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The Dawn of the Oedipus Complex: A Tale of Two Letters

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Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family

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Abstract

The chapter focuses on two early letters by Sigmund Freud, in which he outlines an early concept of the Oedipus complex. It discusses its relevance of these letters for his Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Freudian theory in general.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sigmund Freud, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men.” In: Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, tr. James Strachey, ed. Anna Freud et al. 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), XI: 165–175 (edition will be abbreviated SE).

  2. 2.

    Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 vols. New York: Basic Books, 1953–1957; Max Schur, Freud Living and Dying, New York: International Universities Press, 1979; Marianne Krull, Freud and His Father, New York: Norton, 1986; William J. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986; Peter Rudnitsky, Freud and Oedipus, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987; Eugene J. Mahon, A Psychoanalytic Odyssey, London: Karnac Books, 2014.

  3. 3.

    Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, September 29, 1893. In: Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 56. See also Harold Blum, “Freud, Fliess and the Parenthood of Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 59 (1990): 21–39.

  4. 4.

    Freud [section on Paris], “Report on My Studies in Paris and Berlin” (1886), SE I: 5–15.

  5. 5.

    Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1895), SE II.

  6. 6.

    Freud, “Draft N,” enclosed in letter to Fliess, May 31, 1897. In: Freud, Complete Letters to Fliess, 254.

  7. 7.

    Freud, “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,” (1926 [1925]), SE XX: 77–178, here 90.

  8. 8.

    Freud, Letter to Fliess, October 3, 1897. In: Freud, Complete Letters to Fliess, 268.

  9. 9.

    Blum, “The Prototype of pre-Oedipal Reconstruction,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA). 25 (1977): 757–785.

  10. 10.

    Freud, letter to Fliess, October 4 (c’d October 3), 1897. In: Freud, Complete Letters to Fliess, 263.

  11. 11.

    Freud, letter to Fliess, October 3, 1897. In: Freud, Complete Letters to Fliess, 268.

  12. 12.

    Freud, letter to Fliess, December 12, 1897. In: Freud, Complete Letters to Fliess, 285–286.

  13. 13.

    Freud, letter to Fliess, December 12, 1897. In: Freud, Complete Letters to Fliess, 286.

  14. 14.

    Freud, letter to Fliess, October 15, 1897. In: Freud, Complete Letters to Fliess, 272.

  15. 15.

    Siegfried Bernfeld, “An Unknown Autobiographical Fragment by Freud,” American Imago 4 (1946): 3–19.

  16. 16.

    Freud, letter to Fliess, October 15, 1897. In: Freud, Complete Letters to Fliess, 272.

  17. 17.

    John Munder Ross, “Oedipus revisited. Laius and the Laius Complex,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 37 (1982): 169–200.

  18. 18.

    Blum, “Reconstructing Freud’s Prototype Reconstructions,” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 24 (2015):47–56; and Vaclav Burianek, “Paradise Lost and Trauma Mastered: New Findings on Little Sigmund. International Forum of Psychoanalysis 24 (2015): 22–28.

  19. 19.

    Freud, letter to Fliess, October 3, 1897. In: Freud, Complete Letters to Fliess, 268.

  20. 20.

    Blum, “Adolescent Trauma and the Oedipus Complex,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 30 (2010): 548–566.

  21. 21.

    Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE IV: xxvi.

  22. 22.

    Freud, “The Specimen Dream,” The Interpretation of Dreams (1900 [1899]), SE IV: 96–121.

  23. 23.

    Freud, letter to Fliess, April 26, 1896. In: Freud, Complete Letters to Fliess, 183: “I shall be able to prove to you that you were right, that her episodes of bleeding were hysterical.”

  24. 24.

    Masson, The Assault on Truth, Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984; and Blum, “The Irma Dream: Self-Analysis and Self-Supervision,” JAPA 44 (1996): 511–552.

  25. 25.

    See Rudnitsky, Freud and Oedipus.

  26. 26.

    Freud, letter to Emil Fluss, March 17, 1873. In: Ernst L. Freud (Ed.), “Some Early Unpublished Letters of Freud,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50 (1969):419–427, here 423.

  27. 27.

    Freud, letter to Fluss, June 16, 1873. In: Freud, “Some Early Unpublished Letters,” 425.

  28. 28.

    Freud, “An Autobiographical Study” (1935), SE XX: 7–76, here 9.

  29. 29.

    Richard Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005; and Janine Burke, The Sphinx on the Table, New York: Walker & Company, 2006.

  30. 30.

    Freud, letter to Martha Bernays, February 2, 1886. In: Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, tr. Tania and James Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 202.

  31. 31.

    Freud, “The Material and Sources of Dreams,” The Interpretation of Dreams,” SE IV: 264–265.

  32. 32.

    Freud, “The Dream-Work,” The Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV, 398.

  33. 33.

    Carl Gustav Jung, letter to Freud, October 12, 1911. In: The Freud/Jung letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, ed. William McGuire, tr. Ralph Manheim and R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 447.

  34. 34.

    Sandor Ferenczi, “The Symbolic Representation of the Pleasure and Reality Principles in the Oedipus Myth” (1912). In: Ferenczi, Sex in Psychoanalysis (New York: Dover, 2014), 214–227.

  35. 35.

    Freud, letter to Eduard Silberstein, September 4, 1872. In: Freud, The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871–1881, ed. Walter Boehlich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 17.

  36. 36.

    See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.

  37. 37.

    Freud, letter to Fliess, December 21, 1899. In: Complete Letters, 392.

  38. 38.

    Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), SE VII: 123–246, here 226; and Blum, “Matricide and the Oedipus Complex.” In: Peter Hartocollis (Ed.), Mankind’s Oedipal Destiny (New York: International Universities Press, 2000), 209–228; as well as James L. Fosshage, “Implicit and Explicit Dimensions of Oedipal Phenomenology: A Reassessment, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 30 (2010): 520–534.

  39. 39.

    Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, ed. and abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Basic Books, 1961), 243–244.

  40. 40.

    See Burke, The Sphinx on the Table.

  41. 41.

    Freud “On the Sexual Theories of Children” (1908), SE IX: 205–226, here 214.

  42. 42.

    Freud, “Fourth Lecture,” Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1910 [1909]), SE XIII: 3–58; here 47.

  43. 43.

    Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913), SE XIII 1–161; see also Freud, “The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest” (1913), SE XIII: 163–190.

  44. 44.

    Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1916), SE XIV: 243–258; and Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), SE XIX: 144–207.

  45. 45.

    Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, SE VII: 226 (footnote 1920).

  46. 46.

    Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), SE: XIX: 3–16.

  47. 47.

    Freud, On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), SE XIV: 7–66.

  48. 48.

    Roy Schafer, “Problems in Freud’s Psychology of Women,” JAPA 67 (219): 503–526.

  49. 49.

    Otto F. Kernberg, “Borderline Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Organization: Psychopathology and Psychotherapy.” In: Jeffrey J. Magnavita (Ed.), Handbook of Personality Disorders: Theory and Practice (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), 92–119.

  50. 50.

    Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson, 1975; and Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self, New York: International Universities Press, 1977.

  51. 51.

    Rosemary M. Balsam, “Where has Oedipus gone? A Turn of the Century Contemplation,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 30 (2010): 511–519.

  52. 52.

    Hans Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 41 (1960):16–33.

  53. 53.

    Freud, “Female Sexuality” (1931), SE XXII: 221–246, here 226.

  54. 54.

    Elsa J. Blum and Blum, “The Development of Autonomy and Superego Precursors,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 71 (1990): 585–595.

  55. 55.

    Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1939), SE XXIII: 193–4.

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  1. Psychoanalytic Association of New York, New York University Medical School, New York, NY, USA

    Harold Blum

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  1. Department of German and Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Liliane Weissberg

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Blum, H. (2022). The Dawn of the Oedipus Complex: A Tale of Two Letters. In: Weissberg, L. (eds) Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82124-1_3

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