The Possibility of Multiple Models for Oedipal Development
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HE POSSIBILITY OF MULTIPLE MODELS FOR OEDIPAL DEVELOPMENT Howard H. Covitz
For nearly 100 years and at least in certain prominent psychoanalytic subgroups, the Oedipus complex remained a defining construct that determined a boundary for those within and outside psychoanalysis. The time is ripe for reconsidering its culture-specific and variable nature and its failure inter alia to explain with any degree of cogency ongoing internecine conflict in a community of clinicians and theoreticians who have had the benefit of oedipally mediated training analyses.
KEY WORDS: history of psychoanalysis; application of the Oedipus Complex; psychoanalytic education. DOI:10.1057/palgrave.ajp.3350017
“I postulated a primary wish to rediscover a universe without obstacles, rough edges or differences … The world in which the subject takes total possession of the mother can never be fully attained …. The mother’s thoughts are not totally taken up with the child.” (J. Chassaguet-Smirgel, 1988, The Archaic Matrix of the Oedipus Complex, pp. 511–515) The Œdipal: “A psychoanalytic construct representing a fundamentally human problem: the initiation and entrance of the child into the adult world, into the moral order, into becoming an individual.” H. Loewald (paraphrased by Sacks in APA Panel, 1985):
Three quarters of a century ago, in a polemic against religion and theoretical anarchism, Freud (Introductory Lectures XXXV, S.E. 1933a, p. 158) queried: “Does psychoanalysis lead to a certain Weltanschauung?” Answering this question in the negative, Freud counterpoised empirical science against illusion and emotion. Science, in Freud’s way of thinking, was about capturing the truth or, at least, about approximating closely towards the truth, while illusion was of and about the magical fulfillment of the wishes of childhood. Freud hoped, apparently, that Psychoanalysis An earlier version of this paper was presented at the invited panel for Section One at the Annual Meeting of Division 39, American Psychological Association, April 21, 2006. Howard H. Covitz, Ph.D., ABPP, NCPsyA. Private Practice. Visiting Associate Professor of Mathematics, Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Address correspondence to Howard H. Covitz, 24 Latham Parkway, Elkins Park, PA 190273148; e-mail: [email protected]
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could be established as one of the Natural Sciences, where it is assumed that researches are independent of value, meaning and notions of good and evil. Alas! In the Psychological and Social Sciences, such theoretical neatness is a luxury, at best. I have argued elsewhere (Covitz, 1996) that psychological theories of development, as well as the nosologies that arise from them, are inextricably intertwined with idiosyncratic views of the healthy polity, of the well individual and even with ethico-religious and literary images of the good life. How can we possibly, after all, specify a developmental growth towards wholeness that is independent of the definitions that boundary these very notions? And how can we reasona
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