A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
Incest with his mother is one of the sins of Oedipus, patricide the
other. It might also be mentioned that these are the two great sins
which the first social-religious institution of mankind, totemism,
abhors. Let us turn from the direct observation of the child to analytic
investigation of the adult neurotic. What does analysis yield to the
further knowledge of the Oedipus-complex? This is easily told. It shows
the patient up in the light of the myth; it shows that each of these
neurotics was himself an Oedipus or, what amounts to the same thing,
became a Hamlet in the reaction to the complex. To be sure, the analytic
representation of the Oedipus-complex enlarges upon and is a coarser
edition of the infantile sketch. The hatred of the father, the
death-wish with regard to him, are no longer timidly suggested, the
affection for the mother recognizes the goal of possessing her for a
wife. Dare we really accredit these horrible and extreme feelings to
those tender childhood years, or does analysis deceive us by bringing in
some new element? It is not difficult to discover this. Whenever an
account of past events is given, be it written even by a historian, we
must take into account the fact that inadvertently something has been
interpolated from the present and from intervening times into the past;
so that the entire picture is falsified. In the case of the neurotic it
is questionable whether this interpolation is entirely unintentional or
not; we shall later come to learn its motives and must justify the fact
of "imagining back" into the remote past. We also easily discover that
hatred of the father is fortified by numerous motives which originate in
later times and circumstances, since the sexual wishes for the mother
are cast in forms which are necessarily foreign to the child. But it
would be a vain endeavor to explain the whole of the Oedipus-complex by
"imagining back," and as related to later times. The infantile nucleus
and more or less of what has been added to it continues to exist and may
be verified by the direct observation of the child.
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