ABSTRACT
The Oedipus complex, for Sigmund Freud, is both a hypothesized childhood event, of which he conceives in both phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms, and a functional relation to authority and love figures in a person’s life. In Freud’s model of mind, he views humans as primarily related and not as atomistic or primarily separated, rational agents. When Freud writes that only under “exceptional conditions” can psychology “disregard the relations of the individual to others,” psychopathology like psychosis is what he has in mind. The concept of the social drives is linked to psychic bisexuality and a horizontal axis in the economics of libido. Freud describes sublimation as the transferring of social drives through the introverted act of fantasying: artist is once more in rudiments an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. The paternal imago represents the importance of “social anxiety” and caring about one’s reputation as an ethically good person, or how one reflects on one’s family, work group, or others.
