ABSTRACT
The Oedipus complex has become, so much a byword, the term has gone over so completely into ordinary language, that few people stop to puzzle out what its implications really are. The normal Oedipus complex, for boys and girls, and you might think it is complicated enough. But it becomes highly complicated by a further factor—namely, that there are no such beings as complete men and complete women. We psychoanalysts believe that there is something basic in human nature that one can call 'bisexuality'—namely, that every male individual has in him the potentiality for female sexuality, and the females have the potentiality for male sexuality in their bodies. Since bisexuality is normal and inevitable, the inverted versions of the Oedipus complex are equally normal and inevitable. Those children who do not pass their Oedipus complex, who get stuck somewhere In the struggle with the parents, fail to gain this final independence of the superego.
