The Boy's Oedipus Complex

In Freud's terms, the father threatens the son's masculinity (i.e., threatens to castrate him) if he continues his heterosexual attachment to his mother. But why, since Freud never doubted that this attachment was heterosexual,^[5] does that attachment, in terms of Freud's own analysis, not ensure the son's masculinity? My answer is that the boy's love of the mother, this heterosexual love that Freud saw as essential to masculinity, is not the heterosexuality that a male-dominant society expects of the adult male. In the

mother-son relationship the mother is clearly the more powerful individual by virtue of the generational difference and the relative helplessness and dependence of the child. Masculinity in this society and for Freud means not only heterosexuality but also dominance in heterosexual relations; this dominance would be threatened if the mother-son relationship were not radically rejected by the son. In my view the basic reason Freud stresses the boys giving up the mother to retain his masculinity has to do with his assumption that one cannot be a proper male unless one is the dominant partner in a heterosexual relationship. A boy must therefore relinquish his mother or be a failure as a male.

This, of course, is not the way Freud looks at the situation, because in his initial analysis he overcame women's dominance by interpreting motherhood as just a roundabout way of getting a penis. Freud assumes "male dominance" in his unexamined statement that girls are castrated because they have no penis. Freud rarely allows himself to see mothers as powerful in their own right but instead makes them into relatively powerless wives. Thus in Freud's oedipal scenario, the boy is threatened with the loss of his masculinity not by the dominance of his mother but by the dominance of her husband. The mother, as wife of the boy's father, belongs to the father, who in turn lets the son know that if he gives up his mother (his father's wife, that is), he can have a wife of his own later on.

Thus Freud has the son repress his mother attachment until it can be transferred to a woman who is not his mother, in a context where the son can be the dominant partner. A husband, unlike the male child, can receive the benefits of his wife's mothering on his own terms because she is his wife. In Freud's account the boy resolves his Oedipus complex by repressing his love for his mother and identifying with or internalizing the authority of the father. I read this as the point at which the generational difference between parent and child comes to be represented by the father, not the mother, and the point at which male dominance is installed.

The boy resolves his Oedipus complex by giving up his desire for his mother and identifying with the patriarchal power of the father over his wife and children. He acquires a superego that embodies the patriarchal rules. In Totem and Taboo, Freud imagines that in the beginning or perhaps in separate instances, sons banded to-

gether, killed their father, and took his women, but their guilt was so great over the deed that they incorporated the father, made him a totem, and agreed to live by the law of the father. Notice that Freud in his formal anthropological speculations locates desire and hostility in the minds of the sons, not of the fathers. The sons desire their mother and sisters and hate the father, but in the end they accede to the law of the father that allows them manhood only if they give up the mother.

Freud named the Oedipus complex for Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, but, as many critics have noted, Freud chose to ignore the part of the Oedipus legend in which Oedipus's own father, Laius, crippled Oedipus as a child and exposed him in the wilderness to die. Leon Sheleff argues in favor of the sons and contends that it is the fathers who harbor murderous and jealous motives and whatever of these motives sons have, they develop in response to their fathers.^[6]

The psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg long ago argued that the boy's fear of the father may be an accurate perception of unconscious hostility on the fathers part. Zilboorg maintains that fathers have narcissistic and sadistic motives for establishing sexual control over women and are jealous of the mother-child bond that diminished their own primacy. Zilboorg claimed that "unconscious hostility against ones own children is a well nigh universal clinical finding among men" and suggests that "only after the children grow up and become more articulate human beings does the psychological attitude of the father change to increasing affection."^[7] Thus the early ambivalence of fathers toward small babies so commonly reported may be a defense against the father's own aggressive impulses engendered by their jealousy of the mother's attention to the child.

Freud generally depicted the father as a terrifying person threatening castration if the sons did not give up the mother. At one point in his later work he says, however, "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection."^[8] This was in the context of a child's feeling "helpless" without it. Freud could have implied by this that the father may help the boy fight helplessness by supporting him in his efforts to enter the world of adult males. In the contemporary nuclear family this may involve the father's forming a kind of coalition with the boy against the mother in support of male dominance. Practically speaking, however, a father

could help his son join the world of males not by denigrating women but by making men seem less formidable and hostile by his own attitude toward his son. In terms of Freud's fable, the father does not castrate the boy (he controls his own aggression?), and the boy gives up the mother and prepares to join the world of males. Thus Little Hans's father attempted in his own interactions with his son to assuage his young son's fears of aggression from males. At times Freud implies that "real" fathers do not embody male dominance so much as they mediate between their sons and the threats posed by fearsome images of masculinity.

In fact, the Oedipus complex can be interpreted as "true" at several different levels. It can be taken as a "true" symbolic fable about patriarchy in which children come to take over the patriarchal law of the father in the name of the father. This is Mitchell's version, which stresses the symbolic power of the father. In addition (especially in Freud's case histories), the Oedipus complex can be read as a story about the attitudes and motivations of real fathers in the modern, relatively egalitarian but husband-dominant nuclear family. The implication of the latter approach is that real fathers by their attitudes can exacerbate or mitigate a fear of men or overvaluation of men on the part of women and men. Finally, the Oedipus complex can also be understood as a description of the working out of the interplay between gender and generation in which the father comes to represent the generational difference and the establishment of heterosexuality and male dominance. This is the social structural meaning of the Oedipus complex and the interpretation I have mainly spelled out above and will develop further.

In my view the most important "truth" in Freud's stages of development lies in their reliance on family structure for an explanation of personality. Talcott Parsons sees this clearly, especially with regard to gender differentiation. Parsons interprets the Oedipus complex as representing the stage at which the child perceives the nuclear family as an organized unit.^[9] It is the point at which the male child learns that he is a male like his father but a child unlike his father, who is an adult. Similarly, the child learns that he is a male like his brother and also a child like his brother, whereas he is unlike his sister because he is a male but like his sister in being a child. At this level of generality the process is presumed to be the

same for the female child. In learning these cross-cutting categorizations, the child is also learning to conceive of the family in its totality as a system of social relationships. The meaning of the resolution of the Oedipus complex then centers around the child's "internalizing" not only age and gender roles but also the idea of the family as an entire interactive system.

Parsons's analysis, however, does not sufficiently take into account the power differential between husband and wife. Parsons's way of taking male dominance into account is to say that in the oedipal period the father comes to represent the family as a whole and the pressures for growth that the mother had represented earlier. Although Parsons was more aware than most of structural differences in the situation of males and females, he tended not to see these differences in terms of power and authority, and thus did not stress the extent to which the male-headed nuclear family tends to juvenilize females more than males.

On a more concrete level, Kurt Fischer and Malcolm Watson have suggested that both the creation and the ending of the oedipal conflict can be explained by the child's developing cognitive understanding of the social relationships characterizing the nuclear family. They suggest that developmentally children at first cannot understand how husband and wife as categories are related. They can understand only another single role in relationship to themselves. But when children understand how husband and wife are related, they can then imagine being the husband or wife of the parent. The resolution of the conflicted feelings generated by the desire to marry the adult parent are resolved when the child realizes that the parent is in another generation and will age along with the child.^[10] I believe that this is certainly a part of what goes on as the child matures cognitively. My point is that the Oedipus complex involves more than this, however. It also involves the child's cognitive awareness that fathers have more power and importance than mothers, and fathers come to stand for adulthood for both boys and girls.

Fischer and Watson imply that boys and girls experience the Oedipus complex identically, whereas Freud's account was distinctly asymmetrical. My intention is to show that Freud's account can be fit into a more social structural perspective, but I also argue that Freud's emphasis on the asymmetry of the Oedipus complex is

correct. Male dominance lends a different meaning to the father-daughter relationship than to the mother-son relationship.

In the next section I discuss how the recent "discovery" of "real incest" relates to the foregoing discussion of Freud's description of the Oedipus complex and here again show how male-dominant nuclear family structure is involved.