This book contains classic material dating back to the 1900s and before. The content has been carefully selected for its interest and relevance to a modern audience. Carefully selecting the best articles from our collection we have compiled a series of historical and informative publications on the subject of psychology. The titles in this range include "The Psychology of Nervous Disorders" "Paranoia and Psychoanalysis" "The Psychological Treatment of Children" and many more. Each publication has been professionally curated and includes all details on the original source material. This particular instalment, "The Oedipus Complex" contains information on psychoanalysis. It is intended to illustrate aspects of the Oedipus complex and serves as a guide for anyone wishing to obtain a general knowledge of the subject and understand the field in its historical context. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

This small text is a study of the Oedipus Complex in the work of Sigmund Freud, creator of psychoanalysis. The Oedipus Complex is a theory about the mental life of the child. Briefly summarized, it postulates that in early childhood between the ages of two to six, the child develops two emotional ties with its parents, a tie that is purely affectionate with the parent of the opposite sex and a hostile tie to the parent of the same sex, who is perceived as a rival. At the end of his career, Freud made the dramatic statement: "if psychoanalysis could not claim any other achievement beside the discovery of the repressed Oedipus Complex, this alone would give it the right to a place among the new and precious conquests of humanity."

First English translation of Nasio's groundbreaking work on the Oedipus complex.

The different psychopathologic syndromes show in an exaggerated and caricatural manner the basic structures of human existence. These structures not only characterize psychopathology, but they also determine the highest forms of culture. This is the credo of Freud's anthropology. This anthropology implies that humans are beings of the in-between. The human being is essentially tied up between pathology and culture, and 'normativity' cannot be defined in a theoretically convincing manner. The authors of this book call this Freudian anthropology a patho-analysis of existence or a clinical anthropology. This anthropology gives a new meaning to the Nietzschean dictum that the human being is a 'sick animal'. Freud, and later Lacan, first developed this anthropological insight in relation to hysteria (in its relation to literature).This patho-analytic perspective progressively disappears in Freud's texts after 1905. This book reveals the crucial moments of that development. In doing so, it shows clearly not only that Freud introduced the Oedipus complex much later than is usually assumed, but also that the theory of the Oedipus complex is irreconcilable with the project of a clinical anthropology.The authors not only examine the philosophical meaning of this thesis in the work of Freud. They also examine its avatars in the texts of Jacques Lacan and show how this project of a patho-analysis of existence inevitably obliges us to formulate a non-oedipal psychoanalytic anthropology.

In this close reading of Freudian theory, Jerome C. Wakefield reconstructs Freud’s argument for the Oedipal theory of the psychoneuroses, placing the case of Little Hans into a philosophy-of-science context and critically rethinking the epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis. Wakefield logically evaluates four central Freudian arguments: the "undirected anxiety" argument which contends that Hans suffered from anxiety before he developed his horse phobia; the "day the horse fell down" argument where, engaging in some scholarly detective work, Wakefield resolves a century-old dispute between behaviorists and psychoanalysts about when Hans witnessed a frightening horse accident; the "N=1 sexual repression" argument that the trajectory of Hans’s sexual desires matches the Oedipal theory’s predictions; and lastly, the "detailed symptom characteristics" argument that the Oedipal theory is needed to understand otherwise inexplicable details of Hans’s symptoms. Wakefield demonstrates that, although Freud’s arguments are brilliantly conceived, he misread the facts of the Hans case and failed to support the Oedipal theory as judged by his own stated evidential standards. However, this failure creates an opportunity for renewed consideration of psychoanalysis’s distinctive contribution: the understanding of an individual’s unique meaning system and confrontation with meanings outside of focal awareness in order to reshape an individual’s fate. This book will be of interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists alike, and will prove essential for scholars working in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy of science, and the history of psychiatry.