Psychoanalytic Study of Unresolved Oedipus Conflict

Extract

[...] Indeed, children mostly present symptoms of the depressive lineage, resulting from their tendency to identify with the damaged parental imago projected onto them. That is why the young woman who enters therapy here is still a child, the parental projective identification not having been achieved." She also presents a classic anxiety linked to penis envy and which is objectified here by a great protection in relation to sexuality. There is ambivalence since the analysand identifies with the idealized father and the latter represents her Superego. [...]

[...] This symbolic projection has been reproduced in the patient's couple, so that she unconsciously prohibits childbirth or more exactly the role of woman, confused with that of daughter. As a result, the patient is in symbiosis with the father and then hurt by his death: she "falls" pregnant when he "falls" ill, symmetrically. Now, she must renounce the father and go through two phases which are those of disillusionment and symbolic disidealization of the father. Normally, the resolution or liquidation of this complete Oedipus complex passes through the fear of losing maternal love. [...]

[...] - ROUSSILLON, René, Manual of psychology and general clinical psychopathology p.97. - ZAMANSKY, Elisabeth, The parental projective identification, Gestalt, 2007/1, n°32, p.129-141. [...]

[...] Here, the " convictions » and certainties » of the patient felt very early on regarding the mother's non-feelings towards her and reinforced by her position as eldest and only daughter, which are scattered throughout these notes, allow us to converge towards a primary interpsychic process. Indeed, the analysand "interpreter in her inner world the way her parents first recognized her "alterity and what this means, in their eyes, that she was born a girl, and not a boy. This interpretation has, from then on, shaped the organization of her oedipal conflicts (Faimberg, 1993). [...]

[...] In the case of this classic unresolved Oedipus conflict, the therapist, in what he can convey about his internal conflicts, is indeed the key to reading and resolving for the analysand. However, resistances are to be expected, affecting both the habitus of the patient regarding the family scheme founded as well as the protections, long since erected. Many emotional and affective movements will be possible in this search for psychological restructuration and only the satisfaction acted upon by the elements of the pulsional through their canalization will open up to their elaboration and, in the long term, their transformation. [...]