From Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ : “The little girl likes to regard herself as what her father loves above all else; but the time comes when she has to endure a harsh punishment from him, and she is cast out of her fool’s paradise. The boy regards his mother as his own property; but he finds one day that she has transferred her love and solicitude to a new arrival. Reflection must deepen our sense of the importance of those influences, for it will emphasize the fact that distressing experiences of this sort, which act in opposition to the content of the complex, are inevitable. “The [subsequent] process…is more than a repression. It is equivalent, if it is ideally carried out, to a destruction and an abolition of the complex. We may plausibly assume that we have here come upon the borderline - never a very sharply drawn one - between the normal and the pathological. If the ego has in fact not achieved much more than a repression of the complex, the latter persists in an [however indiscernibly!] unconscious state in the id, and will later manifest its pathogenic effect. “Analytic observation enables us to recognize or guess the connections between the phallic organization, the Oedipus complex, the threat of castration, the formation of the super-ego, and the latency period. These connections justify the statement that the destruction of the Oedipus complex is brought about by the threat of castration. But this does not dispose of the problem; there is room for a theoretical speculation which may upset the results we have come to or put them in a new light. Before we start along this new path, however, we must turn to a question which has arisen in the course of this discussion and has so far been left on one side. The process which has been described refers, as has been expressly said, to male children only. How does the corresponding development take place in little girls? “The fear of castration being thus excluded in the little girl, a powerful motive also drops out for the setting-up of a super-ego and for the breaking-off of the infantile genital organization. In her, far more than in the boy, these changes seem to be the result of upbringing and of intimidation from outside, which threatens her with a loss of love. “The girl’s Oedipus complex is much simpler than that of the small bearer of the penis; in my experience, it seldom goes beyond the taking of her mother’s place and the adopting of a feminine attitude towards her father. Renunciation of the penis is not tolerated by the girl without some attempt at compensation. She slips - along the line of a symbolic equation, one might say - from the penis to a baby. Her Oedipus complex culminates in a desire, which is long retained, to receive a baby from her father as a gift - to bear him a child. One has an impression that the Oedipus complex is then gradually given up, because this wish is never fulfilled.”
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 13:21:37 +0000
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