Many people assume that the Oedipus complex is meant to produce boys who will grow up loving women, and girls who will love men (I would call that Oedipus simplex). I wish Rose had mentioned what Freud called the complete Oedipus complex, which suggests that every child forms both same-sex and cross-sex attractions. Little boys can have romantic feelings for Daddy as well as Mommy, as his famous case of Little Hans showed.
In 1930 Freud wrote, in Civilization and Its Discontents, in an attempt to understand the barbarity of the first world war, that organised society and human drives are incompatible. Repressive sublimation, the notion that channelling our primitive desires into building society, fails when repressed aggression leaks out into rape and murder — war in other words.
For whatever reason, it does seem to be true that younger people are giving Freud a second look. In the past five years, 12 universities in the US have made it possible for students to obtain a minor study a secondary subject in psychoanalytic studies.
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