Oedipus Complex

the Oedipus myth represents the failure of a family to contain sexual and murderous passions.-- David Mann, pub. 2007Transference and countertransference issues with sexually abused clients. Psychodynamic Counselling Volume 1, 1995 - Issue 4, Pages 542-559 | Published online: 24 Dec 2007. (tandonline.com)About your question, I'm not sure how many are actually that familiar with the story of Oedipus beyond hearsay. As for Freud he certainly deducted important things about it relating to the meaning I put forward.
We all need a supply of something which overlaps with the concept of ‘love’. An infant never touched will have its spine wither and it will die. The primary attachment of the infant is to the mother since it typically lives off her body. Freud was entirely correct to relate the psychological formation of the infant to the dynamic of the infant, the mother and the father. The infant unavoidably competes with the father with attention from the mother, and if the father is himself very narcissistic or overly egocentric, and if the mother is lacking in meeting the needs of the infants because of that, it will have in some sense an effect on the entire life of the person who becomes from the infant.
Since the father in a sense takes the mother's attention away form the infant, the infant phantasies about having the father removed from the picture. This has via Freud been termed the Oedipal desire or Oedipal Complex, since in the story of Oedipus he removes his father and is united with his mother. Of course it's pathological, since he's an adult and that's his mother. But the rivalry that forms in infanthood is to varying degrees active in most if not all adults, and is behind many family quarrels, such as where a father rejects his son in some kind of social grandstanding (this actually happens in the sequel to the first Oedipus story, «Oedipus at Colonus»).
== Var ==
It is important to note that what we call the Oedipus myth is, in fact, only one version of a variety of Oedipus myths. I have detailed a full discussion of the alternative Oedipus myths in another paper (Mann 1993).
==r==
Projection; Symbolic role
Complex; Enmeshment; Delusion
Transference; Imaginary
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