Challenging Oedipus in changing families: Gender identifications and access to origins in same-sex parent families created through third-party reproduction

Abstract

ABSTRACTSocio-cultural changes and advancements in assisted reproduction over the past 40 years have led to a rise in new family forms, including same-sex parent families formed through donor insemination or surrogacy, wherein the loving couple does not coincide with the generative couple and the parents do not embody sexual difference. Can we still understand the gender identification processes and the path of accessing one’s origins through the lens of the Oedipal complex? In keeping with the Freudian concepts of “psychosexuality,” “primal scene” and “family romance,” as well as the more recent developments in psychoanalysis, attachment theory and infant research, this article aims at revisiting the Oedipal “complex” as Oedipal “complexity,” which may apply irrespective of parents’ anatomical characteristics. However, this “complexity” does not renounce parents’ bodies and sexuality as important to children’s development. Maintaining the concept of third following the parental couple, and position within generations in the idea of Oedipal complexity, the authors suggest that a child’s development pathways will depend not only on the intersection of the child’s Oedipal and pre-Oedipal levels, but also on the parents’ early relational events and internalisation of their own parental figures, which are not necessarily pre-determined by their gender or sexual orientation.