The Possibility of Multiple Models for Oedipal Development

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.