A Different Look
at the Oedipus Complex

First published in 1994

This piece developed from an article I wrote about a year before, which was published in GEMS News and the Beaumont Magazine.

 
From the first, psychology has studied the way that boys and girls become men and women. One line of thought is that they become aware of gender as something adults seem to think is important. Others suggest that children would take on a gender role without any outside assistance, as an inevitable consequence of their biological difference. Another possible view is that awareness of boys and girls being different comes about through socialisation - seeing other people and interpreting relationships.

The first account of gender role development, and one that dominates popular thought, is Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex.⁽¹⁾ The general idea is that a boy sees his father as a rival for his mother. Because his father is a very powerful figure, he feels threatened, so takes on, or incorporates, the features of his father. By becoming his father, he removes the threat. Usually, it is suggested that he fears his father will castrate him, leading to castration anxiety. Not surprisingly, there are a number of criticisms of this idea, and vociferous rejection of the theory Freud produced for girls, the Electra complex, which proposed the idea of penis envy.

The immediate problems are that they are quoted out of context with Freud's whole argument, particularly as he was probably speaking in metaphors, and that we have to rely on other people's translations from his German text. I have always felt unhappy with the idea, since I could never remember experiencing anything like it, and I certainly had never found my father threatening. Perhaps, I thought, I hadn't, in fact, gone through the process. However, if it was normal for the father to be such an extreme threat, one would expect a boy to reject the father and cling to his mother. Freud's explanation for this lies within meaning of the word incorporation, which, since I see it as an essential part in some transexual processes, is the main topic of this article.

Freud's work was subjective and, besides being inferred from the accounts of his clients, was largely based on his experience of being a man in a male-dominated society. He also drew on philosophical thought of the day, and was influenced by social attitudes which are to a large extent still current. In spite of his controversial views on sexuality, Freud's picture of the ego in a constant battle with the biological animal of the id, found a ready acceptance in a society that was, and still is, oppressed by the idea of original sin.

However, there are a number of other criticisms. Freud suggested that the Oedipus and Electra complexes occur around the age of four. There are studies that suggest that infants can discriminate between the sexes before the age of one year. Recent thought is that in the second year of life, they label themselves as males or females and, shortly after, label others.

In Freud's day, fathers were often authoritarian and punitive, usually aloof and unbending. It is now becoming accepted that an empathetic and caring father is valuable to a child's development. What are we to make of this new man father? Is he a threat to a satisfactory resolution of the Oedipus complex? There is no evidence of this.

Let me offer an alternative hypothesis - that a boy may incorporate features of the father through admiration and love. He may also, of course, incorporate features of his mother. The proposal is that a boy first identifies with his father and a girl with her mother, and that they then incorporate the admired attributes of the identified person. Similarly for the childhood peer group - birds of a feather flock together.

This may seem like an over-complicated way of saying that if you like someone, you copy them, but I would like to study the idea in greater detail.

I am critical of Freud, especially in the way his theories are portrayed in the popular imagination. However, his description of the defence mechanisms, that we use to protect ourselves against emotional issues, is probably the most valuable and intuitively accessible picture of our internal mental life that we have.

It is frequently observed that prisoners, under great threat and deprived of personal power, set out to become like their guards. Bettelheim, who spent some time in a concentration camp, recorded this phenomenon, some prisoners taking "great pride in modelling their behaviour and appearance on . . . their guards . . . collecting scraps of their clothing, imitating their gait and posture, adopting their values and leisure interests."⁽²⁾ It is something that is often seen in normal prisons and also in hostage situations.

There is another concept in psychology called homeostasis which suggests that the organism balances itself physically. While actively seeking stimulation, it sets up defences against the balance being too greatly disturbed. For instance the insulin process of the body continually regulates the balance of the blood sugar, provided that the pancreas is not damaged. Another is the adrenaline fight or flight system, which regulates various hormones, epinephrine, norepinephrine, endorphins, among others. There are people who become addicted to stimulation, addicted to their own hormones, and go from one exaggerated stunt to another. Some people can be disempowered in other ways by imbalance of this process, a central issue in some forms of stress and relaxation therapy.⁽³⁾ A recent hospital drama on television featured a body builder who repeatedly damaged his hernia operation, because he could not manage without the emotional high of exercising.

Freud stated quite clearly that incorporation was a defence mechanism against emotional experiences which would threaten the integrity of the ego. As such it is exhibited in many circumstances other than in the Oedipus complex. Many psychologists see a self-balancing system in a person's emotional life and Freud's defence mechanisms are as useful a model as any. They are something we do for ourselves every day of our lives. They might be as simple as combatting the frustration of seeing a nice dress in a shop window that is too expensive and thinking "Oh well! It wouldn't suit me anyway!"

Freud, I believe, did not mean to refer to the experiences as threatening in themselves. He suggested that they threatened the defences of the ego itself, or what we might call the psychic homeostasis. In other words, all feelings, even good ones, disturb the balance; threaten, I think, is too strong a word.

Such a model gives us a hypothesis that works equally well for boys and girls. It disposes of the idea of the punishing, castrating father, allowing for a more humanistic picture of gender role development in a way that is more likely to be satisfying to the person. It also disposes of the convoluted thinking needed for the always questionable Electra complex.

So is it a case of "Like Father, like Son?" Or is it all the mother's fault for suppressing the proper process of separation and individuation?

Rutherford,⁽⁴⁾ like many other authors, follows a masculinist Freudian tradition that has oppressed mothers for nearly a century, and has hoodwinked even feminists with the myths of our society. In highlighting the case of Michael Ryan, the Hungerford killer, who, by all accounts, was almost totally controlled by his mother, he presumably offers him as the ultimate direction of modern masculinity. Individual case studies can be very misleading, for they may focus attention on a single process which is only one of several possibilities.

What do we mean by traditional family values? Do we really know what a traditional family is? Surely not a return to the enclosed family of a few years ago, where a child could not speak out against sexual or physical abuse. Or one where a wife was expected to endure beatings and rape, for to leave her husband carried the ultimate social stigma.

Clearly, one's mother is the object of one's first relationship, and one of great importance, but, for most children, there are uncles, aunts, grandparents and friends of the family. In most cultures around the world, however, children join their peer group very quickly, often as soon as they have left the breast. Although there seems to be a panhuman pattern where boys and girls separate out to play, they learn socialisation together.

This was the pattern in this country for centuries - the modern family is a relatively recent invention. Nor was sex such a big secret to children. It may be that the children of five or six who have opportunity to play mothers and fathers are the ones who later have a balanced approach to sexuality. We have the myth, not only of the mystery of sex and the innocence of childhood, but that the mystery of womanhood should be at all costs maintained. If the mystery was swept away, perhaps, it would leave men free to wonder, instead, about women as people, rather than as anonymous objects of sexual gratification.

So-called psychohistory is a very imprecise study. It relies on old records and clearly people would not think to record ordinary, everyday occurrences. Those people who left records would, moreover be of the middle or upper classes. It seems reasonable to expect that the primary concern for parents was the survival of their offspring. The mortality rate was very high; in the seventeenth century, children were lucky to see their fifth birthday. The aim was large families, which meant that parental attention was divided, instead of being concentrated powerfully on one or two. Children were just children. As late as the nineteenth century, Fitton⁽⁵⁾ recorded that young boys were rampaging about in the village of Cromford. The mill owner, Arkwright, who would not take children younger than ten, observed that they might be usefully employed. It was noted that girls were already working, nursing their younger brothers and sisters, or doing other work in the home. Thus children grew up with children from the earliest possible age, not exclusively with their parents.

Families and parents provide roots, secure bases from which the child can explore an expanding world and widening relationships. But, while socialisation through the peer group may be a way of mitigating the effects of individual dysfunctional parenting, it also transmits the social values of the community of which it is a part. A consensus of parental and social attitudes is perceived by individual children and passed on.

Gender roles may be too rigidly enforced. In particular, the separation of boys from girls which occurs normally, might be over-emphasised.

There is a long-running debate about the effect of the media in shaping attitudes in children's culture. What could be argued is that television and newspapers mirror cultural stereotypes, rather than promoting them and, perhaps, make them larger than life.

What we see is a male ideal who is free from the emotional ties of women and relationships. Self-sufficient, free to roam the world, without feelings of vulnerability or the need to seek emotional support. We see the lonely cowboy, or the maverick cop fighting for truth and right. Among the less respectable questions asked about Superman in his skin-tight suit are "How does he get his trousers down?" The answer, of course, is that he has no physical needs, still less emotional ones.

A man should need no emotional ties to a woman or to a family. Nor dare he become too friendly with other men for fear of the taboo of homosexuality. Look at men in a public lavatory. They march in quickly, and do their business, careful not to look at, or speak to, anyone else and leave as quickly as possible. Homosexuality is the one thing the real man is afraid of.

This is the politically generated man who built the empire and populated the armies of his masters. As men, we may not allow ourselves to become attached in any way to others, for we have to compete with them and take power over them. But, towards the end of the film, we see our solitary hero seduced by the heroine with all her feminine wiles. Our sexuality betrays us, and women threaten us with entrapment.

As Rutherford says: "Women's presence disturbs men. She mirrors what we deny in ourselves, she is the Other that we fear: the stickiness of our own repressed sexuality. We attempt to control women through defining her, through producing a pornographic female sexuality that will allay our fears, images that we can control and conquer, that don't make demands that threaten to undo and expose us. Women are heterosexual men's Achilles heel because we need her and at the same time that need challenges our masculine claim to rational superiority."

How is such a man to neutralise this threat to his psyche? Strong words, yet most men will feel an uncomfortable ring about them. Most men are not violent towards women, but for some, violence is their only defence. By projecting frustration on to women, they become the source of it, and may therefore be punished. Because such men have only known women as the Other, they are de-individuated. They are the sexual images that flicker on our television screens. They are the pictures in our books and newspapers.

On a television debate recently, the case was brought up of a thirteen year old boy who had raped a six year old girl, said to be the result of watching a pornographic computer diskette. Out of the somewhat unhelpful discussion came a remark that depressed me deeply, as one of the panel said "The fact is that all men commit rape, whatever their age." What a defeatist attitude from someone (who professed to be a feminist) with her resigned acceptance that women will forever be the victims of male biology - a biology, incidentally, that has questionable scientific support.⁽⁶⁾ Certainly the programme hammered one more nail into the coffin of sexual positivism.

We live in a culture where a man's sexual abilities, especially in teenage, far outstrip his opportunities. Yet as Farrell⁽⁷⁾ points out, there is no such thing as safe sex for a man. He is expected to initiate, but if he moves too slowly, he is a wimp. If he moves too fast, he is a harasser. How is a teenage boy expected to cope with this? Incorporation provides a defence against the pleasurable feelings of sexuality which threaten to overwhelm him.

So men may fasten on particular objects of womanhood - high heels, pretty underwear, stocking or tights. They may take to these objects as talismans against their feelings. They may go on and extend their adoption of female clothing and find that, by taking on the appearance of a woman, they become her. Moreover, she is a woman that can be controlled. As transvestites, they never stop being men.

Yet this, too, is socially unacceptable. It is interesting that Bennion,⁽⁹⁾ in spite of his sixty-point sex code, appears to be apologising for sex rather than accepting it as a simple, natural part of everyday life, and is negative about transvestism and other escapes. So many writers seem to feel that we can alter men's sexuality without altering them as people. If we insist that our men should all be permanent warriors, forever on an adrenaline high, then we have to accept male sexuality as it is - and not every man can climb the Himalayas or sail around the world, single handed.

I wonder, however, whether Rutherford is being unduly pessimistic. There always have been gentle, caring men. If Moir and Jessel⁽¹⁰⁾ are right in saying that men are not biologically endowed with compassion and empathy, perhaps they unsuited to be doctors, surgeons, vets, psychiatrists, teachers or counsellors. We do not call such people sissy boys. Perhaps more men would like to follow a more gentle way of life, but dare not, for fear of being labelled wimp. Yet if all the wimps of the world got together, we might find that they were in the majority.

There are many courageous men and women, all over the world fighting crime, and many others involved in high-pressure careers. A woman officer or a career woman can, when she wants to, opt out and raise a family, permanently if she wishes to. A man can marry to raise a family too, but he still does the same job. Now he has to support his new commitment, still doing the same job and working the same hours, with the added pressure of wanting to give time to his family. Indeed, he is expected to; a few years ago, he simply impregnated his wife, and returned to his job.

There have been complaints recently about television series portraying policemen as being divorced or with marital problems. Yet, for many men, that is the way it is. Once upon a time, wives had their own support network built in to the local community. Now isolated in anonymous housing estates, they look elsewhere, to a part time job, perhaps. Becoming immersed in their interests, they do not lose interest in their children, but meet the needs they would prefer to have met by their husbands. Inevitably they drift apart. Or they immerse themselves in their families. The attention that once would have been spread over eight or ten children, is now concentrated on one or two. The children may become the mother's support network, instead of the other way around.

It has become common to pay overtime, because it is cheaper to do so than to employ two people. A new trend is emerging. People are paid for a normal day, but then encouraged to work extra time "for the good of the company." Soon everyone in the company is doing it, and anyone who jibs at the idea will find himself unemployed on some pretext or other. Go into such a company and you will find that most of the men are single, divorced or having marital problems.

I recently applied for a job as a field engineer. My area would extend from Stafford to Lincoln and I would be expected to make four calls a day. This was unusually benevolent and sounded too good to be true. I mentioned that I had a speeding endorsement on my licence (incurred in trying to return home from Portsmouth ready for an early start the following morning). My interviewer said "That's alright. My licence is nearly full. One more and the firm will have to give me a desk job." Of course, as a new recruit, and becoming unable to drive, I would lose my job. Before taking another job, some years ago, I was told that the hours were nine till five. In my naivete, I didn't realise that it would, for instance, start at nine in Grimsby and finish at five in Birmingham.

Field engineers are also expected to break the laws on parking. Fines will be paid unofficially out of the petty cash. So, after eight hours or more, solving complex problems, for often impatient customers, and driving at high speed, a field engineer might make a misjudgment and crash on the motorway - "It goes with the territory." If he is killed, well, the car is insured and there is plenty of labour on the market. This is what I feel that Farrell means by man as the disposable sex.

The new man has always been around and social changes are allowing him to become more acceptable. For one thing, the break up of communities where husbands and wives moved and socialised in different sub-cultures has largely disappeared, forcing men inwards to the family. Wives are refusing to be the little woman staying at home providing a nest for their husbands to rest briefly during their travels. More and more men, too, are finding value in joining in with home-making and child-rearing. Media images are appearing of men nursing babies and listening to their children, working together to decorate and make their homes.

Yet, we can see a dichotomy appearing. In addition to New Man, the stereotype that Rutherford calls Retributive Man, is becoming more exaggerated, in heroes such as Rambo and Dirty Harry. The latest developments are androids like Terminator and Robocop, the ultimate in biologically engineered affectionless psychopathy.

Women are looking for male stereotypes every bit as exaggerated, like the Chippendales. Perhaps they will not repeat the error men fall into, of mistaking the image for the substance. Yet they are putting out conflicting messages of what they want from men.

Psychology speaks about the ability to choose, but few people have absolute freedom of choice. There may be many men who are trapped in a lifestyle where they are being who they should be rather than who they really are.

Many men have, in fact, experienced valuable and valued friendships with sisters, cousins, even the girl next door, relationships devoid of maternal parent-power. One transvestite tells how he and his sister were evacuated during the war. For them, their relationship was all they had to rely on, in a frightening new world. Another tells how, as a child he lived with his ten sisters until, at the age of seven, he was told he must leave them to become a man.

Parted forever from the equality of childhood, such men attempt to recreate it. They come to realise that the life of solitary freedom is not for them. They realise the importance of being in touch with their feelings.

These are perhaps new men who have, throughout their childhood, been told that these attributes are effeminate. In their cross-dressing, they do not embrace femininity, or defend against sexual feelings or their fear of women (as in drag acts) they merely symbolise their discomfort with masculinity. But, in a society in which there are no half measures between rigidly imposed masculinity and femininity, they can only express their feelings by being women.

In My Husband Wears My Clothes, Peggy Rudd⁽¹¹⁾ tells the story of a man who led a field hospital in Korea. Every evening, the nurses would get together to relax and he found himself joining them. After a while they took pity on him, wearing his stiff uniform, and offered him a wrap to wear, and from then on they would relax together off-duty in friendly chat and comradeship. This, he said, marked the start of his later cross-dressing. It seemed to me like a transvestite's fantasy, but it illustrates the point.

The feelings of empathy, woman as friend, can become mixed with sexual feelings, woman as lover, in a very confusing way. Many transvestites go through a period when they wish that they could find a group of female friends, without sexual feelings getting in the way. From this, it is a short step to wanting to become a part of female society. While identifying with women is very different from identifying as a woman, this kind of transvestism may be unique in its urge for a relationship of equality, rather than the exploration of power. Thus a couple will, in all truth, speak of being best friends . In a sense, this group of transvestites may be calling a truce in the battle of the sexes.

When he meets a prospective partner, one man, in succumbing to the vulnerability that he has feared, finds that he no longer needs to defend against it. Another finds a target for his sexuality. The issues against which they are defending disappear and, with them, the need to need to defend by cross-dressing. Invariably, they feel that the need has gone forever. Those who were dressing in the closet, in secrecy and denial, may forget that they ever cross-dressed at all.

Others, however, may expect to find the equality of a former relationship, yet will put on the behaviours of manhood that are expected of them, for no woman can cope with a man who approaches her as an equal. She, too, has been taken in by the myth of the all-powerful male.

This is the dilemma that faces the wife who discovers her husband's cross-dressing. If there is value enough in the marriage for it to continue, and if the husband can meet her halfway, in spite of his guilt and denial, she has to reconsider her place in the scheme of things at a very fundamental level.

Some wives, it is true, see the opportunity to take absolute power. If their husbands are unable to reveal themselves outside of the marriage, for fear of their public positions, they have the opportunity to blackmail their husbands into being the submissive providers, while, in many cases, they can take other lovers.

Others may feel that the trade-off of dependence on someone, including submitting to their power, is worthwhile for a sense of security, and they may be unwilling to give it up.

There are many other wives, however, who see the chance to de ne a new partnership between the genders. They both can be truly their own persons in a way which does not contradict their different sexes,. The cross-dressing, if it continues, becomes simply a role-playing game.

It would seem that, as a psychological process, it is intrinsically harmless, even beneficial, but, for some, there are deeper implications. It is one thing to cross-dress, but what about people who request irreversible surgery?

Someone may be still in the closet, where feelings can build to a high level. Some wives may only be comfortable with either a male lover or a female girl-friend, but not someone who is either at different times. Others may, unilaterally, place restrictions on their husbands. They may, more importantly, treat them with a barely hidden attitude of resentment and distaste.

Incorporating womanhood becomes more and more important to the man, as he feels himself unable to be acknowledged as what he feels is his true self. In the end he begins genuinely to identify himself as female - a "woman in a man's body."

He may seek gender reassignment, then, at some time after the operation, meet a woman he likes very much. If his motives were primarily defensive, the result may well be tragic. If there are people who later come to regret the operation, this may be a factor. It explains why consultants are so much happier with potential transexuals who are already homosexual. Those potential transexuals who remain attracted to women must be clear that it is as woman to woman and not man to woman.

Thus we have a grey area between the transexual who truly identifies himself as female, and may have buried his feelings for a lifetime, and the transvestite who has come to identify himself through incorporation. The child identifying with a significant adult and then incorporating features of that adult, is quite different from the person who, like Bettelheim's prisoners, incorporates features of a threatening other first, and then goes on to identify.

Defence mechanisms typically work below the conscious level, or may be denied by the person. They are not easy for even the skilled gender consultant to spot and are probably beyond the competence of the average provincial psychiatrist. How can one tell? Only by encouraging the person to be truly himself and, in this, the traditional psychiatric process may be counterproductive.

1. A useful introduction to Freud's theories is: Stevens.R, (1983) Freud and Psychoanalysis. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
2. Quoted by Stevens (1) from Bettelheim. B, (1943) Individual and mass behaviour in extreme situations, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38 pp 417-52.
3. Wall.E, (1988) The Stress Evaluation Interview, Derby: Derby Counselling Centre.
4. Rutherford.J, (1988) "Who's That Man" in Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity eds. Chapman.R, Rutherford.J, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
5. Fitton.R.S, (1989) The Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune, p163, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
6. Rose.S, Lewontin.R.C, Kamin.L.J, (1990) Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature. Chapter 6, The Determined Patriarchy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
7. Farrell. W, (1993) The Myth of Male Power, London: Fourth Estate.
8. Reiss I.L, (1990) An End to Shame: Shaping our Next Sexual Revolution, Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
9. Bennion.F, (1991) The Sex Code: Morals for moderns, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
10. Moir.A. and Jessell.D., (1989) Brain Sex, London: Mandarin Books.
11. Rudd, P.J, (1989) My Husband Wears my Clothes, USA - Katy, Texas: PM Publishers.