The Oediple Complex

 The Oediple Complex

The Oediple Complex is simply the threefold relation between the infant, it’s mother and a third person which may be the father, or another person.  Reducing Sophocles play or Shakespeare’s Hamlet to actual biological relations and then adding onto that matrix the unconscious motivations related to the castration complex, phobias, sibling rivalry, and other disorders, especially hysteria, is what most psychoanalysts do.  

The development of the idea put Freud in different speculative positions from a seduction theory to a fantasy theory. Experimental social psychology and ethology have clarified what is in fact occurring: infants experience stranger anxiety and separation anxiety to which various attributions are associated. Also, infants seek comfort over food to which they form attachments. Most of the vissitudes of the so-called Oedipal Complex are unique and arbitrary. Infants, children and adults change their attachments or objects for a variety of reasons. The attachment to family roles is dogma even though incest between parents and offspring, and between siblings, is universally discouraged if not illegal. But, social and psychological relations between family members persist under a death drive where separation is denied leading to the excessive rates of domestic violence and interpersonal violence.