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oedipus complex

Sigmund Freud

psychoanalysis

is the idea that human actions are governed by fate and destiny. Individuals are believed to take no personal responsibility for their lives, and thus place all actions and consequences in the hands of omnipotent Gods and spiritual forces which are outside the realm of human influence.

In a classic essay entitled Oedipus and Job in the West African Religion, pulbished in 1959, Fortes exames the way in which the Tallensi people of Ghana use religious concepts to order and exlain key aspects of an individual's passage through the cycle of life.He identified two sociological concepts, abstracted from African religions in general, which help explicate different types of structural relationships between humans and gods. In the first relationship, which he calls the Oedipal principle, human actions are governed by fate and destiny. Individuals are believed to take no personal responsibility for their lives, and thus place all actions and consequences in the hands of omnipotent gods and spiritual forces which are outside the realm of human influence. . . In the second type of relationship, which Fortes calls the Jobian principle, individuals assume responsibility for their lives and believe that events are shaped by human actions which are only mediated in part by supernatural forces and dividne justice.

is a cultural product. The version taken up by freud, in which mother and father are the objects, is but one possible variant. The trobriader family structure represents still another varient with the mother's brother as the rival.

Since, for Malinowski, the Oedipus complex is a cultural product, he used 'nuclear complex' as a cover term for all possible cultural variants, reserving 'Oedipus complex' for that particular variant in which mother and father are the objects, . . .

is the nodal point of sexual development, the symbolic internalization of a lose, tabooed object of desire.

For Freud, the Oedipus complex is the nodal point of sexual development, the symbolic internalization of a lose, tabooed object of desire. In the act of internalizing the loss of che pre-Oedipal mother, the infant's relationship with the father (or, more accurately, symbolic representations of paternal power) becomes crucial for the consolidation of both selfhood and gender identity.

oedipus complex, n.All

oedipus complex