them the Oedipus complex is just a rather thin joke. It is a very tiny detail within an immense myth. The myth allows the cataloguing of a set of relations between subjects of a wealth and complexity beside which the Oedipus complex seems only to be so abridged an edition that in the end it cannot always be used. Jacques Lacan One of the things we should be watching out for most, is not to understand too much ... Interpreting is an altogether different thing than having the fancy of understanding. Jacques Lacan You cannot negotiate your way through psychoanalytic theory without stumbling over the Oedipus complex. In fact, it has been argued that the entire history of psychoanalysis is coextensive with all the twists and turns that accompanied the elaboration of Freud=s famous discovery. In what follows I would like to discuss briefly some of these twists and turns: what the Oedipus complex was for Freud, how he >discovered= it (I put the word >discovery= in quotation marks to register that, much as Freud loved archaeological metaphors, the Oedipus complex was certainly not simply an unearthed truth), the Oedipus complex=s general importance to psychoanalytic theory and psychotherapy, how it changed in Freud=s own thinking and how it changed Freud=s own thinking, how other analysts and nonanalytic thinkers have expanded, rejected, or altered its terms, and, finally, why the Oedipus complex might still be compelling today. Part of the fascination of the Oedipus complex, for me, is that it is at once a historical curiosity and an enduring idea. When teaching an introductory course on psychoanalysis and literature, I begin by saying that we all already know something about psychoanalysis, for it informs our culture (and our popular culture). I then ask the students to >free associate= to >Freud=: what are the first words, ideas, or images that come to mind? The Oedipus complex is always one of the answers. It is invoked as at once extremely familiar and something to be resisted (>Freud says you want to kill your father and sleep with your mother right? 778 naomi morgenstern university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 4, fall 2003 Something like that ...=). I don=t respond to this in reductive Freudian fashion (>you resist because it is all too true! AYes@ means Ayes@ and ANo@ means Ayes.@ Now, tell me more about your mother ...=), since we will encounter the questions and problems generated by Freudian interpretive principles soon enough. We talk instead about how the Oedipus complex seems problematically reductive or schematic: must every life fit this frame or suffer the consequences? One need not be a romantic individualist to balk at such an account of human lives. In other words, the students immediately locate a central problem: as literary theorist Shoshana Felman writes, >Any Freudian reading is bound to uncover the same meaning, the ultimate signified of human desire: the Oedipus complex= (Jacques Lacan, 103).1 Depending on who is taking the class, we might also talk about the silly, embarrassing, or offensive emphasis on incest and castration, or B by the way B how the Oedipus complex seems to tell us nothing about women. (>Throughout history,= writes Freud in a late essay, >people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity= [>Femininity,= 113]: one is hardly reassured!) In a recent literary-theory anthology that includes several psychoanalytic selections, the editors have edited out the >Oedipal scenario= with its accompanying >castration complex,= because, they argue, it has been >discredited= (Rivkin and Ryan, 127). I find this editorial decision strange, to say the least, for it would seem to dismiss as simply >false= precisely what needs to be read. Far from being irrelevant then, I have found that the associations produced by my students are an extremely productive place to start our year-long project of reading Freud. The term >Oedipus complex= first appeared in print in 1910, but by then it was...