Psychic functions of failure

While we can explain significant differences in social mobility between different occupational categories in terms of the economic and social resources made available to them, in order to understand those who deviate from the statistical mode we need to look at the unconscious meaning of "success" and "failure." Beatrice, Dave, and Sally are all children of professional families and yet have great difficulty being successful at work. Their difficulties with work are multi-determined and there are oedipal and preoedipal issues involved. However, in the case of Beatrice the issues are predominantly oedipal, while in the other cases the issues are primarily preoedipal. It seems that while the common oedipal themes inhibiting productive work and work satisfaction have been discussed in psychoanalytic literature under the rubric "work inhibition," albeit to a small extent, the preoedipal themes have been given less attention. This is because the traditional concept of "inhibition" has taken such a central place in the psychoanalytic perspective on work. The concept of "work inhibition" has paralyzed the development of a broader psychoanalytic framework for the analysis of work problems. As long as we limit our discussions of problems with work to the term "inhibition," they will focus on the oedipal problems of neurotic patients and a large gap will remain between theory and clinical experience because a large number of our patients have difficulties with work that are rooted in preoedipal issues. Unless we can stop being "inhibited" by the very concept, our theoretical understanding of problems with work will continue to lag behind our clinical understanding. "Work inhibition" is not the only type of major problem with work patients can have--they can be the result of a variety of dynamics on either oedipal or preoedipal levels.     

The wrecking effects of race and social class on self and success

The literature on success neurosis has expanded in recent years to include a consideration of preoedipal as well as oedipal factors. Typically, success neurosis is considered to be a symptomatic result of complex intrapsychic phenomena, whether they be at the oedipal and/or preoedipal level. Having previously considered that success neurosis can also be determined by internalized representations of "real" factors, such as racism and poverty (Holmes, in press, b) the author here considers how these factors become primary intrapsychic building blocks of success neurosis through their negative impact on the components of success in the self and the ego.     

Addressing the oedipal dilemma in Macbeth

Macbeth has been viewed as a play about the oedipal crime of patricide. This paper elaborates on this approach by elucidating the oedipal and preoedipal themes in the roles played by women in the drama, particularly in Macbeth's relationships with Lady Macbeth and with the weird sisters. Differences between Macbeth and Macduff's responses to the oedipal dilemma are also defined. An understanding of these themes provides the context for understanding the underlying hostility toward women implicit throughout the play.     

Some relations between the negative Oedipus complex and aggression in the male

The conflictual problems that accompany the Oedipus complex, in both its positive and negative (normal and inverted) forms, have long been recognized. It has also been well established that normal and pathological identifications derive from bisexual tendencies and from the complications of early life experiences that reinforce love or hate toward father and mother respectively. In the male, two mechanisms that can operate to bring about a predominant feminine identification and hence a negative or inverted Oedipus complex have been described. First, there is that of a primary identification with the mother, and the seeking of the father as object, with castration anxiety as a consequence. Alternatively, the sequence has been considered to involve positive oedipal wishes with mother as object; accompanying castration anxiety based on expectation of punishment; submission in a negative oedipal position as an attempted defense, only serving, however, to reinforce castration anxiety; and ultimately, a reversion to reactive aggression against the father. The links between unconscious homosexuality and paranoia in light of the foregoing dynamics have been indicated. The influence of preoedipal experience has long been presumed, though not systematically traced. With the advance of understanding of the earliest phases of childhood development, further clarification has become possible. Several factors are discussed in this paper, with illustrative clinical material. Included are the parental roles in perpetuating infantile conflicts of each libidinal phase, and in progression from symbiosis to successful separation-individuation. The resultant difficulties in ego development and in the establishment of mature object relations are described. The subsequent problems in mastering the tasks of the oedipal phase are detailed, showing the effects in terms of alternating positive and negative oedipal strivings. The adolescent-phase struggles are touched on, including the unrealistic ego-ideal structuring based on the negative oedipal stresses. Finally, the relation between unconscious homosexuality, beating fantasies, and paranoia is discussed, with the implications regarding aggression and its effects on psychopathology.     

A woman's homosexual transference with a male analyst

A woman in analysis with a male analyst developed a significant homosexual transference during the middle phase of treatment. The expression and working through of this material (in displacement) is seen as reflecting one example of the influence of gender on the psychoanalytic process. For the male analyst to utilize this transference, he must make a clear distinction between the negative oedipal phase and the preoedipal (pregenital) phase in female development.     

From Benign Mirror to Demon Lover: An Object Relations View of Compulsion Versus Desire

This article addresses the terrifying power of the father as a dynamic force within the psyche of the female. Its particular focus is on how the psychodynamic form of father internalization within the female effects her creative process and her creative work. Two cases vignettes of female writers are used to illustrate the interaction of traumatizing parental behavior and the daughters incestuous desire on promoting compulsions and inhibitions in creative work. Writing blocks will be seen as a symptom of trauma and psychic conflict that has taken place in the oedipal and post oedipal years, as opposed to the creative compulsions that result from primal stage preoedipal trauma.Address correspondence to Susan Kavaler-Adler, Ph.D., ABPP, Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, 115 East 9th Street, 12P New York, NY 10003; e-mail: SUSKA674@aol.com.     

The early oedipal situation: developmental, theoretical, and clinical implications

The Oedipus complex is typically thought to begin in the phallic phase, when the child's relationship to the parents as a couple achieves central prominence. In contrast, the author views the appearance of oedipal conflicts in the phallic phase as the end point of a line of development of triangular relatedness that began in infancy. An aspect of the Kleinian view of the oedipal situation--that awareness of the parents as a couple begins in the preoedipal period--deserves serious consideration. A patient is presented for whom the working through of early oedipal issues in the transference-counter-transference permitted recovery from withdrawal into a fantasy world.     

Group psychology and the structural theory: a revised psychoanalytic model of group psychology.

It has been my aim in this paper to revise the existing psychoanalytic theory of group psychology in accordance with current structural concepts. The need for fundamental revision in the existing theory of group organization is demonstrated by its restriction to an oedipal paradigm, which cannot account for the regression to an oral paradigm of group organization during group formation. Freud's explanation of regression in crowds is reviewed. The limitations inherent in Freud's topographic and narcisistic models are demonstrated; irreconcilable contradictions are shown to exist between the two theories. A structural model of group psychology that is free from internal contradictions and provides a unifying explanation for both regression and merging in the crowd is developed. As a consequence of these revisions it is possible to conceptualize preoedipal organizations of group structure in addition to the oedipal paradigm proposed by Freud.     

The use of subliminal psychodynamic activation in the study of repression

Female undergraduates (N = 33) selected for the presence of high sexual guilt were divided into two groups. One group evidenced a high degree of personality development from which it was inferred that they were prone toward (a) the use of repression rather than more primitive defenses and (b) oedipal rather than preoedipal conflict. The second group evidenced a lesser degree of personality development, and hence the above inferences did not apply. The subliminal psychodynamic activation method was used with both groups to investigate the effects on repression of intensifying and diminishing unconscious conflict over sexual wishes. Subjects were exposed to the verbal stimuli "LOVING DADDY IS WRONG" (conflict intensifying), "LOVING DADDY IS OK" (conflict reducing), and "PEOPLE ARE WALKING" (neutral control), each accompanied by a congruent picture both before (in one condition) and after (in another) a recall test of both neutral and sexual material. The conflict-reduction condition did not affect memory of the passages, but the conflict-intensification condition did for the group with the greater degree of personality development, when this condition was presented before the material to be remembered, and for the recall of neutral passages. The special conditions necessary for demonstration of repression are viewed as shedding light on why it has previously been difficult to show evidence of repression in laboratory experiments.     

Castration

Castration is not a metaphor within the array of psychoanalytic theories, but a pathological belief operative in the unconscious, which originated during the period of childhood sexuality. Of the two major anxieties, separation and castration, castration anxiety is the most overlooked in clinical discourse and theoretical awareness. Castration conflicts have a developmental history and are composed of phases as much as separation-individuation is. These extend from the preoedipal to the oedipal years and beyond and, as separation conflicts, persist throughout life. Clinical material is demonstrated from across the diagnostic spectrum and all developmental levels. Phylogenetic studies are corroborative. As loss of love is a wider derivative of separation anxiety, castration anxiety radiates out to wider fears of invasion and injury to the body. The transference neurosis is more attuned to encompass separation than castration conflicts. This stratum of psychopathology makes reconstruction and the recovery of historical data indispensable.     

Oedipal dynamics in panic disorder

Both research and clinical work have revealed factors that can lead to the onset and persistence of panic disorder. Preoedipal conflicts intensify the danger of oedipal longings for panic patients. Competition with the same-sex parent is linked with angry preoedipal fantasies and associated fears of disruption in attachments. Fantasies or actual successes can thus trigger panic episodes. Regression to a helpless, dependent state such as panic defends against the danger of aggressive, competitive fantasies and actual achievements. However, the regressive state can also be experienced as dangerous, and can be linked with frightening homosexual fantasies. A reactive aggressive oedipal stance can sometimes result, triggering escalating turmoil. The panic episode serves a series of compromise formations in dealing with these conflicted wishes.     

The Treatment of Oedipal Disgust: When One Person’s Sexual Delight Is Another’s Disgust

Sexual disgust has been conceptualized in terms of drive theory and preoedipal dynamics. Sexual disgust can also be conceptualized from a relational perspective that draws on oedipal psychodynamics as well as recent research on disgust as a form of embodied moral cognition. From a subjective viewpoint, sexual disgust is self-affirming, as it preserves the purity, sanctity, and desirability of the self in the face of polluting sexual contact. Yet from an other-centered viewpoint, sexual disgust precludes empathic recognition when it shames the object of sexual disgust and rationalizes its mistreatment. This dialectic of assertion (i.e., refusal to submit to something sexually disgusting) and recognition (i.e., affirmation as an object of sexual desire) plays out in adult romantic relationships when one partner’s sexual delight is the other partner’s sexual disgust.     

Attachment and sibling rivalry in Little Hans: the fantasy of the two giraffes revisited

Freud's interpretation of Little Hans's "phantasy of the two giraffes" is pivotal to his oedipal analysis that Hans has inchoate desires for sexual intercourse with his mother. Bowlby argued that Freud's focus on his oedipal theory led him to ignore preoedipal attachment-related factors that have equal plausibility in explaining the clinical data. However, Bowlby did not attempt to apply the attachment perspective to the interpretation of Hans's fantasies that form the core of the case material. A microanalysis of Hans's giraffe fantasy and the evidence used to support Freud's claims about it yields an attachment-based sibling rivalry account arguably of greater explanatory power than the oedipal account. Consistent with Bowlby's hypothesis, the evidence suggests that Hans's giraffe fantasy is about the sibling rivalry triangle involved in caregiver attachment access, rather than (or in addition to) the oedipal triangle. The issue of multiple levels of meaning and the methodological challenges raised by multiple determination is also considered. The giraffe fantasy's attachment-theoretic explanation encourages a rethinking of this classic case and strengthens Bowlby's claim that the case is fruitfully viewed from an attachment perspective.     

Aspects of the analysis of an adult son of deaf-mute parents

This case demonstrates unique features connected with the parental deafness: the patient's anger toward women, his splitting of objects into all-good and all-bad, ease of regression, yearning for the symbiotic mother particularly as it was related to space as a transitional phenomenon into which he brooked no intrusion, his unique interests and creativity, his method of teaching, the shaping of the Oedipus complex by preoedipal trauma, and his feeling of entitlement with need to be treated as an exception. I have attempted to demonstrate the relation of the preverbal and preoedipal traumata, stemming from the deaf-mutism of the parents of a hearing child, to the patient's pathology, the shaping of his oedipal constellation, and character traits. I have described the compensatory ego functions that resulted in the development of creative, professional ability. Also, I have tried to demonstrate the complicated multiple overdetermination of his symptoms and aspects of his character formation.     

Little Hans: a centennial review and reconsideration

Freud's "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy" has stimulated interminable "reanalysis." The case of Little Hans, an unprecedented experimental child analytic treatment, is reexamined in the light of newer theory and newly derestricted documents. The understanding of the complex overdetermination of Hans's phobia was not possible in the heroic age of psychoanalysis. Current analytic thought, as well as distance de-idealization vis-à-vis the pioneering past, has potentiated a reformation of the case. The severe disturbance of his mother had an adverse impact on Little Hans and his family. Her abuse of Hans's infant sister has been overlooked by generations of analysts. Trauma, child abuse, parental strife, and the preoedipal mother-child relationship emerge as important issues that intensified Hans's pathogenic oedipal conflicts and trauma. With limited, yet remarkable help from his father and Freud, Little Hans nevertheless had the ego strength and resilience to resolve his phobia, resume progressive development, and forge a successful creative career.     

A sadomasochistic transference: its relation to distortions in the rapprochement subphase.

The development of a rageful sadomasochistic transference early in an analysis is presented. We describe key interventions that foster its resolution and offer a reconstruction of the patient's early life, focusing on difficulty in the rapprochement phase. We believe that the intense and difficult to manage sadomasochistic transference was linked to a repudiation of both preoedipal and oedipal triangulation, resulting in the perpetuation of a hostile dependent mother-child dyad and in the patient's unconscious belief that sadomasochistic interactions were the only means of establishing and maintaining a close relationship.     

The reconstruction of reminiscence

The lifting of repression and of infantile amnesia was an original aim and goal of clinical psychoanalysis. Memory may be more or less reliable and authentic. However, it tends to be subjective, self-serving, and selective, and there are different memory modalities and systems. The recovery of repressed childhood memory has been largely subsumed under the analysis of unconscious conflict and fantasy. "Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences," and these reminiscences interweave with and contribute to reconstruction, which is intrinsic to psycho-analysis. Memory and reconstruction are subject to the influence of special interests, transference, and countertransference. Since open questions remain concerning preoedipal, and particularly preverbal, reconstruction, external confirmation may further both the analytic process and analytic research. The process of reconstruction integrates and transcends memory, facilitating personality reorganization.     

Incest avoidance: oedipal and preoedipal, natural and cultural

Why do most people experience a subjective aversion to the idea of incestuous sexual relations? To help answer this question, recent strands of thinking in both cultural and evolutionary anthropology are considered together with psychoanalytic theories regarding incest avoidance. Coevolutionary theories that propose ways to think about genetic and cultural inheritance as partially independent of each other, evolutionary arguments about the reproductive advantages of incest avoidance, structuralist theory arguing for a kind of incest aversion unrelated to any possible Darwinian selective advantage, and other trends in biosocial research into the origins of the incest avoidance are considered. Finally, a synthesis is proposed that seeks to expand our understanding of the oedipal and preoedipal dynamics of the aversion as these are conceptualized in psychoanalytic theory.     

Three visits to eternity: Freud, Wiesel, and Patient X

Freud's experience on the Acropolis is reviewed and reappraised. Also, the experience of Elie Wiesel at the Wall in Jerusalem and Patient X's reaction visiting an Egyptian temple are examined. Carl Jung's wish to go to Rome and his inability to do so are noted. The aim of the paper is to offer deeper understanding about intense reactions many sensitive and creative people experience over travel to special places. These places are treated as idealized and ambivalently loved transference objects. Normal anticipatory pleasure prior to the trip is impaired and reality pleasure at the site cannot be enjoyed. When these spots are reached, ego regression is initiated by the intolerably intense narcissistic pleasure mobilized by the gratification of fantasies that were felt to be unrealizable. The fantasies can be conscious or unconscious and from oedipal as well as preoedipal and postoedipal developmental levels; however, they always involve the fulfillment of overwhelmingly powerful wishes. The deep ego regression, archaic fantasies, and the complex defenses mobilized are frightening since there may also be concern about ego dissolution or irreversible transformation. One highly adaptive solution which helps master these conflictual and developmental experiences is creative ego activity. While maintaining integrity for the individual ego and enhancing the self, creative work and accomplishment also enrich and advance the cultural process.     

Murdered father; dead father: Revisiting the Oedipus complex1

This paper recovers the notion of the sacrifice of sexuality as the central, tragic, element of the oedipal structure. This notion has been largely abandoned in the psychoanalytic literature that has tended to reduce the oedipal structure to processes of exclusion. The paper traces the development of the theoretical and clinical transformations of Freud ’s ideas on the role of the father and suggests that they allow us to more fully comprehend the Oedipus complex proposed by Freud. A paradox is explored: the killing of the father is, in Freud ’s view, the requirement for the creation of the social order which, from then on, prohibits all killings. The father, however, has to be killed metaphorically only, as the actual exclusion of the father lies at the origin of so many psychopathologies from violence to the psychoses and perversions. The paper analyses the fundamental asymmetry that is present in the Oedipal structure and suggests that the three elements of the oedipal triangle constitute the law (of the dead father, that institutes the sacrifice of sexuality), desire (for the lost object) and identification (with both father and mother). Two clinical examples are discussed. In the first, one can identify a perverse structure in which the father has been murdered; in the second, there is a progressive construction of the dead (symbolic) father in the analytic process.