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

Abstract

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.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A much earlier version of this paper was first given as a keynote address to the Division of Psychoanalysis, Division 39 of the American Psychological Association, 26th Annual Spring Meeting, April 22, 2006, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Notes

¹ From this point on I refer only to homoerotic and heteroerotic dimensions of erotic fantasy life. Although I do not wish to ignore or minimize the multidimensional imaginative potentials of trans fantasy, I have not personally worked with enough trans individuals to try to responsibly apply the thesis of my paper to their experiences. I look forward to a future time and future papers in which that might be possible either for me or for others.

² I think it is important to add here, that one unfortunate artifact of clinical writing is the need to collapse interactions and “interpretations” that were unpacked over months of clinical work and were elaborated in years of deepening understanding. Although my comments to Sam, previously described, are verbatim, they were never offered all at once in the precise manner described, but rather offered across time, as each particular dimension could be tolerated, experienced, and integrated. A psychoanalytic paper asks its author to use clinical material in order to explicate how certain theoretical ideas impact the analytic work. That is why we write. But I do want to note that the tact, timing, and empathic sensitivity with which we proceed is unique to each individual and harder to capture in the confines of a brief paper.

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Notes on contributors

Jody Messler Davies

Jody Messler Davies, Ph.D., was Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues from 1998 to 2008. She is Faculty and Supervisor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Founding Vice President of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Founding Board Member of the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies; Faculty Member, National Institute for the Psychotherapies; the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. She is coauthor of Treating the Adult Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Psychoanalytic Perspective; and author of many papers on trauma and dissociation; a multiple self state model of mind; erotic transference and countertransference; the Oedipus complex and the termination process.