Oedipal Structure Research Articles

An Intimacy of Strangers: An Aesthetic Clinic

Abstract: Fernanda Negrete's The Aesthetic Clinic. Feminine Sublimation in Contemporary Writing, Psychoanalysis, and Art proposes art as a therapeutic that does not embrace the dream of homeostasis, but it is linked to a feminine enjoyment and to an experience of non-totalization. Through the work of Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector, Negrete makes art intervene in psychoanalysis and vice versa. Tracing an intractable and incurable jouissance , in which intensity overflows what is communicable and does not settle in the signifier or the Oedipal structure, she puts into conversation Freud, Lacan, and Deleuze. Art, Negrete argues, shares the experience of the excessive enjoyment of the feminine. Thus, critics desire the knowledge of the unconscious, a knowledge that cannot be mastered or totalized because it decenters not only the artist but also the viewers and the critics.

The “Mesmerised States” of Becoming-Woman in D. H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and The Gipsy

D. H. Lawrence introduces a new ontological dimension into his writing, emphasising the primacy of unbounded desire over oedipal structures situated in the social, political and sexual spheres. His writing often seeks to formulate unstructured, non-oedipalised, and non- binary relations to liberate life from its congealments and established boundaries, and to articulate it in its immanence. These new relations suggest a shift from “being” to "Deleuzian" becomings. The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930) is one of Lawrence’s novels in which characters are transposed into such becomings primarily in the form of becoming-woman. Becoming- woman in the novel calls for new modes of relationality going beyond the molar paradigms of sexual and religious identity imposed within the striated space of the Rectory house, and promises "mesmerised states" of transgression. This paper aims to investigate this affective trajectory of becoming-woman in Lawrence’ The Virgin and the Gipsy in the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s theories. Keywords: Oedipalisation, Becoming-Woman, Lawrence, Deleuze and Guattari, Affect.

A Psychoanalytical Reading of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck

Ibsen, as a playwright, as Thomas F. Van Lann comments, has been accused of deceiving his audience regarding the matters of his play- both its central business and its manner; particularly in his style and mode. While reviewing Ibsen through a Lacanian lens, critics such as Oliver W. Gerland III, argue that reading Ibsen is a task of revising interpretative paradigms and that Ibsen’s protagonist revises strategies for enacting the “self”. The Wild Duck (1884), has been critiqued as a poignant drama of illusions, where an idealistic outsider’s gratuitous truth-telling destroys a family. This paper argues that Ibsen’s texts stage the Oedipal crisis in a revised form by taking recourse to Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, where he suggests a paradigmatic triad as a representation of the displaced form of familar Oedipal structure. For Lacan, the Oedipal structure is not a simple love for the mother and hatred for the father, rather it places the child in the realm of the Symbolic, i.e its linguistic association with the father. He argues that the self is rooted in the mirror stage and the infant’s identification with images of coherence and stability- e.g its own reflected image. This paper argues that Ibsen locates his drama in the simples of the Oedipal complex, but revises it. Hjalmar Ekdal’s Imaginary web is disrupted when the idealist Gregers Werle breaks down the Imaginary, invokes the Symbolic authoritarian “no”, and substitutes it with the retelling of Hakon Werle. This paper seeks to accentuate Gregers’ idealism as what Lacan termed as obsessional neurosis and a display of his own lacking in preserving his Imaginary i.e playing a father to his friend and maintaining Hjalmar’s heroic image in his mind, finally resulting in little Hedvig’s suicide.

Perversion: Possibilities of A Decentralized Democracy

In this article, we discuss a function of the “perversion” which, although there are in the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, from Freud to Lacan, but in the continues of article it “perverse” from that path to expand and develop from within and articulate itself with some concepts from other realms and look for an alternative approach to explain and intervene in the theoretical and practical world. This approach is a montage of the concepts of psychoanalysis, philosophy, politics and sociology, that the main problematic of which is obtain a critical understanding of our current social situation in the context of the transformations of contemporary history and finally to think about the “politics of the future”. For this reason, wherever we talk about “perversion”, we should absolutely not rely on its pathological meaning, but should see it as a pure form and process. With this perspective, we will first discuss Freud’s formulation of fetishism and we trace it in Lacan’s works and the distinction he makes between desire and drive. In the following, we try to keep going on our argument by a pluralistic point of view, in accordance with the plurality of drives, instead of a unitarian point of view to man and society. For this purpose, we go beyond psychoanalysis and discuss the concept of the drive according to Leibniz and Nietzsche, as well as the concept of “Becoming-Woman” by Deleuze and Guattari and we fold it again on the concept of “feminine jouissance’s Lacan to measure that’s relationship with queer feminism and its social and political implications. The central question of this article is what effect does the decline of patriarchal functions and Oedipal structures in the late modernity have on the dynamism of desire and drive and various social and political morphogenesis based on it? The political claim of this article is that theology, patriarchy, and capitalism are historically integrated in the nation-state form and then by looking at the experience of the revolutionary movement of “woman, life, freedom” in Iran, we seek to provide a new analytical and discursive framework to think about anti-authority social movements which seeks to establish a horizontal and egalitarian social geometry instead of the vertical and oppressive ruling geometry.

The murder of the dead father: The Shoah and contemporary antisemitism

ABSTRACT It is suggested in this paper that in the Shoah one is confronted with the abolition of the Law of the Dead Father and the re-establishing of the tyranny of the narcissistic father. In the extermination of the Jews of Europe in the Shoah, the aim was the destruction of the rules of genealogy and filiation to both mother and father that establish the social and give rise to personhood and are at the core of the oedipal structure. The rule of absolute power – the destruction of any sense of maternal care and paternal rules – leads ultimately to the creation of the abject. Freud distinguished between two different types of obstacles to psychoanalytic treatment that are expressions of the death drive. The first is bound and is related to the superego; it is connected to the negative therapeutic reaction, masochism, and the unconscious sense of guilt. The other manifestation of the death drive is unbound and diffuse. If the first is understandable, the second, he suggests, escapes any understanding. The paper makes use of this distinction to examine Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil.

Edypalny charakter relacji pomiędzy religiami Abrahamowymi

The basic research problem presented in the article is expressed by the question about the cause of the tension between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and about the importance of this fact for social life. It is shown here on the example of the tension between Christianity and Judaism, limiting the analysis of the discourse to selected fragments of the New Testament. On the theoretical level, the psychoanalytical tradition as perceived by Jacques Lacan and Paul Ricœur was referred to. In the conclusions of the study, it was found that the development of monotheistic religions follows the Oedipal structure. The originators of new salvation scenarios unconsciously enter into the form of their predecessors, becoming their embodiment.

Oedipus for Everyone: Revitalizing the Model for LGBTQ Couples and Single Parent Families

ABSTRACT The misguided application of Oedipal theory has led to the pathologizing of those with different gender identities or sexual preferences. Despite this harm, Oedipal dynamics are often viewed as a central organizing schema for understanding the dynamics of couples and families. In this paper, I revitalize Oedipal theory, divorcing it from its historical heterosexist bias, and highlighting its relevance for working with couple and family relationships, including LGBTQ and single parent households. Rather than using classical Freudian Oedipal theory which situates Oedipus in the psychosexual development of children, I use a contemporary Kleinian/Bionian model to orient the discussion to the relevance of Oedipal issues in adult relationships. Problematic Oedipal dynamics are not always present, but when they dominate or underlie adult relationships, they can be stifling, destabilizing, and destructive. This perspective emphasizes the importance of considering Oedipal triadic structures when working with diverse couples and families.

『피에르, 혹은 모호함』

Herman Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities develops the psychological, sexual, and family tension between Pierre, his widowed mother(Mrs. Glendinning), his cousin(Glen), his fiancée(Lucy) and his half-sister(Isabel). One of the main issues Melville deals with in this novel is the incestuous relationship between Pierre and Isabel along with the incestuous familial relation with his mother. While some previous studies have focused on the issue from the Freudian perspective, this paper uses Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the Freudian Oedipal Complex to understand it. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the Oedipal model of the family is a kind of organization that colonizes its members, represses their desires, and gives them complexes. Such psychological repression forms docile individuals. Furthermore, they argue that a capitalist society needs a powerful tool to counteract the explosive force of desire, which has the potential to threaten its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy; the nuclear family is the powerful tool able to counteract those forces. Pierre subjected to the Oedipal structure resists the “law of the father” when realizing the existence of his illegitimate half-sister, Isabel who he gets married to later. As Isabel, a minoritarian, is not subordinated to the Oedipal structure, her existence itself threatens Mrs. Glendinning who represents a majority and she has a revolutionary power to deconstruct the fictitious organization of Oedipus Complex.

Metamorphosis, Refuge, and the Gaze: Non‐Binary Shorelines

Drawing on clinical material from sessions with three young trans patients, this re‐working of psychoanalysis seeks to open up new ways of analysing gender, in all its diversities. Gender is argued to function as a fetish, screen or trick, that covers over traumatic loss. This application of Lacan's theory of the gaze designates all gender expressions, whether cis or trans, as modes of creative action. Gender, as formed through societal limits and taboos, can also prove constricting in ways that trans and non‐binary people are productively challenging. Turning to Deleuze, Kafka and Butler problematizes oedipal structures, figuring potential resistances and escapes to the presumed naturalization and fixity of gender. The insistent pull of the drive is theorized by Freud as non‐binary, on the boundaries between psyche and soma and life and death; perhaps it is in relation to such a drive that any gender is precariously constituted.

Spoiling The Stories: The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction by Tamar Merin

Reviewed by: Spoiling The Stories: The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction by Tamar Merin Orian Zakai SPOILING THE STORIES: THE RISE OF ISRAELI WOMEN'S FICTION, by Tamar Merin. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. 216 pp. $99.95 cloth; $34.95 paper; $34.95 ebook. Tamar Merin's Spoiling the Stories: The Rise of Israeli Women's Fiction offers a sophisticated perspective on Israeli women's prose from the Statehood Generation (a group of writers who began publishing during the 1960s and 1970s) and their writings' relationship to the male-centric canon of modern Hebrew literature. The book's three main chapters each offer a nuanced discussion of the literary corpus of one author: Yehudit Hendel, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and Rachel Eytan, respectively. The analysis is guided by a mode of literary influence Merin terms "intersexual dialogue," a form of intertextuality in which women authors negotiate gender assumptions through poetics of dialogue, appropriation, and revision regarding their literary fathers, namely, canonical Hebrew figures such as S. Y. Agnon as well as non-canonical figures such as David Fogel and Uri Nissan Gnessin (p. 6). Along with drawing well-deserved attention to a group of writers who are little known to the English reader, this book is significant for offering an insightful discussion of the way women's literary voices are shaped within textual traditions that ostensibly privilege male voices. Women authors of the Statehood Generation did not gain as much critical and popular acclaim as their male counterparts. Notably, male authors of that generation such as A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz are the most widely read and translated Israeli authors even today. In contrast, Hendel, Kahana-Carmon, and Eytan are little known outside of Israel, and even among the Israeli reading public their work rarely resonates beyond the halls of academic and literary circles. This disparity speaks to the patriarchal structures that inform modern Hebrew literature and that Merin interrogates in this study. The introduction to the book aptly discusses the challenges that characterized women's entry into Hebrew literature. In traditional pre-Zionist Jewish society, women were excluded from studying the classic Hebrew texts of the Torah, the Midrash, and the Talmud and thus did not learn Hebrew. Women were therefore at a disadvantage when modern Hebrew language and literature emerged in the late nineteenth century, with few women participating in the fledgling literary scene. Furthermore, the traditional role assigned to the author of Jewish and Hebrew texts is that of an observer of the house of Israel, a poet-prophet whose mission is to comment on the situation of the people and guide them. Coming from a minority cultural position, women could not master the authority to comfortably occupy this position. Finally, women's positions in the field of Hebrew literature were limited by the androcentrism of the Zionist project [End Page 466] with its emphasis on the figures of the military hero and the halutz, the virile worker and defender of the land. Under these circumstances, women's entry into the Hebrew literary scene was a complicated endeavor. In setting out to chart the place of women within Hebrew literary history, the feminist scholar, Merin contends, faces a related issue, namely, how to account for the relationship between women authors and a literary tradition that is mostly masculine without reenacting a patriarchal Oedipal plot in which women's writing is subjugated to the symbolic order of the father. Against the grain of the Oedipal structure, Merin offers the term "intersexual dialogue" to encompass "the various literary strategies employed by Israeli female prose fiction writers expressing their voice within a male dominant and (still) inherently Oedipal literary tradition" (pp. 5-6). Through this framework, Merin is able to describe a bi-directional relationship between the women authors of the Statehood Generation and their literary fathers, in which women echo but also subvert and challenge masculine narratives. Chapter one focuses on the work of Hendel from the 1950s. Analyzing Hendel's novella Almanato shel Eliezer (1947; Eliezer's widow) and novel Rehov ha-Maderegot (1956; Street of Steps, 1963), Merin shows how Hendel invokes Agnon, a literary father rejected by the generation of authors before her. Adopting...

Ипостаси и трансформации образа отца в психоанализе

The paper explores various psychoanalytic views on the role of the father in psychic life, in the development of an individual and society. The idea of the sacrifice of sexuality as the inevitable and tragic element of the oedipal structure is stressed. Mother’s and father’s functions in a child’s development are outlined. The differences in the understanding of the notion of the father by Freud, Lacan, Green, Mahler, Klein, Britton and others are discussed. The concept of the Third in contemporary psychoanalysis is outlined, theories of Thirdness by Benjamin and Ogden are compared.

The Preoedipal and Oedipal Structure of Termination: An In-depth Case Study.

Much has been written about the Oedipus complex as a central organizing focus for the understanding of early developmental attainments as well as for the structuring of the personality, but nowhere are triangular forces more vitally active, clinically, than in the termination phase. The decision to end, once agreed upon, typically sets in motion a symmetrical process in which two dynamics occur concurrently. First, what drives the termination is a mourning process in which the primary task is to relinquish the analyst as a transference object and to establish the analyst as an internal object. In parallel, oedipal structures take hold of the termination process so that the final working-through and the resolution of the transference/countertransference can be maximized-with the goal of integration. An eight-year, four-times-a-week analytic psychotherapy on the couch is described to illustrate the critical role of triangulation dynamics in termination. Using in-depth transcripts of dream and sessional material, the author highlights a number of conscious and unconscious resistances in the patient to this phase of work that were particular to his perverse oedipal pathology. Ron Britton's concept of an organized oedipal illusion or an oedipal delusion as defenses against the termination phase proved helpful to both patient and psychotherapist in negotiating some of the heightened emotional aspects of the final working-through.

“Days of begging, days of theft”: The Philosophy of Work inBlood Meridian

AbstractThis article offers a new interpretation of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, reading the novel on the basis of the appeal to ideas of craftsmanship and manual labor that explicitly characterizes much of McCarthy's wider writing. It argues that the attraction to the life-world of manual work signals the presence of a substantial aesthetic philosophy within McCarthy's textual practice (marked in particular by a deeply Heideggerian approach to language) and that Blood Meridian constitutes one of the most fully developed articulations of this philosophy in his canon. Within this framework the novel's Oedipal structure is then approached on the basis of the confrontation between the worker and the intellectual, highlighting the significance of the kid's status as a frustrated or misdirected worker and his subsequent struggles against the authority of successive intellectuals cast in the paternal role. In particular, an extended reading of Judge Holden is proposed in this context. The judge is seen as the focal point for the projection of the anxieties and tensions that McCarthy invests in the position of the intellectual, with particular emphasis placed on the transcendence of the judge's discourse that occurs in Blood Meridian's epilogue and the explicit re-emergence of manual labor that it articulates.

A Conversation with Judith Butler

A Conversation with Judith Butler Rosaura Martínez Ruiz (bio) rosaura martínez ruiz: Freud’s thought has been a great influence for your work, but your concerns have been political. How do you incorporate Freud’s legacy into your political thinking? judith butler: I suppose my concerns are philosophical and political, and that my work belongs to a broader field of critical theory that accepts that our thinking is situated in our historical world, and that one of its tasks is to find the best way to think about and evaluate that world. Freud has always been important for me, at least as far back as I can recount my trajectory as a person who likes to read books about life and the mind. When I was young, I had the same prejudices against psychoanalysis that many people have, namely, that it would reduce all desire and ideation to a crude account of the oedipal structure. But the more I read, the more I came to understand psychoanalysis as a practice of interpretation, and that changed my mind. When I say it is a “practice” of interpretation, I mean to call attention to both the theoretical and clinical dimensions of psychoanalysis. In a way, psychoanalysis stages its own debate on theory and practice. It asks about what is “acted out” in the world, and that includes the sphere of politics. But the two main questions that have drawn me to psychoanalysis have to do with (a) sexuality, [End Page 51] its variations, and its non-teleological structure, and (b) loss and destruction, including the question of why people go to war, and how best to understand and criticize the exhilarations of sadism and the failure to mourn. rmr: What Freudian ideas or formulations do you find the most significant for your thinking? Why? jb: Perhaps melancholia has been the most important Freudian concept in my published work. My effort all along has been to see how melancholia operates not only in the constitution of the ego (as demonstrated in The Ego and the Id) but in the “malaise” (Unbehagen) of culture itself. The strict taboos on same-sex love still prevalent in many parts of the world mean that there is very often no readily available language through which to acknowledge a love or a loss. Indeed, if melancholia is the failure to acknowledge or register a loss, we can and must ask what languages are available in which to make that acknowledgment. If the languages pathologize or criminalize the love, then to openly mourn the loss of that love is to establish oneself as a criminal or pathological character in public discourse. This is a terrible bind, but also a radically unethical cultural consequence of homophobia. rmr: Working with psychoanalysis as a theory to think the political and social realm, the question or critique I have come across the most concerns the “extrapolation” of clinical thinking toward the social and political. Nonetheless, I think that there is no extrapolation, because the Freudian psyche is a social and political organization from the very beginning. jb: We can agree that the Freudian psyche is a social and political organization to begin with but still ask in what sense it is social and in what sense it is political. In other words, there may be a distinct sense of the social and political character of the psyche that belongs to its own organization, and quite another sense that belongs to the way that psychic dynamics take form in the world, [End Page 52] in the form of discourse, silence, institutions, anarchy, policy, politics, and even revolution. In other words, how do we think about an “uprising” in psychoanalytic terms? We have to consider many different factors but also the relation between longing and destruction, to begin our analysis. We cannot stay only with the social and political structure of the psyche, but must ask also, “How does the psyche inform and animate—even destabilize—social and political structure?” rmr: I also believe that in your book The Psychic Life of Power you work with the idea of subjectivity as a reflexive itinerary, and that is why you work with Althusser, Lacan...

“Not Entirely on His Side”: The Assumption of Sexed Subjectivity in Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls”

The enigma of sexual difference is the nodal point of Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” (1968). The Lacanian concept of sexuation, which defines the positions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as belonging to discordant logical structures, will serve to illuminate the complex path of the unnamed female protagonist of this short story (and secondarily, of her younger brother) in coming to assume a position as a sexed subject. While the oedipal structure, including Lacan’s revision of Freud’s account, clarifies the initial identifications and idealizations which inform the process of sexuation, the story brings to light the inadequacy of this perspective to situate the speaking being as ‘sexed’. Through a metaphorical parallel with the fate of the farm horses, Mack and Flora, each of the children will encounter, incarnated in the figure of the father, the law of the symbolic order, or in other words, the necessity of symbolic castration; each will be called upon to assume a position on the side of man, or of woman.

Transference analysis as the ideal of the psychoanalyst

In Freud’s compact definition, transference is both the greatest obstacle and the most powerful ally in understanding the psychodynamic of the analysand. With transference thus defined as the nucleus of the psychoanalytic therapeutic relationship, the analysis of the transference becomes the analyst’s methodological ideal. The article aims at rendering the two extremes of the ideal visible: as an obstacle, transference must be cleared; as an ally, it is a goal that must be achieved. These two extremes are discussed by presenting two samples of work, one by Freud himself and one by Leon Grinberg. In a successful analytic process, the analysis of transference naturally links the two extremes together. However, as the patient’s most severely conflict-laden dynamic is condensed in transference, its direct interpretation is not nearly always possible (a case vignette illustrates this). Thus the reliability of the setting and the oedipal structure of the analytic interaction come to the fore in the analytic process. In order to maintain and use them for the benefit of the patient, the analyst must be prepared to continuously analyse his or her own counter-transferences.

Why He Really Doesn't Get Her: Deleuze's Whatever-Space and the Crisis of the Male Quest

In this essay I argue that the crisis of action in postwar narrative cinema as it has been conceptualised by Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema books is linked to a crisis of the male quest. I will approach this double crisis primarily through Deleuze's concept of the whatever-space ( l'espace-quelconque ), a decentered narrative site that stands in a relation of mutual determination to its wandering protagonists. Through a discussion of different types of whatever-space in Italian neorealism and 'post-neorealism' (De Sica, Antonioni, and Bertolucci) as well as films by Godard, Hitchcock and Polanski, I argue that the crisis of action not only consists in a loosening up of 'the sensory-motor schema', but also in a breaking down of the bond between male desire and narrative structure, or what Teresa de Lauretis calls 'Oedipal structure'. In this double crisis the whatever-space is transformed into a site of narrative impotence, and thereby comes to resemble its archetypical form, that of the Wasteland. In 'post-Italian-neorealism', examples of which are Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris , the whatever-space is reinvested with meaning and transformed into an escapist site of imagination that unites wandering and the encounter. This encounter, which is by definition ephemeral, forms the condition of the image, a product of cinematic love that comes at the price of the forfeited male quest for the Holy Grail.

The Difficulty of Reading Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish" Suspiciously

The difficulty of reading Allen Ginsberg’s poetry is a recurring theme in criticism of his work and that of other post-WWII “Beat Generation” writers. “Even when a concerted effort is made to illuminate [Beat] literature,” laments Nancy M. Grace, “doing so is difficult: the romance of the Beat life threatens to subsume the project” (812). Of course, the Beat life is romantic to the extent that it is romantically regaled. Continual romantic portrayals, such as that of Ginsberg in the recent movie Howl (2010), rekindle the Beat romance for new audiences with chicken-and-egg circularity. I explore this difficulty of reading Ginsberg that Grace and other critics identify by articulating it with respect to "Kaddish"—“Ginsberg’s most highly praised and his least typical poem” (Perloff 213)—as a difficulty of interpreting Ginsberg suspiciously. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s theories of interpretation—or “hermeneutics”—provide the theoretical foundation here. Ricoeur distinguishes between a romantic or “restorative” mode of interpretation, where meaning is reverently reconciled to a text assumed to be trustworthy, and a “suspicious” approach, where meaning is aggressively extrapolated from a text held as unreliable. In order to bring these theories to bear on "Kaddish" and its criticism, I draw on Rita Felski’s pioneering work in relating Ricoeur’s concept of “suspicious reading” to the field of literature. Is it possible to read "Kaddish" suspiciously? Or is there nothing left for suspicious readers to expose in texts such as "Kaddish" that are already self-exposing?

Is the Balkans the Unconscious of Europe?

This essay examines Slavoj Žižek's claim that the Balkans is the unconscious of Europe. To make such a claim is to treat the entire region as a subject with a failing oedipal structure, which Žižek attributes to the absence of a Cartesian tradition and the proper symbolic authority. As a result of such absence, he claims, the Balkans has withdrawn into its pathological feminine substance and needs to be conquered by the language of the universal subject. This paper places Žižek's work in the context of other versions of colonial psychoanalysis, versions that justify oppression in the name of failed oedipalization.

Fixing Freud: The Oedipus Complex in Early Twenty-First Century US American Novels

Representations of Sigmund Freud in early 21st century US American novels rely on and respond to the image of Freud that emerged from investigations by Paul Roazen ("Brother Animal," 1969) and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson ("The Assault on Truth," 1984), which cast doubt on the validity of the Oedipus complex. Relying on Roazen, Brenda Webster's "Vienna Triangle" (2009) links Freud's oedipal thinking to paranoia and male masochism. Working with Masson, Selden Edwards's "The Little Book" (2008) takes Freud to task for abandoning the seduction theory in favor of the Oedipus complex. Jed Rubenfeld's "The Interpretation of Murder" (2006) rethinks the Oedipus complex as a projection of adults onto their children. All three novels seek to celebrate Freud's understanding of the human psyche, while shifting the focus of the oedipal structure away from the murderous and lustful child toward the adult.