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"I postulated a primary wish to rediscover a universe without obstacles, rough edges or differences ... The world in which the subject takes total possession of the mother can never be fully attained .... The mother's thoughts are not totally taken up with the child." (J. Chassaguet-Smirgel, 1988, The Archaic Matrix of the Oedipus Complex , pp. 511-515)
The OEdipal: "A psychoanalytic construct representing a fundamentally human problem: the initiation and entrance of the child into the adult world, into the moral order, into becoming an individual." H. Loewald (paraphrased by Sacks in APA Panel, 1985):
Three quarters of a century ago, in a polemic against religion and theoretical anarchism, Freud (Introductory Lectures XXXV, S.E. 1933a, p. 158) queried: "Does psychoanalysis lead to a certain Weltanschauung ?" Answering this question in the negative, Freud counterpoised empirical science against illusion and emotion. Science, in Freud's way of thinking, was about capturing the truth or, at least, about approximating closely towards the truth, while illusion was of and about the magical fulfillment of the wishes of childhood. Freud hoped, apparently, that Psychoanalysis could be established as one of the Natural Sciences, where it is assumed that researches are independent of value, meaning and notions of good and evil. Alas! In the Psychological and Social Sciences, such theoretical neatness is a luxury, at best. I have argued elsewhere (Covitz, 1996) that psychological theories of development, as well as the nosologies that arise from them, are inextricably intertwined with idiosyncratic views of the healthy polity, of the well individual and even with ethico-religious and literary images of the good life. How can we possibly, after all, specify a developmental growth towards wholeness that is independent of the definitions that boundary these very notions? And how can we reasonably hope to conceptualize any aspect of human development without attending to--or at the very least allowing for--the exigencies of social and political life as manifested in human culture. I implicitly disagree with the view of Science that precipitates from such thought as Freud's on this matter. Loosely speaking, I have little more to say in what follows than: the Spartan and Athenian oedipals must be fundamentally different, as must mine which arises from my own values.
In what follows, I...