Introduction

Ever since Freud discovered the Oedipus complex it has been recognized as the central conflict in the human psyche—the central cluster of conflicting impulses, phantasies, anxieties and defences. It has therefore become the centre of psychoanalytic work. It is still sometimes mistakenly thought that Klein’s work became solely concerned with the baby’s relation to the breast and that the role of the father and the Oedipus complex lost in importance in her work. In fact, as is certainly well known by those acquainted with the work, one of Klein’s earliest discoveries was that of early forms of the superego and of the Oedipus complex before genital primacy. She discovered that there were primitive forms of the Oedipus complex and that pre-genital does not necessarily mean pre-oedipal. She sees the father—the real father as well as the phantasies about father—as being important in the child’s life from the beginning. When she started working with children she was surprised to discover that children not much over two years of age showed oedipal phantasies and had intense anxieties 2associated with them. Oedipal phantasies gave rise to fear of primitive persecutory figures—maternal, paternal, or as a combined figure often at the very centre of phobias—nightmares and night fears. Those phantasy figures exhibited sadistic oral, urethral and anal features, as well as castration threats, due to the projections of infantile sexuality and sadism, and in keeping with the stage of the child’s own psychosexual development. She described the figure of combined sexual parents as an important factor in psychotic anxieties. This phantasy figure is partly a denial of the parental intercourse, combining the two into one monstrous figure, and also a projection of the child’s hostility to that intercourse, making it into a particularly threatening figure.