Oedipus Complex - Criticism

Criticism

Contemporary psychoanalysts accept the universality of the Oedipus complex to different degrees; Hans Keller proposed it is so "at least in Western societies"; and others consider that ethnologists already have established its temporal and geographic universality. Nonetheless, few psychoanalysts disagree that the "child then entered an Oedipal phase . . . involved an acute awareness of a complicated triangle involving mother, father, and child" and that "both positive and negative Oedipal themes are typically observable in development". Despite evidence of parent–child conflict, the evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson note that it is not for sexual possession of the opposite sex-parent; thus, in Homicide (1988), they proposed that the Oedipus complex yields few testable predictions, because they found no evidence of the Oedipus complex in people.

Moreover, in No More Silly Love Songs: A Realist's Guide to Romance (2010), Anouchka Grose said that "a large number of people, these days believe that Freud's Oedipus complex is defunct . . . 'disproven', or simply found unnecessary, sometime in the last century". Moreover, from the post-modern perspective, Grose said that "the Oedipus complex isn't really like that. It's more a way of explaining how human beings are socialised . . . learning to deal with disappointment". The elementary understanding being that "You have to stop trying to be everything for your primary career, and get on with being something for the rest of the world". Nonetheless, the open question remains whether or not such a post–Lacanian interpretation "stretches the Oedipus complex to a point where it almost doesn't look like Freud's any more".

Parent-child and sibling-sibling incestuous unions are almost universally forbidden. An explanation for this incest taboo is that rather than instinctual sexual desire there is instinctual sexual aversion against these unions (See Westermarck effect). Steven Pinker wrote that "The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother."