The Oedipus Complex Today
Essays reworking the Oedipus complex for modern clinical practice.
It is the clinical and technical challenge that leads the psychoanalyst to modify and refine his theoretical framework, and this is the way psychoanalytic theory grows.
Edited by John Steiner from papers given at the 1987 Melanie Klein Conference, this short collection sets three clinical essays alongside a reprint of Klein's 1945 paper and an introduction by Hanna Segal. Ronald Britton, Michael Feldman, and Edna O'Shaughnessy each take the Oedipus complex out of developmental theory and into the session, tracing how the parental couple and the excluded third are staged in the transference.
Britton's contribution introduces the link between the parents as a structure the patient must tolerate, and the collapse of that link as a clinical problem. Feldman follows the pressure a patient exerts to draw the analyst into an Oedipal role, and O'Shaughnessy reads the complex where it stays hidden. Across the essays the argument is consistent: the Oedipus situation is not only recalled but enacted, and the analyst's task is to register the position assigned to them without occupying it.
About the authors
John Steiner
John Steiner is a British psychoanalyst and a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society, working within the Kleinian and post-Kleinian tradition. Building on Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, and Herbert Rosenfeld, he is known for the concepts of pathological organisations of the personality and psychic retreats: defensive structures that shield patients from persecutory and depressive anxieties. His work examines movement between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and the themes of seeing and being seen, shame, and humiliation.
Ronald Britton
Ronald Britton (born 1932) is a British psychoanalyst who trained first as a doctor and child psychiatrist before qualifying with the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1979, where he became a training and supervising analyst. Working in the Kleinian tradition, he chaired the Department of Children and Parents at the Tavistock Clinic. He is known for the concepts of the third position and triangular space, the internal Oedipal structure through which a person observes relationships, and for the books Belief and Imagination and Sex, Death, and the Superego.
Michael Feldman
Michael Feldman is a British psychoanalyst working in the Kleinian tradition. Born in South Africa, he studied medicine and psychology and was a consultant psychotherapist at the Maudsley Hospital in London until 1998. He is a training analyst in the British Psychoanalytical Society, drawing on the work of Betty Joseph, Herbert Rosenfeld and Hanna Segal. His clinical papers examine transference, countertransference and the inevitability of enactment, following the minute by minute interaction between patient and analyst. He is the author of Doubt, Conviction and the Analytic Process (2009).
Edna O'Shaughnessy
Edna O'Shaughnessy (1924 to 2022) was a South African-born British psychoanalyst who worked within the Kleinian tradition. Trained in philosophy before analysis, she became a distinguished training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Her clinical papers examined the Oedipus complex, the notion of a bizarre object, and the defensive patterns she named enclaves and excursions, in which the analyst is drawn into a patient's avoidance of emotional contact. She contributed to The Oedipus Complex Today.
John Steiner
John Steiner is a British psychoanalyst and a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society, working within the Kleinian and post-Kleinian tradition. Building on Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, and Herbert Rosenfeld, he is known for the concepts of pathological organisations of the personality and psychic retreats: defensive structures that shield patients from persecutory and depressive anxieties. His work examines movement between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and the themes of seeing and being seen, shame, and humiliation.
Details
- 1989
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 158
- 9780946439553