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A review of cross-species and cross-cultural research suggests that, throughout most of human behavioral evolution, children may have been enlightened as to the facts of life by observing parental intercourse and then imitating it in sexual rehearsal play in the context of a continuously rising curve of sexual desire and sexual knowledge throughout childhood. Concealment of the primal scene and prohibition of cross-generational, bisexual, and 'polymorphously perverse' childhood sex play may be of relatively recent origin in human cultural evolution, buttressed by the instillation of culturally acquired sexual disgust in sexually conservative cultures. Looking at the primal scene in cross-species and cross-cultural perspectives utilizing the adaptationist framework of contemporary evolutionary biology can challenge normative assumptions that may still be embedded in psychoanalytic theories of species-wide psychosexual development.

Freud based his oedipal theory on three clinical observations of adult romantic relationships: (1) Adults tend to split love and lust; (2) There tend to be sex differences in the ways that men and women split love and lust; (3) Adult romantic relationships are unconsciously structured by the dynamics of love triangles in which dramas of seduction and betrayal unfold. Freud believed that these aspects of adult romantic relationships were derivative expressions of a childhood oedipal conflict that has been repressed. Recent research conducted by evolutionary psychologists supports many of Freud's original observations and suggests that Freud's oedipal conflict may have evolved as a sexually selected adaptation for reproductive advantage. The evolution of bi-parental care based on sexually exclusive romantic bonds made humans vulnerable to the costs of sexual infidelity, a situation of danger that seriously threatens monogamous bonds. A childhood oedipal conflict enables humans to better adapt to this longstanding evolutionary problem by providing the child with an opportunity to develop working models of love triangles. On the one hand, the oedipal conflict facilitates monogamous resolutions by creating intense anxiety about the dangers of sexual infidelity and mate poaching. On the other hand, the oedipal conflict in humans may facilitate successful cheating and mate poaching by cultivating a talent for hiding our true sexual intentions from others and even from ourselves. The oedipal conflict in humans may be disguised by evolutionary design in order to facilitate tactical deception in adult romantic relationships.

Freud suggested that the child perceives parental intercourse as an act of infi delity by the desired but unfaithful parent. Parental sexual infi delity is felt to be a major narcissistic injury that gives rise to fantasies of revenge. A defensive organization arises to manage this trauma and its attendant revenge fantasies. That organization involves splitting of the desired parent into faithful and unfaithful parts, displacement of hostility on to the rival parent, and identifi cation with the desired but unfaithful parent resulting in the impulse to infi delity. Romantic fantasies of escape and rescue from evil rivals provide guilt free ways of satisfying fantasies of oedipal revenge. In those fantasies the evil rival is turned into an injured third party who gets his or her just deserts as the romantic couple gets to live happily ever after. This defensive organization may embroil patients in complicated love triangles as adults for which they may seek treatment. Analyzing the repudiated narcissistic wound of parental infi delity and the disguised revenge fantasies that defend against that wound may provoke narcissistic rage towards the analyst as a moralistic, possessive, controlling, envious, and spoiling oedipal parent.

\"Good fish get dull but sex is always fun.\" So say the Mehinaku people of Brazil. But Thomas Gregor shows that sex brings a supreme ambiguity to the villagers' lives. In their elaborate rituals—especially those practiced by the men in their secret societies—the Mehinaku give expression to a system of symbols reminiscent of psychosexual neuroses identified by Freud: castration anxiety, Oedipal conflict, fantasies of loss of strength through sex, and a host of others. \"If we look carefully,\" writes Gregor, \"we will see reflections of our own sexual nature in the life ways of an Amazonian people.\" The book is illustrated with Mehinaku drawings of ritual texts and myths, as well as with photographs of the villagers taking part in both everyday and ceremonial activities.

No detailed description available for \"Anxious Pleasures\".

This chapter contains sections titled: The Death of the Father: Tony Harrison, Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove Poetic Partners: Ted Hughes, Penelope Shuttle Self‐Elegy: Peter Reading References and Further Reading

The prevalence of preschool children's differential affectionate and aggressive preferences and behaviors toward their parents was assessed to determine if, in fact, so-called Oedipal conflicts commonly exist and if social-cognitive factors relate to these Oedipal conflicts. Parents' reports of parent-child interactions and children's responses to hypothetical stories concerning parental preferences and conflicts were collected for 40 children (ages 3 to 6). Children's social-cognitive development in three areas was also assessed: understanding of family roles, and the relativity of age and belief in parental omniscience. As hypothesized, children showed more Oedipal behaviors (i.e., differential preferences for the opposite-sex parent and antagonism toward the same-sex parent) at 4 years than at 3 years of age. These behaviors diminished at 5 and 6 years. Moreover, changes in Oedipal behaviors corresponded to changes in social-cognitive understanding. These results suggest that a social-cognitive explanation of Oedipal conflicts should be considered.

Comparison of responses to books that seem quite different

Whereas oedipal conflicts may emerge at any phase of the psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personalities, it is particularly in the advanced stages of resolution of narcissistic transferences that the intimate connection between oedipal and preoedipal conflicts, with the growing dominance of oedipal conflicts, tends to become remarkable in the sessions (Grunberger 1989; O. Kernberg 1984; Rosenfeld 1987). The following case highlights how the analysis of oedipal conflicts gradually resolved a severe and extended inhibition of sexual desire that developed in the course of analytic treatment. The enactment in the countertransference of castration anxiety against which the patient was successfully defending

The theory of the Oedipus complex as Freud formulated it rests on the following pillars: the child's characteristic sexual and aggressive impulses concerning the parents, phallic monism, and the castration complex. This paper reviews the context in which Freud discovered the Oedipus complex, as well as Freud's theory. It then examines the proposals of later authors whose general Oedipal theories differ from Freud's in an attempt to point out both their possible correlations and confrontations with Freud. It includes Klein's pre-genital Oedipal theory, Lacan's structuralist reinterpretation, Bion's reconception of the complex under the knowledge vertex, Green's generalized triangulation theory, Meltzer's notions of the aesthetic object and sexual mental states, and Chasseguet-Smirgel's archaic Oedipal matrix