[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Oedipal Transference
The Oedipal Transference involves the awareness and acceptance of the creative relationship between two people. From this come the recognition of dependence, the need for sharing, and the internalization of the combined object that functions to strengthen and sustain the individual. Each development point brings a quantity of mental pain. Whether this pain can be tolerated, modified or evaded depends on the internal presence of a thinking object and stands at the crossroads of development.
The significance of the work of Wilfred Bion in our thinking about development cannot be overestimated. The question is ‘How do we become what we are?’ Yet the moment we try to conceptualize this, to capture the moment, circumstances may have changed. As Winnicott (1949/1958) says, ‘All individuals are really trying to find a new birth in which the line of their own life will not be disturbed by a quantity of reacting greater than that which can be experienced without a loss of the sense of continuity of personal existence’. (Debbie Hindle, 1999).
‘The entry into the Oedipus complex involves the introduction of a distinctly new form of otherness into the mother-infant dyad that requires a radical psychological-interpersonal reorganization’ (Ogden, 1989). Sigmund Freud (1897/1961a) first ‘discovered’ the Oedipus complex in the course of his self-analysis, as noted in a letter to Fliess. Here he began to think about his hostile impulses towards his father and loving impulses towards his mother.
Freud elaborated his thinking about this complex in his clinical work and in his writing (1909/1961f, 1920/1961k, 1923/19611,1924/1961m, 1924/ 1961n, 1931/1961p), but as Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) clarify, he nowhere gives a systematic account of the Oedipus complex. The earliest versions of the complex were based on the simplest ideas about the little boy’s rivalry with the father for attention and an exclusive relationship with the mother......
