Freud - Complete Works (671 page)

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THE DISSOLUTION OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

(1924)

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THE DISSOLUTION OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

To an ever-increasing extent the Oedipus
complex reveals its importance as the central phenomenon of the
sexual period of early childhood. After that, its dissolution takes
place; it succumbs to repression, as we say, and is followed by the
latency period. It has not yet become clear, however, what it is
that brings about its destruction. Analyses seem to show that it is
the experience of painful disappointments. The little girl likes to
regard herself as what her father loves above all else; but the
time comes when she has to endure a harsh punishment from him and
she is cast out of her fool’s paradise. The boy regards his
mother as his own property; but he finds one day that she has
transferred her love and solicitude to a new arrival. Reflection
must deepen our sense of the importance of those influences, for it
will emphasize the fact that distressing experiences of this sort,
which act in opposition to the content of the complex, are
inevitable. Even when no special events occur, like those we have
mentioned as examples, the absence of the satisfaction hoped for,
the continued denial of the desired baby, must in the end lead the
small lover to turn away from his hopeless longing. In this way the
Oedipus complex would go to its destruction from its lack of
success, from the effects of its internal impossibility.

   Another view is that the Oedipus
complex must collapse because the time has come for its
disintegration, just as the milk-teeth fall out when the permanent
ones begin to grow. Although the majority of human beings go
through the Oedipus complex as an individual experience, it is
nevertheless a phenomenon which is determined and laid down by
heredity and which is bound to pass away according to programme
when the next pre-ordained phase of development sets in. This being
so, it is of no great importance what the occasions are which allow
this to happen, or, indeed, whether any such occasions can be
discovered at all.

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   The justice of both these views
cannot be disputed. Moreover, they are compatible. There is room
for the ontogenetic view side by side with the more far-reaching
phylogenetic one. It is also true that even at birth the whole
individual is destined to die, and perhaps his organic disposition
may already contain the indication of what he is to die from.
Nevertheless, it remains of interest to follow out how this innate
programme is carried out and in what way accidental noxae exploit
his disposition.

   We have lately been made more
clearly aware than before that a child’s sexual development
advances to a certain phase at which the genital organ has already
taken over the leading role. But this genital is the male one only,
or, more correctly, the penis; the female genital has remained
undiscovered. This phallic phase, which is contemporaneous with the
Oedipus complex, does not develop further to the definitive genital
organization, but is submerged, and is succeeded by the latency
period. Its termination, however, takes place in a typical manner
and in conjunction with events that are of regular recurrence.

   When the (male) child’s
interest turns to his genitals he betrays the fact by manipulating
them frequently; and he then finds that the adults do not approve
of this behaviour. More or less plainly, more or less brutally, a
threat is pronounced that this part of him which he values so
highly will be taken away from him. Usually it is from women that
the threat emanates; very often they seek to strengthen their
authority by a reference to the father or the doctor, who, so they
say, will carry out the punishment. In a number of cases the women
will themselves mitigate the threat in a symbolic manner by telling
the child that what is to be removed is not his genital, which
actually plays a passive part, but his hand, which is the active
culprit. It happens particularly often that the little boy is
threatened with castration, not because he plays with his penis
with his hand, but because he wets his bed every night and cannot
be got to be clean. Those in charge of him behave as if this
nocturnal incontinence was the result and the proof of his being
unduly concerned with his penis, and they are probably right. In
any case, long-continued bed-wetting is to be equated with the
emissions of adults. It is an expression of the same excitation of
the genitals which has impelled the child to masturbate at this
period.

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   Now it is my view that what
brings about the destruction of the child’s phallic genital
organization is this threat of castration. Not immediately, it is
true, and not without other influences being brought to bear as
well. For to begin with the boy does not believe in the threat or
obey it in the least. Psycho-analysis has recently attached
importance to two experiences which all children go through and
which, it is suggested, prepare them for the loss of highly valued
parts of the body. These experiences are the withdrawal of the
mother’s breast - at first intermittently and later for good
- and the daily demand on them to give up the contents of the
bowel. But there is no evidence to show that, when the threat of
castration takes place, those experiences have any effect. It is
not until a
fresh
experience comes his way that the child
begins to reckon with the possibility of being castrated, and then
only hesitatingly and unwillingly, and not without making efforts
to depreciate the significance of something he has himself
observed.

   The observation which finally
breaks down his unbelief is the sight of the female genitals.
Sooner or later the child, who is so proud of his possession of a
penis, has a view of the genital region of a little girl, and
cannot help being convinced of the absence of a penis in a creature
who is so like himself. With this, the loss of his own penis
becomes imaginable, and the threat of castration takes its deferred
effect.

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   We should not be as short-sighted
as the person in charge of the child who threatens him with
castration, and we must not overlook the fact that at this time
masturbation by no means represents the whole of his sexual life.
As can be clearly shown, he stands in the Oedipus attitude to his
parents; his masturbation is only a genital discharge of the sexual
excitation belonging to the complex, and throughout his later years
will owe its importance to that relationship. The Oedipus complex
offered the child two possibilities of satisfaction, an active and
a passive one. He could put himself in his father’s place in
a masculine fashion and have intercourse with his mother as his
father did, in which case he would soon have felt the latter as a
hindrance; or he might want to take the place of his mother and be
loved by his father, in which case his mother would become
superfluous. The child may have had only very vague notions as to
what constitutes a satisfying erotic intercourse; but certainly the
penis must play a part in it, for the sensations in his own organ
were evidence of that. So far he had had no occasion to doubt that
women possessed a penis. But now his acceptance of the possibility
of castration, his recognition that women were castrated, made an
end of both possible ways of obtaining satisfaction from the
Oedipus complex. For both of them entailed the loss of his penis -
the masculine one as a resulting punishment and the feminine one as
a precondition. If the satisfaction of love in the field of the
Oedipus complex is to cost the child his penis, a conflict is bound
to arise between his narcissistic interest in that part of his body
and the libidinal cathexis of his parental objects. In this
conflict the first of these forces normally triumphs: the
child’s ego turns away from the Oedipus complex.

   I have described elsewhere how
this turning away takes place. The object-cathexes are given up and
replaced by identifications. The authority of the father or the
parents is introjected into the ego, and there it forms the nucleus
of the super-ego, which takes over the severity of the father and
perpetuates his prohibition against incest, and so secures the ego
from the return of the libidinal object-cathexis. The libidinal
trends belonging to the Oedipus complex are in part desexualized
and sublimated (a thing which probably happens with every
transformation into an identification) and in part inhibited in
their aim and changed into impulses of affection. The whole process
has, on the one hand, preserved the genital organ - has averted the
danger of its loss - and, on the other, has paralysed it - has
removed its function. This process ushers in the latency period,
which now interrupts the child’s sexual development.

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   I see no reason for denying the
name of a ‘repression’ to the ego’s turning away
from the Oedipus complex, although later repressions come about for
the most part with the participation of the super-ego, which in
this case is only just being formed. But the process we have
described is more than a repression. It is equivalent, if it is
ideally carried out, to a destruction and an abolition of the
complex. We may plausibly assume that we have here come upon the
borderline - never a very sharply drawn one - between the normal
and the pathological. If the ego has in fact not achieved much more
than a
repression
of the complex, the latter persists in an
unconscious state in the id and will later manifest its pathogenic
effect.

   Analytic observation enables us
to recognize or guess these connections between the phallic
organization, the Oedipus complex, the threat of castration, the
formation of the super-ego and the latency period. These
connections justify the statement that the destruction of the
Oedipus complex is brought about by the threat of castration. But
this does not dispose of the problem; there is room for a
theoretical speculation which may upset the results we have come to
or put them in a new light. Before we start along this new path,
however, we must turn to a question which has arisen in the course
of this discussion and has so far been left on one side. The
process which has been described refers, as has been expressly
said, to male children only. How does the corresponding development
take place in little girls?

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   At this point our material - for
some incomprehensible reason - becomes far more obscure and full of
gaps. The female sex, too, develops an Oedipus complex, a super-ego
and a latency period. May we also attribute a phallic organization
and a castration complex to it? The answer is in the affirmative;
but these things cannot be the same as they are in boys. Here the
feminist demand for equal rights for the sexes does not take us
far, for the morphological distinction is bound to find expression
in differences of psychical development. ‘Anatomy is
Destiny’, to vary a saying of Napoleon’s. The little
girl’s clitoris behaves just like a penis to begin with; but,
when she makes a comparison with a playfellow of the other sex, she
perceives that she has ‘come off badly’ and she feels
this as a wrong done to her and as a ground for inferiority. For a
while still she consoles herself with the expectation that later
on, when she grows older, she will acquire just as big an appendage
as the boy’s. Here the masculinity complex of women branches
off. A female child, however, does not understand her lack of a
penis as being a sex character; she explains it by assuming that at
some earlier date she had possessed an equally large organ and had
then lost it by castration. She seems not to extend this inference
from herself to other, adult females, but, entirely on the lines of
the phallic phase, to regard them as possessing large and complete
- that is to say, male - genitals. The essential difference thus
comes about that the girl accepts castration as an accomplished
fact, whereas the boy fears the possibility of its occurrence.

   The fear of castration being thus
excluded in the little girl, a powerful motive also drops out for
the setting-up of a super-ego and for the breaking-off of the
infantile genital organization. In her, far more than in the boy,
these changes seem to be the result of upbringing and of
intimidation from outside which threatens her with a loss of love.
The girl’s Oedipus complex is much simpler than that of the
small bearer of the penis; in my experience, it seldom goes beyond
the taking of her mother’s place and the adopting of a
feminine attitude towards her father. Renunciation of the penis is
not tolerated by the girl without some attempt at compensation. She
slips - along the line of a symbolic equation, one might say - from
the penis to a baby. Her Oedipus complex culminates in a desire,
which is long retained, to receive a baby from her father as a gift
- to bear him a child. One has an impression that the Oedipus
complex is then gradually given up because this wish is never
fulfilled. The two wishes - to possess a penis and a child - remain
strongly cathected in the unconscious and help to prepare the
female creature for her later sexual role. The comparatively lesser
strength of the sadistic contribution to her sexual instinct, which
we may no doubt connect with the stunted growth of her penis, makes
it easier in her case for the direct sexual trends to be
transformed into aim-inhibited trends of an affectionate kind. It
must be admitted, however, that in general our insight into these
developmental processes in girls is unsatisfactory, incomplete and
vague.