The oedipal experience

Abstract

Marion Burgner’s paper grew out of a Hampstead Clinic study group which examined the effects on the child of the loss of the father through separation or divorce in the first five years of life. Their damaged oedipal development left them prone to being driven by pre-oedipal needs and exclusively tied to their pre-oedipal mother, fearful of losing her and driven by anxiety to seek closeness, even if on the surface they seemed to function at a pseudo-oedipal level. There were problems too in the formation of the superego, which tended to be over-strict with aggression turned towards the self, and with sexual identity. The children needed a therapeutic approach that helped them with reality testing, and the availability of the analyst as a new object, as a safe, predictable figure, unlike the parents. Burgner then presents two adult analytic cases to explore the feasibility of analysis where a marked structural deficit from the oedipal phase has been carried over into later life. Both stopped their treatment prematurely when they could not tolerate working on the incestuous oedipal material that was finding its way into the transference and that brought with it considerable narcissistic vulnerability.