The Kore Complex: on a Woman’s Inheritance of Her Mother’s Failed Oedipus Complex

Abstract

The Greek myth of Kore/Persephone captures a particular psychopathology of women who are torn between a deadened and often asexual husband (Hades) and an ongoing close relationship with a caretaking mother (Demeter). Psychoanalytic work often reveals that these women live in the shadow of their mothers’ failed oedipal complex. Their identificatory preoccupation with maternal object preservation disrupted or distorted their oedipal development, and ever since continues to serve as a defense against sexual strivings. Thus, these women are trapped in a Kore complex: as maiden caretakers, they remain attached to and torn between a “grain mother” and a grandfather transference object.

• Greek mythology
• Kore/Persephone
• life and death drives
• female development
• oedipal phase
• object preservation and self-preservation
• transgenerational transmission
• object choice
• sexuality
• anxiety
• libido and lethe
• mental structures