The Oedipus complex lies at the heart of Freud's dynamic developmental theory. In the evolvement of psychoanalytic theory, this complex is associated with the entire range of feelings the child may experience in relation to his parents and interactions he or she may have with them. The love and hate of the Oedipus complex, the conflict, and the way in which the complex is resolved become at certain points the basis for the understanding not only of child development, personality trends, and psychopathology, but also of broader phenomena, such as the development of social institutions, religion, and morality.

Freud's ideas on the Oedipus complex emerge gradually; they change, the terminology is changed, the scope of what is to be considered oedipal is constricted and expanded. These developments and vicissitudes were influenced by a variety of factors. Freud's attempts to conceptualize intrapsychic material emerging from analyses of some of his patients, as well as from his self-analysis, his attempt to deal with opposing theories and their proponents, and the interaction of the oedipal complex with other focal theoretical issues, are among the major influential factors.

In the first section an outline of the basic stages in the evolution of Freud's ideas on the Oedipus complex is presented. In the second section we present some conjectures about events in Freud's personal and professional life that influenced the course of development of his ideas on the Oedipus complex.

Freud in the last phase of his work gave increasing attention to questions about civilization, about its roots in and effects on human psychology. He was particularly interested in whether civilization on the whole helped or hindered human beings in their search for happiness, and he dealt with this question in two well-known books, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents, the first of which he wrote in 1927 and the second in 1930. This essay is a study of differences between the views that he expressed in these two books. The differences indicate a shift in his outlook, and the essay represents an attempt to understand the reasons behind this shift.

The Future of an Illusion ends in optimism. Briefly, Freud's hopeful conclusion was this: Just as healthy individuals overcome their childish ways as they mature, as reason comes to play a greater role in the governance of their lives, so too healthy societies should overcome their primitive practices as they mature, as science comes to play a greater role in the governance of their lives. Three years later, when he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud's optimism had dimmed. He ended the work on a somber note. No one, Freud observed, in this age of great technological advances can be confident that the struggle between life-giving and life-destroying forces that shapes civilization will not have a ruinous outcome. No doubt the rise of the Nazis and the Fascists during the intervening years partly explains this shift in his outlook. But his further reflections on the nature of civilization help to explain it as well.

Freud opens his ingenious and revealing essay on the Moses of Michelangelo with a disclaimer. He had, he said, no more than a layman's or amateur's knowledge of art: neither in his attitude to art nor in the way in which he experienced its attractions was he a connoisseur. He goes on:

And then, as if for a moment conscious that he might appear to be imposing his own personal peculiarities, a quirk of his own temperament, upon a subject with its own code, with its own imperatives, he hastens to concede what he calls "the apparently paradoxical fact" that "precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unsolved riddles to our understanding." Before these works we feel admiration, awe-and bewilderment. "Possibly," Freud goes on with that irony which he permitted himself in talking of established ways of thinking

A recent essay in Science compares Freud's work with contemporary “cognitive science.” The comparison is rather to Freud's disadvantage, and to the disadvantage of Freud's contemporaries: Our contemporaries have a conception of the mind as a computational system. Some of their theories posit a quantity, “activation,” that is responsible for aspects of mental functioning. Some of their theories postulate “parallel processing” through a network that is analogous to the connected system of nerve cells in the human nervous system. Unlike Freud, the story goes, our contemporaries have an experimental tradition that supports their theories. The result is that we now have a powerful and distinctive science of both the unconscious and the conscious, a science whose theories have led to new experiments “that tentatively reveal a tripartite classification of nonconscious mental life that is quite different from the seething unconscious of Freud.”

In a general way, these perceptions are widely shared, not only among academic psychologists, but among philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, research administrators, and increasingly, the educated public. They have the impression that contemporary cognitive psychology with its computer simulations of mind is onto something new and scientific that was at best only dimly foreshadowed in earlier psychologies. My purpose is to argue the contrary. A big part of contemporary cognitive science is pretty much what you would expect to get if Sigmund Freud had had a computer.

Despite distorted understandings of Freud's views and despite periodic waves of Freud-bashing, Auden's assessment remains essentially correct. Freud's influence continues to be enormous and pervasive. He gave us a new and powerful way to think about and investigate human thought, action, and interaction. He made sense of ranges of experience generally neglected or misunderstood. And while one might wish to reject or argue with some of Freud's particular interpretations and theories, his writings and his insights are too compelling to simply turn away. There is still much to be learned from Freud.

The essays here collected focus on some of Freud's masterworks and some of his central concepts, trying to bring out the structure of his arguments and contributions to our self-understanding.

Freud was born in 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, but after his family's move when he was four years old, he passed almost all of his long life in Vienna. The story of his life is the story of his thought. The great events were most often the occasions of his discoveries and speculations. After his childhood move, the rest of his life can be viewed as a tale of four cities, the psychogeography of which is explored by Carl Schorske. Vienna, embroiled in anti-Semitism, was the ambivalent scene of Freud's professional advances and defeats as well as home to his contented family life.

In his last decade of life Sigmund Freud turned once more to a question that had troubled him ever since he published his conception of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900: What were the implications of individual psychodynamics for civilization as a whole? His mature reflections on that subject he set forth in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930a). Its somber conclusions have, of course, become part of our self-understanding: that the progress of our technical mastery over nature and the perfection of our ethical self-control are achieved at the cost of instinctual repression in the “civilized” man - a cost so high as not only to make neurotics of individuals, but of whole civilizations. An excess of civilization can produce its own undoing at the hands of instinct avenging itself against the culture that has curbed it too well.

One might expect that, in making a point so historical in its essence, Freud would have reached out to propose a scheme of civilization's march toward the organization of nature and the collective development of the superego. Such was not Freud's way. He approached his problem not historically but analogically, proceeding from an analysis of the individual psyche, its structure and experience, to the functioning and future of society. Yet to introduce his reader to the difference between the psyche and history, he had recourse to an ingenious historical metaphor."

Often, when Freud mentioned morality, he was referring to a culture's restrictions on sexual behavior - a code regularly endorsed yet routinely defied. He was deeply interested in exposing the reasons for such restrictive sexual codes, and the dynamics of our deviations from them. Still, for Freud, it is not the sexual content nor the societal enforcement of certain constraints that makes them moral; moral constraints are, rather, constraints that play a particular role within the psychology of individuals - namely, the role of “superego.” While the emergence of a superego is, according to Freud, bound up with the dynamics of sexual desire in general and the oedipal complex in particular, in the end it is the relational properties and not the content of the superego - specifically, its historical relations to other people and its ongoing relations to the ego - that make it a superego and make it the agency of morality. An account of the formation and the character of the superego is, then, simultaneously an account of the formation and the character of morality.

To understand Freud's account of the superego, and the closely related ego-ideal, we must understand how a self or an ego is constituted and how characteristics of other people may be internalized to become parts of oneself. This story forms the crucial metapsychological background for Freud's account of morality, and I offer a somewhat novel interpretation of this background in the first and second sections of this chapter.

The first of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is titled “The Sexual Aberrations.” Why should Freud begin a book the main point of which is to argue for the existence of infantile sexuality with a discussion of adult perversions? (After all, the existence of the adult aberrations was not news.) I believe Freud's beginning can be usefully understood as part of an effective argumentative strategy to extend the notion of sexuality by showing how extensive it already was. Freud himself (in the preface to the fourth edition) describes the book as an attempt “at enlarging the concept of sexuality” (1903d, VII, 134). The extension involved in the notion of perversion prepares the way for the extension involved in infantile sexuality.

The book begins, on its very first page, with a statement of the popular view of the sexual instinct:

The Interpretation of Dreams is often regarded as Freud's most valuable book, and it was pivotal in his work.

Freud began his psychological investigations by following up an insight of his senior colleague Joseph Breuer. One of Breuer's patients was a very intelligent and articulate young woman diagnosed as hysterical. Breuer inquired into her symptoms in great detail, and discovered that they were connected with her emotional life in a number of ways.

In particular, she and Breuer could often trace the beginning of a symptom to an event that had been significant to her but that she had forgotten. Where this was so, moreover, the symptom itself could be seen to be connected with feelings related to this event, which she had not previously expressed. Such symptoms thus had a meaningful connection with events and motives in the patient's life. And they were relieved when she brought these events to consciousness and felt and expressed the motives connected with them.

She was, for example, afflicted for some time with an aversion to drinking, which persisted despite "tormenting thirst." She would take up the glass of water she longed for, but then push it away "like someone suffering from hydrophobia." Under hypnosis she traced this to an episode in which a companion had let a dog - a "horrid creature" - drink water from a glass. She relived the event with great anger and disgust; and when she had done so, the aversion ceased, and she was able to drink without difficulty.

Historically, psychoanalytic writing and everyday language have referred to “woman” as a unitary entity; psychoanalysis has compared “the man” to “the woman” “the boy” to “the girl.” Recent feminist and postmodernist writing has taught us to be wary of such singular referents and of theories that employ them. In particular, psychoanalysis has often been criticized for the limited class and cultural location of its clinical sample of the empirical “women” upon which its purportedly universal theory of femininity has been developed. When we interrogate Freud's writings, however, we find that his and other psychoanalytic references to “woman” are in dialogue with an emphatically plural account of a multitude of “women.” Freud's descriptions of women and of his interactions with them comprise a large cast of characters, a pantheon of higher and lesser ideal-typical goddesses and mortals to complement and accompany Oedipus, Narcissus, Moses, and others in psychological glory or ignominy. We also find actual, historically specific, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century named and nameless women in clinical cases and vignettes.

This essay enumerates these women. I describe a number of implicit axes that differentiate them. Freud describes woman as subject of her own psyche, that is, as living experiencer of self and conscious and unconscious mental processes, as subject to herself. Woman as subject expands into woman as subject-object, that is, object to her own subjectivity as she internally relates to and identifies with or against another internally experienced woman.

For many years, Freud's “seduction theory” of neurosis was seen as an erroneous if initially plausible step on his way to the mature theory of psychoanalysis, and his account of his rejection of the seduction theory was taken essentially at face value. More recently, with the increasing appreciation of child sexual abuse, classical psychoanalysis has been criticized for dismissing childhood reality as infantile fantasy, interest in the seduction theory has been revived, and Freud's motives for abandoning it have been sharply questioned. The story of the rise and fall of the seduction theory thus takes on new interest and significance. Perhaps its most crucial lesson is the importance of theory in psychoanalysis. Theoretical presuppositions played a major role in creating the theory, in causing Freud to abandon it, and in helping him produce a replacement. Theoretical considerations also explain why, though Freud never ceased believing in the reality of sexual abuse in childhood, he could not find a causal role for it once he had adopted his new theory.

The climax of the story is well known. In his letter of September 21, 1897, Freud announced to Wilhelm Fliess, "I no longer believe in my neuiotica" (1985 [1887-1904], 264), the seduction theory he had tenaciously defended for the two preceding years. His reaction to this event seemed paradoxical even to him. It was, he wrote, "the collapse of everything valuable" in his recent theoretical efforts, yet he had "more the feeling of a victory than a defeat (which is surely not right)." But it was. The famous letter was as much birth announcement as obituary. Less than two months later, Freud sent Fliess with mock fanfare the first outline of his theory of infantile sexuality and its role in the formation of neurotic symptoms in adulthood.

POINTS OF CONTACT BETWEEN MARXISM AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Marxism has made two major contributions to recent moral philosophy. The first has been to stimulate a deep and wide-ranging discussion of the moral status of capitalism, provoked by the attempt to determine whether the Marxian critique of capitalism is a moral critique and, if so, on what moral ideal the critique is based. The second has been to force moral philosophers to confront the problem of ideology. Before sketching out the shape of these contributions and the lessons they bring, let us briefly consider what it is about Marxism and about moral philosophy that makes each subject to the concerns of the other.

First let us look at Marxism, which aims to be a scientific theory of social systems. Although Marx devoted the major portion of his writings to the analysis of one type of social system - capitalism - he tried to develop a science of history, an explanation of how societies arise, persist, and decline. And Marx predicted that capitalism's day would end with a revolution that would supplant it with communism. But Marxism is more than observation, analysis, and prediction. Marx was no neutral observer, no scholarly wallflower. His allegiance was to the working masses whose efforts wring from nature the conditions necessary for the survival and flourishing of every society, and he matched his written work with political activism. Moreover, Marx's partisanship is inextricable from his theoretical writings.

Social theorists tend to be remembered for their conclusions rather than the way in which they conducted their inquiries, but if we neglect to study the latter it is quite likely that we will misunderstand or misconstrue the former. Marx complained that the method he employed in Capital was “little understood” and although he attempted to clarify the nature of what he called his “dialectic” the logic of his scientific endeavor has continued to be a contentious subject (Marx, 1977: 99-103). To improve our understanding of his method and its significance in social science, a number of questions need to be addressed. What did Marx mean by dialectic? What did it look like in his work? What was the precise relationship between Marx's dialectical method and formal logic? And finally, what is the relationship between Marx's dialectic and Marxist theory?

The most direct way to get to the heart of the first three questions is to examine Marx's use of the concept of contradiction, which played a role of vital analytical significance in his work, resulting in well-known formulations such as the “contradictions of capitalism” and “class contradictions.”Dialectical philosophers claim that contradictions exist in reality and that the most appropriate way to understand the movement of that reality is to study the development of those contradictions. Formal logic denies that contradictions exist in reality, and where they are seen to exist in thought, they have to be expunged in order to arrive at the truth. This is embodied in the principle of noncontradiction, in which the presence of a contradiction in a statement or proposition invalidates its claim to truth. On the face of it, therefore, the claims of dialectical and formal logic appear to be incommensurable, and dialogue between the two systems appears to be impossible.

In this chapter we shall be exploring one of Marx's most important concepts, that of reproduction. We shall look at the ways in which he did use it and also consider the reasons why he did not use it in some other ways. It may seem strange to spend so much time on what Marx (and Engels) did not do, but considering this omission and the reasons for it may throw light on some fundamental features of Marx's method. In particular, it should help us understand what underlies his materialist conception of history and assess the feminists' basic criticism: that its concentration on production rather than human reproduction means that it is not adequate to the task of explaining gender differences in society and understanding the history of struggle over them.

The plan of the chapter is as follows: First we shall examine Marx's use of the term reproduction to refer to the reproduction of whole social systems, in particular, their class structure. Then we shall consider whether accounts of how social systems reproduce themselves are complete if they do not include human reproduction, the way that people within such systems are born and raised to occupy particular class and gender positions. After this, we shall look at what Marx and Engels had to say about human reproduction and what significance they gave to the consideration of its social forms in their historical analysis. We shall find that their record on this matter is ambivalent - they seem to give human reproduction more importance in describing their historical method than in their actual analyses - and we shall explore why this should have happened. Finally, we shall look at some directions in which work that stays within the Marxist tradition but accords human reproduction more importance might go.