ABSTRACT
In a sense, latency could be thought of as a time of working through which, recapitulating infantile experiences, reaches the point where it is possible to articulate these experiences within a whole self and a whole object that can integrate them. Alternatively, the presentation of the divisions and projections that traverse the self and the object can prevail, striving at least for a compromise solution between that which can be tolerated and acknowledged as belonging to the ego and that which cannot be tolerated or integrated. If latency is to be seen as the phase that follows the waning of the Oedipus complex, it is very much influenced by how the child goes through this waning—or, as Ferrari argues in From the Eclipse of the Body to the Dawn of Thought, the oedipal constellation never wanes completely.
