From Oedipus Complex to Oedipal Complexity: Reconfiguring (Pardon the Expression) the Negative Oedipus Complex and the Disowned Erotics of Disowned Sexualities

This paper proposes a contemporary rendering of the Oedipus Complex as key to understanding an individual’s unique erotic signature. Conceived in terms of its complexity as opposed to a fixed and rigid complex and ridded of its hetereonormative biases, Oedipal complexity becomes a royal road to unlocking erotic inhibitions and potentiating sensual expansiveness. The theory is rooted in a multiple self state model of mind with an emphasis on conflicting systems of early internalized object relations. Two extended clinical examples are offered in an attempt to further explicate this point of view.     

Infantile Sexuality, Primary Object-Love and the Anthropological Signifi Cance of the Oedipus Complex: Re-Reading Freud's 'Female Sexuality'

The author attempts to show why and in what respect Freud's famous article 'Female sexuality' can still be a source of inspiration for a contemporary metapsychology. In this text, Freud acknowledges the importance of the child's tie to its mother for the fi rst time. Both Balint and Bowlby consider this text to be a distant forerunner of their own theories on primary object-love and attachment respectively. At the same time, Freud's text contains some elements of a 'theory of generalized seduction' as it was developed in the last decades by Jean Laplanche. 'Female sexuality' therefore presents itself as the perfect point of departure for a discussion of the relation between primary object-love (and attachment) and sexuality. Based on his reading of Freud's text, the author argues that human subjectivity is characterized by the lack of attunement between the world of the adult and the world of the child. This insight allows for a reformulation of the anthropological signifi cance of the Oedipus and castration complexes. They are no longer interpreted as universal problems that every child has to face, but as historical and contingent solutions to the lack of attunement between the child and the adult that is essential to human subjectivity.     

God, Determinism, and Action: Perspectives from Physics

Recent articles by Michael Heller, Carl Helrich, Peter Hodgson, Jeffrey Koperski, and Nicholas Saunders present a challenge to much current thinking on God, divine action, and cosmology. In the process, they also reveal underlying assumptions and current problems, especially in the debate over physics and divine action. In particular, three issues come up that need to be addressed further. First, what is the status of determinism, and what can physics contribute? Second, what kind of divine action are we talking about? Third, what is the relationship between God and time, and how does this affect claims about the personhood of God? While these essays present necessary critiques and interesting, positive proposals, they also reveal unresolved tensions that need to be addressed.     

Converting a Freudian analysis into a Jungian one: obsession,addiction, and an answer from Job

In his analyses of obsessional patients, Sigmund Freud suggested that they suffered from intrusive cognitions and compulsive activities. Early psychoanalysts delineated the phenomenology of obsessionality, but did not differentiate what is currently termed obsessive‐compulsive disorder from obsessional personality. However, it was widely recognized that the success of psychoanalysis with obsessional patients was limited due to rigid characterological defences and transference resistances. The present paper examines the case of a middle‐aged obsessional academic who had been treated for nearly twenty years in a ‘classical' Freudian psychoanalysis prior to entering Jungian analysis. It examines how persistent focus on Oedipal conflicts undesirably reinforced the transference resistance in this obsessional man, and suggests that focusing instead on diminishing the harshness of the super‐ego via the therapeutic alliance, and fostering faith in the salutary aspects of unconscious processing has led to salutary results in this case. The biblical book of Job is adopted as ancient instruction in how to address the scrupulosity and addictive mental structuring of obsessionality in analysis.     

Rethinking the Learning Society: Giorgio Agamben on Studying,Stupidity, and Impotence

In this article, the author rethinks critiques of the learning society using Giorgio Agamben’s theory of potentiality. Summarizing several major contributions to our understanding of the limitations of the discourse of learning, the author proposes that critics thus far have failed to fully pinpoint the exact danger of learning. Importantly, learning is not only a rejection of the democratic or political dimension of education but it is first and foremost predicated on a false ontology of potentiality. What is put at risk in learning is a sacrifice of our (im)potential, our capacity to be or not to be this or that within the order of things. Through a reconstruction of Agamben’s theory of studying, the author argues for a different conceptualization of freedom in education, of teaching, and of the time of education.     

Klein's Archaic Oedipus Complex and Its Possible Relationship to the Myth of the Labyrinth: Notes on the Origin of Courage

The ancient Greek myth linking the images of the labyrinth and the Minotaur provides an allegory for Melanie Klein's conception of the archaic Oedipus complex as well as a vivid illustration of Winnicott's notions of object usage and the 'subjective object'. The labyrinth is suggestive of mother's body as the first area for an infant's exploration and putative sadistic conquest. The Minotaur, in turn, suggests the infant's unconscious phantasies about the content of mother's body, namely such projective identifications onto that body as the paternal penis and the 'internal babies'. Further, the heroic dynamic personified by Theseus in the myth of the labyrinth metaphorically signifies what is here proposed as a developmental line that involves the courage to do a number of things, including to become, to create, to seek, to explore, to do, to challenge, to undertake risks, to accept, to rescue, to initiate, to think, to know and to realize. The Minotaur can thus be thought to serve as a universal subjective signifier for an 'Object of Challenge', which, if not successfully dealt with by the ego-development of the infant, transforms that default into the 'Object of Nemesis'. Ultimately, this myth of mastery speaks to the psychoanalytic process itself as well as casting light on the transformative aspects of sexual intercourse as a personal healing ritual.     

Video Treatment Re-Examined: Enactments,Erotic Transference,and the Third: Reply to Lyons and Williams

This discussion will address clinical, procedural, and theoretical issues raised by Lyons and Williams in response to my paper. I will elaborate on potential enactments, the erotic transference, and the third as related to the case.     

God, Freedom, and Evil: Perspectives from Religion and Science

This paper develops analogies concerning the evolution of dissipative structures in nonequilibrium thermodynamics to interpret irrational human behavior in which one finds a lack of correspondence between the invested means and the consequences observed. In an attempt to positively explain the process of cooperation between the free human person and interacting God, I use philosophical categories of Whitehead's process philosophy in an aesthetic model that opposes composition and performance in a musical symphony. Certainly, the essence of human freedom can be expressed in neither thermodynamical nor aesthetic terms. The models proposed can, however, facilitate our understanding of the mutual relations between God's action in the world and the drama of human free choice of moral evil.     

Pleasure and displeasure from the body: Perspectives from exercise

We investigated some types of triggers of embarrassment and their personality correlates. A total of 161 undergraduates indicated how embarrassed they would be in a variety of situations classified a priori into three types. The types were based on the kind of trigger they embodied and were derived in part from current theories of embarrassment. Several analytic techniques, including factor analysis, suggested that there are at least three sorts of situations people find embarrassing: committing a faux pas, being the centre of attention, and threatening another's social identity. We created a subscale for each subtype of trigger. Embarrassibility on each subscale was correlated with embarrassibility on the others, but the reliabilities of the subscales substantially exceeded their intercorrelations. Some personality variables, for example, Neuroticism (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975) correlated with all subscales, whereas other personality variables correlated differentially, for example, Revised Self-Monitoring (Lennox & Wolf, 1984), Interaction Anxiousness (Leary, 1983), and Rejection Sensitivity (Downey & Feldman, 1996). We believe, contrary to previous suggestions (Edelmann & McCusker, 1986), that there are subtypes of triggers of embarrassment and they they roughly correspond to the different causes of embarrassment as proposed by various theorists. We discuss the implications of our results for theories of embarrassment.     

The Oedipus Complex: Solutions or Resolutions,by Rhona M. Fear,Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018, 160 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -