From Oedipus Complex to Oedipal Complexity: Reconfiguring the Negative Oedipus Complex and the Disowned Erotics of Disowned Sexualities

In her presentation Dr. Jody Messler Davies, Co-Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues , and author of Treating the Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse , spoke of expanding the way we define sexuality, eroticism and desire. Davies sought to move away from the view that adult sexuality develops out of a linear course of events. Rather, Davies enlarged the concept of sexuality to reflect her belief in our inherent bisexuality, and relational psychoanalysis' notions of the infinite complexity of gender and self/other configurations. She reconceptualized positive and negative Oedipal configurations of identification and counter-identification as "a lifelong struggle to sustain erotic, romantic and sexual attachments across the lifecycle."

Davies's first goal was to deconstruct Freud's formulation of The Oedipus Complex. For Freud, in the "positive Oedipus complex," the child's attachment to the opposite sex parent is erotic while its...