ABSTRACT
The Oedipus situation dawns with the child’s recognition of the parents’ relationship in whatever primitive or partial form. It is continued by the child’s rivalry with one parent for the other, and it is resolved by the child relinquishing his sexual claim on his parents by his acceptance of the reality of their sexual relationship. For S. Freud the Oedipus complex was the nuclear complex from its discovery in 1897 to the end of his life. The chapter suggests that if the encounter with the parental relationship starts to take place at a time when the individual has not established a securely based maternal object, the Oedipus situation appears in analysis only in primitive form and is not immediately recognizable as the classical Oedipus complex. It describes a patient who illustrates this situation. Oedipal illusions are a developmentally phenomenon than the primitive wiping out of the parental relationship with delusional development.
