“The Baby With the Cream Puffs”: Further Complications in Oedipal Complexities, Commentary on Paper by Jody Messler Davies

Abstract

Davies (this issue) recasts the pathologizing/heteronormative “positive and negative” Oedipus complex into a model where “primary and secondary” oedipal configurations constitute the kaleidoscope of sensual/erotic experience—for heterosexually and homosexually developing individuals. Further complexity could include nontraditional (e.g., lesbian-/gay-parented) families and the development of their children. If there is no genital difference between parents, no clear gender-role divide—and the (relational) triangle is only the beginning—how do we conceptualize the development of these children, who are likely to be heterosexual with a “typical” gender identity? Davies points us toward the multiplicity inherent in the disowned unconscious longings (and communications) of any parent—or in Laplanche’s terms, the plurality contained in the adult and its elaboration in the “enigmatic message” to the child. Such enigmatic communications, in addition to more lateral and cultural influences, may constitute the unconscious substrate (if not the cause) of fluid, complex gender and erotic subjectivities.

Notes

¹ The opponent-process theory was based, in part, on observations of the emotions of skydivers, as well as dogs exposed to electric shocks. Two affective components of these experiences, such as fear (of the event) and relief (at its termination), with repeated pairing, shift in their relative intensity over time, so that fear is diminished and relief is elevated to pleasure. Eventually, there is a shift from fear to pleasure after multiple experiences.

² Laplanche talks about the fundamentally alien and exotic nature of the adult’s sexuality for the infant—sexuality that the infant does not innately possess him- or herself. Perhaps Bem, too, from a radically different vantage point, is also describing a fundamental experience of alien otherness when he describes the developing child’s sense of the exotic and of the difference between the self and peers (as well as the culture as embodied most concretely in peers and their messages).

³ Lisa Diamond (2003), a prominent sexuality researcher, has proposed that the attachment (or pair-bonding and, therefore, love) system is separate from the sexual mating system, given that they evolved to serve different functions (see also Fisher, 1998), but that the biobehavioral links between love (attachment) and (sexual) desire are bidirectional (e.g., the neuropeptide oxytocin is implicated in both). In her model, under the right circumstances, the bidirectional linkages between the systems can sometimes lead to novel sexual desires—as with Davies’s patient Ted, a gay-identified man who has fallen in love and desire with a woman.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noah S. Glassman

Noah S. Glassman, Ph.D., is a member of the Psychoanalytic Society of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. His most recent publication is a chapter with Steven Botticelli, Ph.D., “Perspectives on Gay Fatherhood: Emotional Legacies and Clinical Reverberations,” in Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience (2014), edited by Steven Kuchuck. He is in private practice in New York City.