Female Oedipus Complex Research Articles

Gender Constitution and Reversible Potentiality: The Making of the Masculine Subject in Longus’sDaphnis and Chloe

This study places Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe in dialogue with Foucault and Freud, arguing that within the liminality of adolescence, the formation of gendered subjectivity is a condition of “reversible potentiality” in which any given act of the subject represents the radical potential for the subject to be acted upon. Seeking to disrupt the presumptive equivalence between masculine subjectivity and knowledge/power, the author turns to Lycaeneion’s education of Daphnis as a case study in male subject formation. Here, knowledge functions as a force of immobilization rather than empowerment. If Daphnis’s psychosomatic identification with feminine sexuality is understood as a symptom of male sexual development in pederastic culture, then the Freudian female Oedipus complex can be reimagined as descriptive of the boy’s progression out of sexual objectification and into the role of active sexual pursuer, a stage through which boys in pederastic culture must pass on their way to adult male subjectivity.

Penis Envy and the Female Oedipus Complex: A Plea to Reawaken an Ineffectual Debate.

Going along with Laplanche's assumption that there is no endogenous sexuality, the authors discuss Freud's concepts of the female Oedipus complex and penis envy and some of its proposed alternatives. The female oedipal conflict turns out to be the outcome of a projective identification with the Oedipus complexes of the mother and father. In the context of the rivalry with the mother, penis envy refers to the maternal power over the father's penis that the daughter wants to have in herself, while, in the context of the rivalry with the father, penis envy arises from the jealousy of the father's penis that the daughter believes is necessary to have on herself in order to satisfy her mother. The authors conclude that in Freud's day such insights were already available, which might have culminated in the conceptualization they present in this paper.

On Myths and Myth-Making: Psychoanalytic Theorizing about Mother—Daughter Relationships and The “Female Oedipus Complex”

A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed. By Nancy Kulish and Deanna Holtzman. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 2008. 218 pp.Electra Versus Oedipus: The Drama of the Mother—Daughter Relationship. By Hendrika C. Freud; translated by Marjolin de Jager. London/New York: Routledge, 2011. 205 pp.The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood. By Barbara Almond. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2010. 265 pp.

“The Power of Christ Compels You”: Holy Water, Hysteria, and the Oedipal Psychodrama in The Exorcist

Though made forty years ago, William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1971) remains a shocking film, as scenes of Regan's bodily contortions and convulsions, explicit acts of masturbation, and sexual abuse...

Daddy Issues in J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country

In this article, we try to explore the psychological problems of Magda, the main female character in J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, and the causes of the disorders. Using the theories of Oedipus Complex in females, we try to prove that Magda suffers from neurosis, which later develops into psychosis. The serious mental problems in the young lady result from her unsuccesful resolution of her sexual desire towards her own father. Magda’s female Oedipus Complex is caused by the absence of the mother figure, the sexual attachment to the father, and the unrevoked hatred toward the mother competitor.

A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed (review)

A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed (review)

Chiasmatic Narrative and Twisted Subjectivity in Kanai Mieko's Boshizô

The article provides a reading, from a psychoanalytic point of view, of Japanese writer Kanai Mieko’s short tale Boshizo (Portrait of Mother and Child), published in 1992, as a “twisted” or “contorted” parable of the construction of female subjectivity. Establishing connections between the form and the content of the novel, the essay analyzes how Kanai’s use of the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus structures the internal narrative of the novel at the same time that it reflects the process of formation of female subjectivity and desire. The novel becomes, thus, a staging of the female Oedipus complex which plays out its twists.

Mothers and Daughters from Today's Psychoanalytic Perspective

In this paper, I review and synthesize findings that may help us remodel the way we think about the vicissitudes of the mother-daughter relationship. Although exciting new ideas are burgeoning in the literature, there seems to be a lag between discoveries and their integration into clinical practice. Older theories emphasizing separation and the girl's “change of libidinal object” from mother to father reflect linear models that do not encompass the development we observe and experience. Newer theories depict development as interactive and relational throughout the life cycle—leading not to separation but to autonomy with connectedness. Applying male models to the female superego or speaking of the “female Oedipus complex” is misleading. New myths are being proposed to describe the conflicts integral to the girl's triangular situation. Applying the myth of Persephone and Demeter has been especially instructive. Many analysts tend to pathologize or infantilize the woman's ongoing tie to her mother and tend to misunderstand the intense ambivalence between daughter and mother. Once we recognize that the course of development is not linear, we should expect to see the woman revisiting, reexamining, and resynthesizing representations of self-versus-mother and self-with-mother over her lifetime.

'My heart belongs to daddy'. Some reflections on the difference between generations as the organiser of the triangular structure of the mind.

The author begins his paper with a historical review of the concept of the difference between generations, which is in his opinion a metaphorical transformation that underpins the three-dimensional functioning of the psychic apparatus by introducing a differentiating intergenerational space between subject and object. He postulates that at the point of intersection between the intersubjective and the intrapsychic the subject clings to the specific fragments of his parents' history that are consistent with a belief about himself and the oedipal couple in which intergenerational links are severed and infantile incestuous wishes are seen as fulfilled. Disavowal of this generation gap is considered to lead to failure of post-oedipal secondary identifications, resulting in disturbance of the triangular structuring of the mind and consequent impairment of the genesis of thought processes. These ideas are compared with related conceptions of other authors and illustrated, with an account of the associated transference/countertransference vicissitudes, by a clinical example of the constellation the author calls 'My heart belongs to daddy', which he sees as a way station in the negotiation of the female Oedipus complex.

Journal reviews

Articles reviewed:Astor, James: ‘Some Jungian and Freudian perspectives on the Oedipus myth and beyond’.Colman Warren: ‘That within which passes show: Hamlet and the unknowable Self’.Halberstadt‐Freud H. C: ‘Electra versus Oedipus Ð Femininity reconsidered’.Kulish, Nancy & Holtzman, Deanna: ‘Persephone, the loss of virginity and the female Oedipus complex’Hopkins, Linda B: ‘D. W. Winnicott's analysis of Masud Khan: a preliminary study of failures of object usage’.Miletic, Michael (ed.): ‘Perspectives on the analyst's self‐disclosure during psychoanalysis’.Miletic, Michael J. (ed.): ‘Perspectives on the analyst's self‐disclosure during psychoanalysis’.Ornstein, Anna: ‘The fate of narcissistic rage in psychotherapy’.Solomon, Hester McFarland: ‘Love, Paradox of Self and Other’.Stack, Carolyn: ‘The analyst's new clothes: the impact of the therapist's unconscious conflicts on the treatment process’.Von Der Tann, Matthias: ‘Was lesen Jungianer in Berlin für das Examen?’–‘What do Jungians in Berlin read for their final paper?’

Why Bettelheim?: A Comment on the Use of Psychological Theories in Criticism

Why Bettelheim?A Comment on the Use of Psychological Theories in Criticism Michael Steig (bio) As an erstwhile psychoanalytic critic, I am increasingly skeptical about the uncritical use of psychological grids in literary interpretation. Bruno Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment in particular often seems to be taken as Truth rather than as the views of one psychiatrist holding one set of values. Accepting Bettelheim's basic model of the use of fairy tales by children to externalize and (in fantasy) resolve their unconscious conflicts and anxieties is one thing—though even that model can be questioned; accepting his moralizing tendencies is something else. Thus, although I find "Unlocked by Love" a very insightful discussion of the particular appeal of four of William Steig's picture books with child protagonists, I must express some concern about the way in which Bettelheim is used. Arlene Wilner's suggestion that William Steig's Sylvester is transformed into a rock as a punishment seems to derive from Bettelheimian assumptions about misconduct and justice in stories for children. Or does she assume that all calamities in children's stories are viewed by child readers as punishments? In either case, we are distanced from the experience of reading when the critic fails to describe her own relation to either the theory or the interpretation. There is nothing new in the unquestioning acceptance and application [End Page 125] of psychological precepts: literary critics have been doing it for years, whether the source of undisputed wisdom is Freud, Jung, Bettelheim, or Lacan. (A recent example: Michael Reed's piece in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 11, on the female Oedipus complex in Outside Over There—an interesting article that nonetheless gives no sense of the author's basis for accepting Freud's theories.) The special problem with Bettelheim (also true of Freud to an extent) is that his supposedly scientific view of child development is fraught with values that can be called political and moralistic, a fixed set of ideas about how children should develop. "Unlocked by Love" does communicate some sense of the author's feelings about the appeal of the stories by William Steig, and no doubt Bettelheim's basic model was a necessary starting point for the article. But this critic and all too many others keep the works they interpret at a distance by choosing to apply "well-accepted" views of child development without considering that any theory of a universal pattern of development is open to serious doubts—if only by the fact that it claims universality. What I am suggesting is that the criticism of children's literature needs greater awareness both of the possible weaknesses in particular psychological theories and of the processes of reading and interpretation. [End Page 126] Michael Steig Michael Steig teaches at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Dickens and Phiz (1978) and Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding (1989). Copyright © 1990 The Children's Literature Foundation, Inc.

The Female Oedipus Complex and the Relationship to the Body

The Female Oedipus Complex and the Relationship to the Body