ABSTRACT
The Black Man, both in Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera films and in Dianne Elise clinical vignette, is scripted to represent the oedipal father who intrudes on the mother-daughter dyad, beckoning the daughter forward in her sexual development. The recounted a girlhood game of swimming underwater for as long as possible, imagining herself to be a mermaid, twisting and turning with legs and feet held together in a flutter kick. In pursuing the theme of the Black Man, Dianne Elise patient and she uncovered her sense that her sexuality was foreign and located in this man from some faraway country. Because exclusion from the parents' sexual relationship represents such a fundamental aspect of reality for the child, as Rusbridger emphasizes, 'analysis of the patient's responses to the oedipal situation constitutes the central task of analysis'. The erotic link to each parent starts to form as the child moves from preoedipal into oedipal experience.
