ABSTRACT
The author describes some of what Melanie Klein added to the understanding of the Oedipus situation, and also describes what is meant by the depressive position. He shows how this concept necessarily changes people's understanding of the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Though Freud referred to Oedipus Rex, as the author described, in 1897, he did not use the term 'Oedipus complex' in a paper until 'A Special Type of Object-Choice Made by Men' in 1910. In Klein's view the Oedipal situation began in infancy and underwent a complex development occupying years before reaching its zenith at the age of four. This was the age of what has come to be called the classical Oedipus complex as described by Sigmund Freud. The depressive position, like the Oedipus complex, is an extremely rich and many-faceted concept, and long before its discovery in psychoanalysis it had been explored in theology and in literature.
