6: Analysis of Freud’s Oedipus Complex
Michael T O’Brien, M.A., Ed.D.
We’ve seen up to now that what has traditionally been received as Freud’s theory of an Oedipus Complex, should more properly be viewed, in context of his theory, as a symptom of his own hysteria, an obsessional idea, and a projection of his uniquely personal self-reproaches onto an ambiguous universe of undefined others. It qualified as a symptom of what he considered a “neuro-psychosis of defence.”
As such it should be analyzed, in order to gain insight into its still-hidden real meaning in his life.
He told his readers how to analyze the manifest content of such symptoms. While his description here manifestly pertains to the case of dreams, he explained in his Interpretation of Dreams that his method for the interpretation of dreams had originally come not from the study of dreams, but from his earlier study of “certain pathological structures — hysterical phobias, obsessional ideas, and so on” He was actually treating dreams with “the method of interpretation that had been worked out for symptoms” {Freud 1900a: 100ff}. He said there was a “complete identity between the characteristic features of the dream-work and those of the psychical activity which issues in psychoneurotic symptoms,” so he felt justified “in carrying over to dreams the conclusions we have been led to by hysteria” (pp 597–598).
So let’s take his procedure for interpreting dreams and apply it to the “manifest content” of his “theory” of an Oedipus Complex.
It’s manifest (superficial) content is “being in love with my mother and jealous of my father” {Freud 1985: 272}, or later, “a [boy’s] wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother” {1923b: 32}. And:
I am thinking of the Oedipus complex, so named because its essential substance is to be found in the Greek legend of King Oedipus, which has fortunately been preserved for us in a version by a great dramatist. The Greek hero killed his father and took his mother to wife {Freud 1940a: 187}.
But, according to Freud, these statements would not represent its real meaning. “It seems, therefore, to be possible for what is in fact the main thing, the centre of the unconscious thoughts, to be absent in the manifest dream [or symptom]. This means that the impression made by the whole dream [symptom] must be fundamentally altered {Freud 1916–17: 124}. “It follows that the dream [symptom] as a whole is a distorted substitute for something else, something unconscious, and that the task of interpreting a dream [symptom] is to discover this unconscious material (p. 114).
Freud states there are “three important rules, which we must obey during the work of interpreting dreams” [or symptoms].
(1) We must not concern ourselves with what the dream appears to tell us, whether it is intelligible or absurd, clear or confused, since it cannot possibly be the unconscious material we are in search of.
(2) We must restrict our work to calling up the substitutive ideas for each element, we must not reflect about them, or consider whether they contain anything relevant, and we must not trouble ourselves with how far they diverge from the dream-element.
(3) We must wait till the concealed unconscious material we are in search of emerges of its own accord (p. 114).
So we reject the apparent meaning of the manifest content entirely. But then we must note the discrete elements that appear in that content. In this case: mother, father, child, wish, incest, and killing. Each of these elements we can take as representing elements found also in the hidden meaning, but they are distorted and disguised so as to give them a new context, a new meaning, a different meaning.
We should freely associate these same elements, and “wait till the concealed unconscious material we are in search of emerges of its own accord.”
Pause. Try it. In your own mind. What possible new meaning(s) emerge “of its own accord”?
One that emerges in my mind would be one not of a son killing his father and sleeping with his mother (as Oedipus did), but one of a father and a mother sexually abusing and killing their son. Not nice, but it happens. It doesn’t strain one’s sense of reality.
Get Michael O’Brien, Ed.D.’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Sounds extreme, but we can’t allow ourselves to censor anything. We must let the process work of its own accord. And Freud does remind us, in the same book, his dream book, that one of his favorite ways to disguise or distort something was to change it into its opposite:
Reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite, is one of the means of representation most favoured by the dreamwork… It serves in the first place to give expression to the fulfillment of a wish in reference to some particular element of the dream-thoughts. ‘If only it had been the other way round.’ This is often the best way of expressing the ego’s reaction to a disagreeable fragment of memory. Again, reversal is of quite special use as a help to the censorship, for it produces a mass of distortion in the material… and this has a positively paralyzing effect… on any attempt at understanding the dream. For that reason, if a dream obstinately declines to reveal its meaning, it is always worth while to see the effect of reversing some particular elements in its manifest content, after which the whole situation often becomes immediately clear {Freud 1900a: 327}.
It never made sense to me that a child, especially an infant, would wish to kill its father. (And I watched five, growing up, over a period of 20 yrs.) But, a father killing his child? Unfortunately, that does happen. Is that what happened in Freud’s case? We need to stay open to that possibly, while at the same time foreclosing the idea of the manifest content being what Freud had in mind.
An analysis of the manifest content of Freud’s theory of an Oedipus Complex thus suggests to me a more sinister hidden meaning, involving Freud having killed and seemingly sexually abused a child we never knew he even had.
This might explain his extremely traumatic reaction to ever having to thinking about this “event” or “earlier scene” ever again.
We don’t have to close our minds here, however. There are other means Freud recommended for figuring out the latent meaning of a symptom or dream. A main one involves going back to the beginning, to what was happening in a person’s life just before the time the symptom first appeared.
The wildest and most eccentric obsessional ideas can be cleared up if they are investigated deeply enough. The solution is effected by bringing the obsessional ideas into temporal relationship with the patient’s experience, that is to say, by enquiring when a particular obsessional idea made its first appearance” {Freud 1909d:·186}.
This is called regression in Freud’s system. We can certainly go back to reconstruct what was going in Freud’s life in the time just before October of 1897. His surviving letters allow us to do this. Does he elsewhere allude to a father having killed his own child, for example?.
In my next essay, we will do that. We’ll go back to key points in Freud’s life just before his first notions of an Oedipus Complex began to emerge.
© Michael T. O’Brien, M.A., Ed.D. Lincoln, MA. February 5, 2025.
References
Freud, S. (1900a). The Interpretation of Dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.). In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 4–5). London the Hogarth Press, 1953.
Freud, S. (1909d). “Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis.” Standard Edition, 10, 155–318.
Freud, S. (1916–17). Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis. Standard Edition, 15–16, 15:463.
Freud, S. (1923b). The ego and the id. Standard Edition, 19, pp. 12–66.
Freud, S. (1940a). An Outline of Psycho-Analysis [1938]. Standard Edition, 23, 144–207.
Freud, S. (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (J. Strachey, Trans.). Belknap Harvard University Press.
