I have been reading a book which talks about Freud, although he is not the main subject of it. The author talks about the Oedipus complex quite a bit, and mentions other writers/theorists who use the notion in their work, but at no point is there a summary of whether the Oedipus complex is generally accepted as true. What evidence is there for its validity?
Do psychoanalysts/psychologists accept the Oedipus complex as generally giving an accurate picture of anything? I thought that Freud was considered out of date these days, but so many people seem to unthinkingly refer to it.
Dunno about Freud, but generally members of the opposite sex tend to attract one another and members of the same sex tend to compete. Just because the hot lady is your mom doesn’t stop your raging teenage hormones from working. (The fact that society actually has to have rules that have to spell out “No snogging the Mother” seems to suggest we’re very horny and lack sufficient self control.)
Oedipus was a character in a Greek play who murdered his father and married his mother. So I’m pretty sure that Oedipus Complex has to do with jealousy of father out of latent sexual desire for mother.
Why don’t you all just ignore this post? Somewhere in the threat I’m sure I read the question, “What is this complex?” That question seems to have disappeared and I’m beginning to think I was hallucinating.
You’re not hallucinating. Due to an accident with a PC and a radioactive spider, I have acquired the ability to edit posts. Just pray that I only use my powers for good.
It is some sort of hideous fusion of a person and a computer! Run for your life!
::While running he screams out::
The complex is regarded by modern society as true, due to the fact that it makes an awfull lot of sense, but the psyhologists commnity keeps on finding new ways to “debunk” it, or to say that our understanding of it is not what Fraud really meant!
::He then collapses due to the fact that it is not healthy to scream while running.::
We had a discussion about this (well, it started with the Elektra phenomenon and went all Oedipal) over here.
Freud wasn’t interested in “evidence” as you or I would understand the term. He adamantly refused to do research involving actual people who weren’t his patients, or really people much at all. He performed investigation into classic literature and tried to prove that his theories were universal and unconcious because varied cultures wrote about similar themes (well, not very varied - I don’t think he looked in places much more exotic than ancient Greece). But he was not a reseacher, he did no work with “normal” people. He had a few mentally strained patients he did extensive case histories on and then extrapolated from there. (And yes, he did it mostly while on lots and lots of cocaine. Wikipedia has a fun article about that one.)
The thing is, while so many of his theories are derided as bunk because he didn’t “prove” them (and I agree many are bunk) the guy was onto something. There’s much of what he said that “feels” right to a lot of people intuitively. Unconscious vs. conscious minds? That was Freud. There’s not a lot of educated minds that disagree that something like the unconscious mind exists. But did Freud prove it exists? Nope. Id, ego and superego - the idea that one part of you wants pleasure, one part has the disapproving voice of society telling you you can’t do that, and one part that has to sort out that conflict - seems to resonant with lots of folks. But did he prove it? Nope.
But really, how *would *you prove such things?
In short: yeah, there’s probably something like a mild form of Oedipal struggle in many boys’ development. But it’s probably not quite the huge issue Freud made of it, may not be sexual in origin, Oedipus himself wasn’t Oedipal, and Victorian psychoanalysts were mighty strange.
Sophocles, Oedipus the King (tr. by Robert Fagles).
As indicated by WhyNot, it is hardly evident that Oedipus had an Oedipus Complex. After all, he didn’t know it was his father that he killed and his mother that he married until years after the fact. In fact, he actually left Corinth and ended up in Thebes because he sought to avoid his fate of murdering his father and marrying his mother, at the time thinking that his parents were the King and Queen of Corinth.
However, if one applies Freud’s aforementioned unconscious mind and posits that Oedipus unconsciously knew that Laius was his father and Jocasta was his mother, then it is possible to say that Oedipus had an Oedipus Complex. However, unconscious knowledge would seem to be even trickier to pin down than unconscious desire, especially in light of the facts presented in Oedipus the King. While it may be possible that Oedipus could have figured out that Jocasta was his mother, it is unlikely that he could have figured out that Laius was his father until well after he killed him.
Still, it is interesting that Sophocles makes this observation about men dreaming of wedding and/or bedding their mothers, that he considers it to be normal, and that it need not be given much importance.
Is it linked to the oft said idea that men often marry women who are like their mothers. And also women often marry men who are like their fathers? Not that I know of any real evidence for those statements.
