ABSTRACT
Freud first intuited that it was during the third through seventh years that the problems of independent psychic life (selfhood) were faced and worked through by children. Borrowing the mythic themes of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Freud discovered in his own self-analysis (in 1897) the power of emotional triangulation among independently functioning selves. Carl Jung pointed to Electra as the mythic model for triangulating selves in girls. It is one thing to search for nurturance and intelligibility in the world (the organizing experience). It is yet another thing to seek to establish dyadic reliability (symbiotic experience). And, it is yet another experience to look to the other for consolidation of a sense of self (the self-other experience). But, the most complicated aspects of human life develop when a full emotional awareness of third parties, of contingent emotional relationships among interacting selves, is integrated into psychic functioning. That is, the impact of the mythic Oedipus/Electra triangulation experience relies on the child’s growing realization that each relationship exists within a broader set of contingencies determined by third parties. Symbolically and historically, the third party is represented as Father or The Fathers, but in actual human experience, the third party appears along with language and cultural awareness as that which comes between the symbiotic Mommy and me, as that which intervenes in our private dyadic relationships and catapults our relatedness into the broader human community of thirds.
