ABSTRACT
Reading Joseph Lichtenberg’s (2008) “The Oedipus Complex in the 21st Century,” I was deeply impressed both by the breadth of his approach and by the multi-disciplinary expansion of his perspective. I immediately thought of his earlier similar attempts in Psychoanalysis and Motivation (Lichtenberg, 1989) in which he beautifully and credibly demythifies and demystifies psychic agency and psychic determinism. He liberates the infant (and his descendant, the adult) from the non-human garb of narrow, rusted theory to the three-dimensional spirit of aliveness and realness. Put another way, in his view the infant is a more active, alert, and object-seeking individual from birth than we have hitherto realized. On a similar note Hartmann (1939) seemed to have felt similarly in regard to exclusive emphasis on the drives when he long ago proposed the concept of adaptation. However, this profound and evocative concept lamentably never made much headway in subsequent psychoanalytic thinking – except in Erikson’s (1959) application of it in his Identity and the Life Cycle. Erikson linked adaptation with infantile sexual development and its expansion and maturation in ego development and the life cycle. Lichtenberg reminds me of Hartmann and Erikson in his creative and imaginative pragmatism.
