by Robert M. Young
It has always seemed odd to me that the Oedipus myth and complex should lie at
the heart of our humanity. It strikes me as so eccentric, so weird, in the same
way that being turned on by dangling bits of fat with nipples on them or an
enlarged vein with a sac beneath it seems undignified and comical. But there it
is: evolution, culture and fashion have left us this way, with sexuality and the
Oedipal triangle intermingled and as lifelong unconscious preoccupations which
ramify throughout both personal and large-scale history. For example, as the
artist Otto Dix once said, all wars are fought over the pudenda. We’ll just have
to make the best of it and play the hand we’ve been dealt.
In a similar way I have been slow to accept the centrality of the Oedipal
triangle in psychotherapy - to realize that the analytic space is an Oedipal
space, that the analytic frame keeps incest at bay and that the analytic
relationship involves continually offering incest and continually declining it
in the name of analytic abstinence and the hope of a relationship that
transcends or goes beyond incestuous desires. Breaking the analytic frame
invariably involves the risk of child abuse and sleeping with patients or
ex-patients is precisely that.
Martin Bergmann puts some of these points very nicely in his essay on
transference love (Bergmann, 1987, ch. 18). He says, ‘In the analytic situation,
the early images are made conscious and thereby deprived of their energising
potential. In analysis, the uncovering of the incestuous fixation behind
transference love loosens the incestuous ties and prepares the way for a future
love free from the need to repeat oedipal triangulation. Under conditions of
health the infantile prototypes merely energize the new falling in love while in
neurosis they also evoke the incest taboo and needs for new triangulation that
repeat the triangle of the oedipal state’ (p. 220). With respect to patients who
get involved with ex-therapists, he says that they claim that “‘unlike the rest
of humanity I am entitled to disobey the incest taboo, circumventing the work of
mourning, and possess my parent sexually. I am entitled to do so because I
suffered so much or simply because I am an exception’” (p. 222). From the
therapist’s point of view, ‘When the transference relationship becomes a sexual
one, it represents symbolically and unconsciously the fulfilment of the wish
that the infantile love object will not be given up and that incestuous love can
be refound in reality’ (p.223). This is a variant on the Pygmalion theme. The
analytic relationship works only to the extent that the therapist shows, in
Freud’s words, ‘that he is proof against every temptation’ (Freud, 1915, p.
166).