ABSTRACT
This book updates the Oedipus complex for a contemporary audience in the light of social and cultural changes and explores its implications for psychoanalytic treatment and our understanding of queer families.
Growing evidence during the past few decades indicates that children who grow up in same-sex families adapt well. These findings, which do not conform to the predictions of Oedipal theory, expose the theory’s biases, and call for reexamination of its premises. This book based on ground-breaking research and pursues a methodical investigation of the characteristics of the same-sex families that defy the expectations of Oedipal theory. Furnished with vivid illustrations, it invites the reader to engage actively in the interpretive effort and presents a diverse and complex story about kinship, opening a window onto a rich world of infantile phantasies and parents’ psychological conflicts, at the fascinating intersection of the personal and the social.
Oedipal Experiences in Same-Sex Families will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, educators and policymakers, same-sex parents, and parents who were assisted by gamete donation.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |35 pages
Introduction
part I|67 pages
What does Oedipal development have to do with the parents' sex, anyway?
chapter Chapter one|36 pages
“I want to marry you, Mommy”
chapter Chapter two|29 pages
Oedipal configurations
part II|74 pages
What does genetics have to do with kinship, anyway?
chapter Chapter four|27 pages
A new hierarchy
chapter Chapter five|14 pages
Back to the closet
chapter Chapter seven|13 pages
The power of interpellation
part III|79 pages
What does procreation have to do with parental coitus, anyway?
chapter Chapter eight|45 pages
Between longing and dread
chapter Chapter nine|32 pages
Gamete donation in light of the primal scene
part IV|27 pages
Afterword