Further Thoughts on the Oedipal Lens: Reply to Commentaries

ABSTRACT

My response aims to demonstrate how a capacity for triangular space allows us to tolerate and encompass differences of all sorts, ranging from theoretical orientations to family and coupling structures. I re-emphasize the contemporary Kleinian/Bionian Oedipus as a developmental model of the mind that is a departure from the classical model of the Oedipus complex and its associated anchoring in psychosexual development. I reargue the necessity of divorcing Oedipal theory from its historical heterosexist bias and highlight the clinical relevance of a contemporary Oedipal lens when working with a wide variety of non-heteronormative relationships, including, LGBTQ couples, families and single parents.

This article responds to:

Triangular Dynamics and Triangular Space: A Response to Shelley Nathans’ “Oedipus for Everyone: Revitalizing the Model for LGBTQ Couples and Single Parent Families”

Rethinking Oedipus or Not

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shelley Nathans

Shelley Nathans, Ph.D., practices in San Francisco and Oakland, and is Faculty at California Pacific Medical Center, Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group, and The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is the director/producer of the film, Robert Wallerstein: 65 Years at the Center of Psychoanalysis. Her publications include “45 Years” (Fort Da in 2018); “Whose Disgust is it Anyway?: Projection and Projective Identification in the Couple Relationship” (Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2016); and “Infidelity as Manic Defence” (Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 2012). She is co-editor (with Milton Schaefer) of Couples on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy and the Tavistock Model (Routledge, 2017).