7 
Reading Loewald: Oedipus reconceived
Freud’s Oedipus complex has, in the history of psychoanalysis, been reinvented several times – for example, by Klein, Fairbairn, Lacan, and Kohut. At the heart of Loewald’s (1979) re-conceptualization of the Oedipus complex is the idea that it is the task of each new generation to make use of, destroy, and reinvent the creations of the previous generation. Loewald reformulates the Oedipus complex in a way that provides fresh ways of viewing many of the fundamental human tasks entailed in growing up, growing old, and, in between the two, managing to make something of one’s own that succeeding generations might make use of to create something unique of their own. Thus, Loewald reinvents Freud’s version of the Oedipus complex, and it is my task to re-conceive Loewald’s version of the Oedipus complex in the very act of presenting it. By means of a close reading of Loewald’s (1979) “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” I will demonstrate what it is about the way Loewald thinks that leads me to view that paper as a watershed in the development of psychoanalytic thought.
The sequential nature of narrative writing makes it difficult for Loewald to capture the simultaneity of the elements of the Oedipus complex; I, too, must struggle with this dilemma. I have elected to discuss Loewald’s overlapping ideas in more or less the sequence he presents them, addressing the tension between influence and originality in the succession of generations; the murder of the oedipal parents and the appropriation of their authority; the metamorphic internalization of the child’s experience of the parents, which underlies the formation of a self responsible for itself and to itself; and the transitional incestuous object relationship that mediates the dialectical interplay between differentiated and undifferentiated forms of object relatedness. I will conclude with a comparison of Freud’s and Loewald’s conceptions of the Oedipus complex.
Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex
In order to place Loewald’s contribution in context, I will review the major tenets of Freud’s Oedipus complex, as I understand them. Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex is built on a foundation of four revolutionary ideas: (1) All of human psychology and psychopathology, as well as all human cultural achievements, can be understood in terms of urges and meanings that have their roots in the sexual and aggressive instincts. (2) The sexual instinct is experienced as a driving force beginning at birth and is elaborated sequentially in its oral, anal, and phallic components in the course of the first five years of life. (3) Of the multitude of myths and stories that human beings have created, the myth of Oedipus, for psychoanalysis, is the single most important narrative organizing human psychological development. (4) The triangulated set of conflictual murderous and incestuous fantasies constituting the Oedipus complex is “determined and laid down by heredity” (Freud, 1924, p. 174) – that is, it is a manifestation of a universal, inborn propensity of human beings to organize experience in this particular way (see Ogden, 1986a).
The Oedipus complex for Freud (1924) is “contemporaneous” (p. 174) with the phallic phase of sexual development. It is a web of intrapsychic and interpersonal parent–child relationships in which the boy, for example, takes his mother as the object of his romantic and sexual desire, and wishes to take his father’s place with his mother (Freud, 1910, 1921, 1923, 1924, 1925). The father is simultaneously admired and viewed as a punitive rival. The aggressive instinct is manifested, for the boy, in the form of the wish to kill his father in order to have his mother for himself. The wish to kill the father is a highly ambivalent one, given the boy’s pre-oedipal love for and identification with his father, as well as the boy’s erotic attachment to his father in the negative Oedipus complex (Freud, 1921). The boy experiences guilt in response to his wish to murder his father (in the positive Oedipus complex) and his mother (in the negative Oedipus complex). Similarly, the girl takes her father as the object of her desire and wishes to take her mother’s place with her father. She, too, experiences guilt in response to her incestuous and murderous wishes in the complete Oedipus complex (Freud, 1921, 1925).
The child guiltily fears punishment for his or her murderous and incestuous wishes in the form of castration at the hands of the father. Whether or not actual castration threats are made, the threat of castration is present in the mind of the child as a “primal phantasy” (Freud, 1916–1917, p. 370), a universal unconscious fantasy that is part of the make-up of the human psyche.
“Analytic observation[s] . . . justify the statement that the destruction of the Oedipus complex is brought about by the threat of castration” (Freud, 1924, p. 177). That is, the child, for fear of punishment in the form of castration, relinquishes his or her sexual and aggressive strivings in relation to the oedipal parents and replaces those “object cathexes . . . [with] identifications” (Freud, 1924, p. 176) with parental authority, prohibitions, and ideals, which form the core of a new psychic structure, the superego.
The tension between influence and originality
With Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex in mind, I will now turn to Loewald’s reformulation. The opening sentence of Loewald’s paper is a curious one in that it appears to make no reference to the subject that the paper will address: “Many of the views expressed in this paper have been stated previously by others” (Loewald, 1979, p. 384).1 Why would anyone begin a psychoanalytic paper with a disclaimer renouncing claims for originality? Loewald goes on immediately (still not giving the reader a rationale for his odd approach) to cite a lengthy passage from Breuer’s introduction to the theoretical section of Studies on Hysteria:
When a science is making rapid advances, thoughts which were first expressed by single individuals quickly become common property. Thus no one who attempts to put forward today his views on hysteria and its psychical basis can avoid repeating a great quantity of other people’s thoughts, which are in the act of passing from personal into general possession. It is scarcely possible always to be certain who first gave them utterance, and there is always a danger of regarding as a product of one’s own what has already been said by someone else. I hope, therefore, that I may be excused if few quotations are found in this discussion and if no strict distinction is made between what is my own and what originates elsewhere. Originality is claimed for very little of what will be found in the following pages.
(Breuer and Freud, 1893–1895, pp. 185–186; cited by Loewald, 1979, p. 384)
Subliminally, a sense of cyclical time is created by the juxtaposition of Loewald’s disclaiming originality and Breuer’s virtually identical statement made almost a century earlier. Loewald, before discussing his ideas concerning the Oedipus complex, is showing them to us in our experience of reading: no generation has the right to claim absolute originality for its creations (see Ogden, 2003b, 2005b). And yet, each new generation does contribute something uniquely of its own: “Many [not all] of the views expressed in this paper have been stated previously” (Loewald); and “Originality is claimed for very little [but something]” (Breuer).2
Between the lines of Loewald’s text is the idea that it is the fate of the child (as it was the fate of the parents) that what he makes of his own will enter a process of “passing from personal into general possession” (Breuer). In other words, what we do manage to create that bears our own mark will become part of the pool of collective knowledge, and, in so doing, we become nameless, but not insignificant ancestors to succeeding generations: “there is always a danger of regarding as a product of one’s own what has already been said by someone else” (Breuer), an ancestor whose name has been lost to us.
Loewald’s paper goes on to explore and bring to life this tension between one’s indebtedness to one’s forbears and one’s wish to free oneself from them in the process of becoming a person in one’s own terms. This tension between influence and originality lies at the core of the Oedipus complex, as Loewald conceives of it.
Loewald’s paper seems to begin again in its second paragraph with a definition of the Oedipus complex as the “psychic representation of a central, instinctually motivated, triangular conflictual constellation of child–parent relations” (p. 384). (With its several beginnings and several endings, the paper itself embodies the multiplicity of births and deaths that mark the endless cycle of generations.) Loewald then draws our attention to the way in which Freud (1923, 1925), in speaking of the fate of the Oedipus complex, uses forceful language, referring to its “destruction” (1924, p. 177) and its “demolition” (Freud, 1925, p. 257). Moreover, Freud (1924) insists, “If the ego has . . . not achieved much more than a repression of the complex, the latter persists in an unconscious state . . . and will later manifest its pathogenic effect” (p. 177). This idea provides Loewald the key to his understanding of the fate of the Oedipus complex.
The reader’s head begins to swim at this point as a consequence of the convergence of two interrelated enigmatic ideas: (1) the notion that the Oedipus complex is “demolished” (how are we to understand the idea that some of the most important human experiences are, in health, destroyed?); and (2) the idea that the demolition of the Oedipus complex is “more than a repression” (whatever that means). The reader, here and throughout the paper, must do a good deal of thinking for himself in making something of his own with the ideas that Loewald is presenting. This, after all, is the task of each new generation vis-à-vis the creations of its ancestors.
In an effort to find his bearings in this portion of the paper, the reader must grapple with several questions. To begin with, the reader must determine the meaning of the term repression as it is being used here. Freud uses the term to refer to two overlapping but distinct ideas in the course of his writing. At times, he uses the term to refer to psychological operations that serve to establish “the unconscious as a domain separate from the rest of the psyche” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, p. 390), a sine qua non of psychological health. At other times – including, I believe, the instance under discussion – the term is used to refer to a pathogenic expulsion from consciousness of disturbing thoughts and feelings. Not only is the repressed segregated from the main body of conscious thought, repressed thoughts and feelings are for the most part cut off from conscious and unconscious psychological work.
The reader must also attempt to formulate for himself what it means to bring the Oedipus complex to a close, not by repressing it, but by demolishing the thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and object-related experiences that constitute it. To my mind – and I think that there would be general agreement among psychoanalysts on this point – the psychic registration of a significant experience, whether that registration be conscious or unconscious, is never destroyed. It may be suppressed, repressed, displaced, denied, disowned, dissociated, projected, introjected, split off, foreclosed, and so on, but never destroyed or demolished. No experience can ever “unhappen” psychically. And yet this is what Freud and Loewald are insisting to be the case – at least to a significant degree – in the waning of the Oedipus complex. The unresolved question of what it means to say that the Oedipus complex undergoes “more than a repression” (i.e. that it is demolished) generates in the experience of reading Loewald’s paper a tension that is not unlike the experience of living with unresolved (but not repressed) oedipal conflict. It unsettles everything it touches in a vitalizing way.
Parricide: a loving murder
Having introduced these thoughts and questions regarding the demolition of the Oedipus complex, Loewald proceeds to broaden the traditional conception of the oedipal murder. He uses the term parricide to refer to the act committed by “One who murders a person to whom he stands in a specially sacred relation, as a father, mother, or other near relative, or (in a wider sense) a ruler. Sometimes, one guilty of treason (Webster, International Dictionary, 2nd ed.)” (cited by Loewald, 1979, p. 387).3 In the act of parricide, Loewald observes,
It is a parental authority that is murdered; by that, whatever is sacred about the bond between child and parent is violated. If we take etymology as a guide, it is bringing forth, nourishing, providing for, and protecting of the child by the parents that constitute their parenthood, authority (authorship), and render sacred the child’s ties with the parents. Parricide is a crime against the sanctity of such a bond.
(p. 387)
Loewald again and again in his paper makes use of etymology – the ancestry of words, the history of the way succeeding generations both draw upon and alter the meanings of words.
Parricide involves a revolt against parental authority and parental claims to authorship of the child. That revolt involves not a ceremonious passing of the baton from one generation to the next, but a murder in which a sacred bond is severed. The child’s breaking of the sacred bond to the parents does not represent a fearful response to the threat of bodily mutilation (castration), but a passionate assertion of the “active urge for emancipation” (p. 389) from the parents. Loewald’s phrase urge for emancipation connects the word urge (which has a strong tie to the bodily instinctual drives) with the word emancipation, thus generating the idea of an innate drive for individuation. In the language itself, instinct theory is being broadened by Loewald to include drives beyond the sexual and aggressive urges (see Chodorow, 2003; Kaywin, 1993; and Mitchell, 1998, for discussions of the relationship between instinct theory and object relations theory in Loewald’s work).
In the oedipal battle, “opponents are required” (p. 389). A relative absence of genuine parental authority leaves the child with little to appropriate. Moreover, when the parents’ authority has not been established, the child’s fantasies lack “brakes” (Winnicott, 1945, p. 153) – that is, the secure knowledge that his fantasies will not be allowed to be played out in reality. When parental authority does not provide the “brakes” for fantasy, the fantasied murder of those one loves and depends upon is too frightening to endure. Under such pathological circumstances, the child, in an effort to defend himself against the danger of the actual murder of the parents, represses (buries alive) his murderous impulses and enforces that repression by adopting a harshly punitive stance toward these feelings. In health, paradoxically, the felt presence of parental authority makes it possible for the child to safely murder his parents psychically (a fantasy that need not be repressed). Oedipal parricide does not require repression because it is ultimately a loving act, a “passionate appropriation of what is experienced as loveable and admirable in parents” (p. 396). In a sense, the fantasied death of one’s oedipal parents is “collateral damage” in the child’s struggle for independence and individuation. Killing one’s parents is not an end in itself.
For Loewald, the Oedipus complex is at its core a face-off between the generations, a life-and-death battle for autonomy, authority, and responsibility. In this struggle, parents are “actively rejected, fought against, and destroyed, to varying degrees” (pp. 388–389). Difficulty arises not from parricidal fantasies per se, but from an inability to safely commit parricide, to sever one’s oedipal ties to one’s parents. The following brief clinical account illustrates a form of difficulty encountered in the oedipal appropriation of parental authority.
Several years into his analysis, Mr N told me the following dream:
“I was checking in at the front desk of a hotel late at night. The man behind the desk told me that all the rooms were booked. I said that I had heard that hotels keep a few rooms open in case someone shows up in the middle of the night. I thought, but did not say to him, that those rooms are meant for important people. I knew that I was not an important person. At the other end of the long desk, an older woman who was checking in, said in a commanding voice, ‘He’s with me – he’ll share my room.’ I didn’t want to share a room with her. The thought was repellent. I felt as if I couldn’t get a breath of air and tried to find a way out of the hotel, but I couldn’t find an exit.”
Mr N said that he felt extremely embarrassed by the dream and had considered not mentioning it to me. He told me that even though we had often talked about his feeling that his parents had had no psychological room in themselves for him as a child, he was horrified in the dream by the woman (who seemed like his mother) offering to have him share her room and, by implication, her bed with him.
I said to Mr N that the embarrassment he felt in response to the dream may stem not only from his feeling horrified by the idea of sleeping with his mother, but also from seeing himself as a perennial child who lacks the authority to claim a place of his own among adults – a boy who will never become a man.
By contrast, an experience in the analysis of a man in his mid-20s captures something of the experience of a healthy oedipal succession of generations:
A medical student near the end of his analysis with me began affectionately to refer to me as “a geezer” after it had become apparent that I knew very little of the developments in psychopharmacology that had occurred in the previous twenty-five years. I was reminded of my own first analysis, which had begun while I was a medical student. My analyst occasionally referred to himself as an “old buck” in response to my competitiveness with him regarding what I was learning about current developments in psychoanalysis. I remembered having been surprised by his seemingly calm acceptance of his place in the “over-the-hill” generation of analysts and of my place in the new (and, I believed, far more dynamic) generation.
While with my medical student analysand, my memory of my analyst’s referring to himself as an old buck struck me as both comic and disturbing – disturbing in that, at the time he said it, he was younger than I was at that juncture in the analysis of my patient. I recognized how his acceptance of his place in the succession of generations was currently of great value to me in my efforts not only to accept, but also, in a certain way, to embrace my place as “a geezer” in the analysis of my medical student.
As parents to our children, even as we fight to maintain our parental authority, we allow ourselves to be killed by our children lest we “diminish them” (p. 395). In the Oedipus myth, Laius and Jocasta are told by the oracle at Delphi that their son is destined to murder his father. The horror of this prophecy is equivalent in present-day terms to a hospital forewarning each couple as they enter the obstetrics ward that their child who is about to be born will one day murder them. Laius and Jocasta attempt to circumvent such an outcome by killing their child. But they cannot bring themselves to commit the murder by their own hand. They give Oedipus to a shepherd who is told to leave the infant in the forest to die. In so doing, Laius and Jocasta unconsciously collude in their own murder. They create a window of opportunity for their child not only to survive, but also to grow up to murder them.4
The dilemma faced by Laius and Jocasta is a dilemma shared not only by all parents, but also by all analysts when we begin analysis with a new patient. In beginning analysis, we as analysts are setting in motion a process in which the patient – if all goes well – will contribute to our dying. For all to go well, we must allow ourselves to be killed by our patients lest “we diminish them” (p. 395), for example, by treating them as less mature than they are, by giving advice that is not needed, supportive tones of voice that are unwanted, and interpretations that are undermining of the patient’s ability to think reflectively and insightfully for himself. Not to diminish one’s children (and one’s patients) involves not a passive resignation to aging and death, but an actively loving gesture repeated time and again in which one gives over one’s place in the present generation to take one’s place sadly and proudly among those in the process of becoming ancestors. Resistance to taking one’s place as part of the past generation will not stop the succession of generations, but it will leave a felt absence in the lives of one’s children and grandchildren, an absence where their ancestors might under other circumstances have been a highly valued presence. (Loewald told his colleague Bryce Boyer that he could not have written this paper before he became a grandfather [Boyer, 1999, personal communication].)
Parents may try to protect themselves against giving way to the next generation by behaving as if there is no difference between the generations. For example, when parents do not close bedroom and bathroom doors, or display erotic photographs as “art,” or do not wear clothing at home because “the human body is not a shameful thing,” they are implicitly claiming that there is no generational difference – children and adults are equal. Children, under such circumstances, have no genuine parental objects to kill and only a perverse version of parental authority to appropriate. This leaves the individual a stunted child frozen in time.
Having discussed the central role in the Oedipus complex of the child’s loving murder of his parents, Loewald makes a remarkable statement that sets this paper apart from its psychoanalytic predecessors:
If we do not shrink from blunt language, in our role as children of our parents, by genuine emancipation we do kill something vital in them – not all in one blow and not in all respects, but contributing to their dying.
(p. 395)
In the space of a single sentence, the Oedipus complex is radically reconceived. It had been well established by Freud (1909, 1910) that the Oedipus complex is not simply an intrapsychic event, but a set of living object relationships between the child and his parents. But Loewald does not stop there. For him, the fantasied murder of the parents that is played out in oedipal object relationships contributes to – is part of the process of – the parents’ dying. It is tempting to water down Loewald’s “blunt language” by saying that “their dying” is a metaphor for parents’ relinquishing their authority over (their authorship of) the life of the child. But Loewald is saying more than that: he is insisting that the living out of the Oedipus complex by children and their parents is part of the emotional process (which is inseparable from bodily processes) by which human beings grow up, grow old, and die.
The battle between parents and children for autonomy and authority is most evident in adolescence and beyond, but it is, of course, equally important in early childhood. This is true not only of the child’s falling in love with one parent while becoming intensely jealous of, and rivalrous with, the other. In addition, for example, the “terrible twos” often involves the parents in a battle with their newly ambulatory child who is relentlessly insistent on his independence. Parents of two-year-olds frequently experience their child’s “stubborn willfulness” as a betrayal of an unspoken agreement that the child will remain a fully dependent, adored, and adoring baby “forever.” The child’s breaking of the “agreement” constitutes an assault on the parents’ wish to remain parents of a baby timelessly – that is, insulated from the passage of time, aging, death, and the succession of generations. (The relationship of the “stubborn” toddler to his parents is triangulated to the degree that the child splits the parents intrapsychically into the good and the bad parent or parents.)
The metamorphic internalization of the oedipal parents
Thus, parricide, from the point of view both of parents and of children, is a necessary path to the child’s growing up, his coming to life as an adult who has attained authority in his own right. Oedipal parricide conceived of in this way underlies, for both Freud and Loewald, the organization of “the superego [which is] the culmination of individual psychic structure formation” (Loewald, 1979, p. 404). The use of the term superego in this phrase and throughout Loewald’s paper represents a residue of the structural model of the mind that Loewald is in the process of transforming. Consequently, the term, as used by Loewald, is confusing. As I read his paper, I find it clarifying to my thinking to “translate” the term superego into terms that are more in keeping with the ideas that Loewald is developing. In place of the word superego, I use the idea of an aspect of the self (derived from appropriated parental authority) that takes the measure of, and the responsibility for, who one is and how one conducts oneself.
Superego formation involves an “internalization” (Loewald, 1979, p. 390) of or “identification” (p. 391) with the oedipal parents. Freud [1921, 1923, 1924, 1925], too, repeatedly uses the terms identification, introjection, and incorporation to describe the process of superego formation. This process brings us to what I consider to be one of the most difficult and most important questions raised by Loewald regarding the Oedipus complex: What does it mean to say that oedipal object relationships are internalized in the process of superego organization? Loewald responds to this question in a very dense passage that leaves a great deal unsaid or merely suggested. I will offer a close reading of this passage in which I include inferences that I have drawn from Loewald’s statements:
The organization of the superego, as internalization . . . of oedipal object relations, documents parricide and at the same time is its atonement and metamorphosis: atonement insofar as the superego makes up for and is a restitution of oedipal relationships; metamorphosis insofar as in this restitution oedipal object relations are transmuted into internal, intrapsychic structural relations.
(p. 389)
To paraphrase the opening portion of this passage, the organization of the superego “documents” parricide in the sense that superego organization is living proof of the murder of the parents. The superego embodies the child’s successful appropriation of parental authority, which is transformed into the child’s capacities for autonomy and responsibility. The superego as psychic structure monitors the ego and, in this sense, takes responsibility for the ego/“das Ich” “the I”.
That same process of superego organization not only constitutes an internal record of parricide in the form of an alteration of the psyche of the child, it also constitutes an “atonement” (p. 389) for the murder of the parents. As I understand it, the organization of the superego represents an atonement for parricide in that, at the same moment that the child murders the parents (psychically), he bestows upon them a form of immortality. That is, by incorporating the child’s experience of his parents (albeit a “transmuted” version of them) into the very structure of who he is as an individual, the child secures the parents a place, a seat of influence, not only in the way the child conducts his life, but also in the way the child’s children conduct their lives, and on and on. I am using the word children, here, both literally and metaphorically. The alteration of the psyche involved in superego organization influences not simply the way the grown child relates to his own children, it affects everything that the child creates in the course of his life – for example, the qualities of the friendships and other love relationships in which he takes part, as well as the thinking and creativity that he brings to the work that he does. These creations (his literal and metaphorical children) alter those they touch, who, in turn, alter those they touch.
The “internalization” of the parents (in a transformed state) constitutes atonement for killing the parents in that this internalization contributes to the child’s becoming like the parents. But, in another sense, it is in the “transmutation” of the parents that an even more profound form of atonement lies. To the extent that the parents have been transformed in the internalization process, the parents have contributed to the creation of a child who is capable of being and becoming unlike them – that is, capable of becoming a person who is, in certain respects, more than the people who the parents have been capable of being and becoming. What more meaningful atonement can there be for killing one’s parents?
Loewald continues in the passage under discussion: superego organization is an atonement for parricide “insofar as the superego makes up for and is a restitution of oedipal object relations.” These words are carefully chosen. The word restitution derives from the Latin word meaning to re-establish. The formation of the superego restores to the parents their authority as parents – but not the same authority that they formerly held as parents. Now they are parents to a child who is increasingly capable of being responsible for himself and to himself as an autonomous person. The parents who are “restituted” (re-established) are parents who had not previously existed (or, perhaps more accurately, had existed only as a potential).
For Loewald, in the passage under discussion, superego formation as a part of the resolution of the Oedipus complex represents not only an atonement for parricide and the restitution of the parents, but also a “metamorphosis insofar as in this restitution oedipal object relations are transmuted into internal, intrapsychic structural relations” (p. 389). I find the metaphor of metamorphosis to be critical to Loewald’s conception of what it means to say that the parents are internalized in a “transmuted” form. (Loewald, in this paper, uses the word metamorphosis only in the sentence being cited and may not have been aware of the full implications of his use of this metaphor.) In complete metamorphosis (for example, in the life cycle of the butterfly), inside the cocoon, the tissues of the caterpillar (the larva) break down. A few clusters of cells from the breakdown of the larval tissues constitute the beginning of a new cellular organization from which adult structures are generated (e.g. wings, eyes, tongue, antennae, and body segments).
There is continuity (the DNA of the caterpillar and that of the butterfly are identical) and discontinuity (there is a vast difference between the morphology and physiology of the external and internal structures of the caterpillar and those of the butterfly). So, too, superego formation (the internalization of oedipal object relations) involves a simultaneity of continuity and radical transformation. The parents (as experienced by the child) are not internalized, any more than a caterpillar sprouts wings. The child’s “internalization” of oedipal object relationships involves a profound transformation of his experience of his parents (analogous to the breakdown of the bodily structure of the caterpillar) before they are restituted in the form of the organization of the child’s more mature psychic structure (superego formation).5
In other words, the child’s “internalized” Oedipal object relationships (constituting the superego) have their origins in the “DNA” of the parents – that is, the unconscious psychological make-up of the parents (which in turn “documents” their own oedipal object relationships with their parents). At the same time, despite this powerful transgenerational continuity of oedipal experience, if the child (with the parents’ help) is able to kill his oedipal parents, he creates a psychological clearance in which to enter into libidinal relationships with “novel” (p. 390) (non-incestuous) objects. These novel relationships have a life of their own outside of the terms of the child’s libidinal and aggressive relationships with his oedipal parents. In this way, genuinely novel (non-incestuous) relationships with one’s parents and others become possible. (The novel object relationships are colored by, but not dominated by, transferences to the oedipal parents.)
In a single summary sentence, which could have been written by no one other than Loewald, the elements of the transformations involved in superego formation (the establishment of an autonomous, responsible self) are brought together: “The self, in its autonomy, is an atonement structure, a structure of reconciliation, and as such a supreme achievement” (p. 394).
The transitional incestuous object relationship
The paper begins anew as Loewald takes up the incestuous component of the Oedipus complex. This portion of the paper, for me, lacks the power of the foregoing discussion of imagined (and real) parricide, guilt, atonement, and restitution. It seems to me that the centerpiece of the paper – and Loewald’s principal interest – is the role of the Oedipus complex in the child’s achievement of an autonomous, responsible self. Incestuous desire is a subsidiary theme in that story.
Loewald opens his discussion of oedipal incestuous wishes by raising the rarely asked (even a bit startling) question: “What’s wrong with incest?” He responds, “Incestuous object relations are evil, according to received morality, in that they interfere with or destroy that sacred bond . . . the original oneness, most obvious in the mother–infant dual unity” (p. 396). Incest involves the intrusion of differentiated libidinal object relatedness into the “‘sacred’ innocence of primary narcissistic unity . . . [which is] anterior to individuation and its inherent guilt and atonement” (p. 396).
In other words, we view incest as evil because, in incest, differentiated, object-related sexual desire is directed toward the very same person (and the very same body) with whom an undifferentiated bond (which we hold sacred) existed and continues to exist. Thus, for Loewald, incest is felt to be wrong, not primarily because it represents a challenge to the father’s authority and claim to the mother, or because it denies the difference between the generations, but because it destroys the demarcation between a fused form of mother– child relatedness (primary identification) and a differentiated object relatedness with the same person. Incest is felt to be evil because it overturns the “barrier between [primary] identification [at-onement] and [differentiated] object cathexis” (p. 397).
The overturning of the barrier between primary identification and object cathexis is a matter of the greatest importance, not only because the individual’s emerging sexuality is shaped by the way the parents and children handle incestuous desire, but, perhaps even more importantly, because the individual’s capacity for healthy object relatedness of every sort – his capacity to establish a generative dialectic of separateness from, and union with, other people – depends upon the living integrity of that barrier.
Parricide is a manifestation of the oedipal child’s drive to become an autonomous individual; incestuous wishes and fantasies represent the concurrent need on the part of the oedipal child for unity with the mother. From this vantage point, “The incestuous [oedipal] object thus is an intermediate, ambiguous entity, neither a full-fledged libidinal objectum [differentiated object] nor an unequivocal identificatum [undifferentiated object]” (p. 397). Loewald uses the terms incestuous object and incestuous object relationship to refer not to actual incest, but to external and internal object relationships in which incestuous fantasies predominate. The incestuous oedipal relationship persists as an ongoing aspect of the Oedipus complex, which mediates the tension between the urge for autonomy and responsibility and the healthy pull toward unity (for example, as an aspect of falling in love, empathy, sexuality, care giving, “primary maternal preoccupation” [Winnicott, 1956, p. 300], and so on).
Both the superego and the transitional incestuous object relationship are heirs to the Oedipus complex in complementary ways, each mediating a tension between love of the parents and the wish to emancipate oneself from them and to establish novel object relationships. There are, however, important differences between the two. The atonement (at-one-ment) that underlies superego formation involves the metamorphic internalization of an object relationship with the parents as whole and separate objects; by contrast, the at-one-ment involved in (transitional) incestuous object relatedness is that of fusion with the parents (primary identification).
By understanding the oedipal incestuous object relationship as constituting an intermediate position between undifferentiated and differentiated object relatedness, Loewald is not simply amplifying a psychoanalytic conception of pre-oedipal development. He is suggesting something more. The Oedipus complex is not only a set of differentiated object relationships that comprise “the neurotic core” (p. 400) of the personality. The Oedipus complex “contains . . . in its very core” (p. 399) a more archaic set of object relationships that constitutes the “psychotic core” (p. 400) of the personality. From the latter, the earliest forms of healthy separation–individuation emerge.
Thus, the Oedipus complex is the emotional crucible in which the entirety of the personality is forged as the oedipal configuration is reworked and reorganized on increasingly more mature planes throughout the individual’s life (see Ogden, 1987). Loewald, not one to claim originality for his ideas, states that while Freud “acknowledged the fact [that the Oedipus complex centrally involves undifferentiated object relations] long ago” (Loewald, 1979, p. 399), this aspect of the Oedipus complex is “more [important] than was realized by Freud” (p. 399). This more primitive aspect of the Oedipus complex is not outgrown; rather, it takes its place as “a deep layer of advanced mentality” (p. 402).
Before concluding this part of the discussion, I will revisit an idea that remains unresolved. At the outset of the paper, Loewald (with Freud) insisted that in health the Oedipus complex is “demolished.” Loewald, in the course of the paper, modifies that idea:
In the abstract, as the organization of this structure [the autonomous self] proceeds, the Oedipus complex would be destroyed as a constellation of object relations or their fantasy representations. But, in the words of Ariel in Shakespeare’s Tempest, nothing fades, “but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.”
(p. 394)
In other words, the Oedipus complex is not destroyed, but is continually in the process of being transformed into “something rich and strange” – that is, into a multitude of evolving, forever-problematic aspects of the human condition that constitute “the troubling but rewarding richness of life” (p. 400). The reader may wonder why Loewald does not say so from the beginning instead of invoking the clearly untenable idea that experience can be destroyed. I believe that Loewald begins with the more absolute and dramatic language because there is a truth to it that he does not want the reader to lose sight of: to the degree that one succeeds in murdering one’s parents psychically and atones for that parricide in a way that contributes to the formation of an autonomous self, one is released from the emotional confines of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is destroyed to the extent that oedipal relationships with one’s parents no longer constitute the conscious and unconscious emotional world within which the individual lives as a perennial, dependent child.
The paper closes as it began, with a comment addressing writing itself as opposed to the subject matter that has been taken up:
I am aware that, perhaps confusingly, I have shifted perspectives several times in my presentation. I hope that the composite picture I have tried to sketch in this fashion has not become too blurred by my approach.
(p. 404)
The words shift[ing] perspectives, to my ear, describe a style of writing and thinking that is always in the process of being revised, and a style of reading that is as critically questioning as it is receptive to the ideas being presented. What more suitable ending can one imagine for a paper that addresses the ways in which one generation leaves its mark on the next, and yet fosters in its descendants the exercise of their right and responsibility to become authors of their own ideas and ways of conducting themselves?
Loewald and Freud
I will conclude by highlighting some of the differences between Loewald’s and Freud’s conceptions of the Oedipus complex. For Loewald, the Oedipus complex is driven not primarily by the child’s sexual and aggressive impulses (as it is for Freud), but by the “urge for emancipation,” the need to become an autonomous individual. The girl, for example, is not most fundamentally driven to take the place of her mother in the parents’ bed, but to take her parents’ authority as her own. The child atones for imagined (and real) parricide by means of a metamorphic internalization of the oedipal parents, which results in an alteration of the self (the formation of a new psychic agency, the superego). “Responsibility to oneself . . . is the essence of superego as internal agency” (Loewald, 1979, p. 392). Thus, the child repays the parents in the most meaningful terms possible – that is, by establishing a sense of self that is responsible to oneself and for oneself, a self that may be capable of becoming a person who is, in ways, more than the people who the parents were capable of being and becoming.
The incestuous component of the Oedipus complex contributes to the maturation of the self by serving as an ambiguous, transitional form of object relatedness that holds in tension with one another differentiated and undifferentiated dimensions of mature object ties. The Oedipus complex is brought to an end not by a fear-driven response to the threat of castration, but by the child’s need to atone for parricide and to restore to the parents their (now transformed) authority as parents.
I do not view Loewald’s version of the Oedipus complex as an updated version of Freud’s. Rather, to my mind, the two renderings of the Oedipus complex constitute different perspectives from which to view the same phenomena. Both perspectives are indispensable to a contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of the Oedipus complex.
1 All page references in this chapter not otherwise specified refer to Loewald’s (1979) “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex.”
2 Breuer’s words echo those written by Plato two-and-a-half millennia earlier: “Now I am well aware that none of these ideas can have come from me – I know my own ignorance. The only other possibility, I think, is that I was filled, like an empty jar, by the words of other people streaming in through my ears, though I’m so stupid that I’ve even forgotten where and from whom I heard them” (Plato, 1997, p. 514). Loewald, trained in philosophy, no doubt was familiar with this dialogue.
3 Loewald uses the word sacred as a secular term to refer to that which is solemnly, respectfully set apart, as poetry, for Plato and Borges, is set apart from other forms of human expressiveness – poetry is “something winged, light and sacred” (Plato, cited by Borges, 1984, p. 32).
4 The Oedipus complex is, in a sense, a process by which the child, in killing his parents (with their cooperation), creates his own ancestors (see Borges, 1962).
5 A passage from Karp and Berrill’s (1981) classic, Development, underscores the aptness of the metaphor of metamorphosis:
The completion of the cocoon signals the beginning of a new and even more remarkable sequence of events. On the third day after a cocoon is finished, a great wave of death and destruction sweeps over the internal organs of the caterpillar. The specialized larval tissues break down, but meanwhile, certain more or less discrete clusters of cells, tucked away here and there in the body, begin to grow rapidly, nourishing themselves on the breakdown products of the dead and dying larval tissues. These are the imaginal discs. . . . Their spurt of growth now shapes the organism according to a new plan. New organs arise from the discs.
(p. 692)