Independence and the Feeling of Betrayal
A Loewaldian Perspective on Becoming Yourself
In The Waning of the Oedipus Complex, Hans Loewald explores the emotional complexity of becoming a person in one’s own right. He understands the Oedipus complex, as an enduring struggle involving dependence, authority, and separation. These conflicts change shape as we mature and return at different moments throughout life.
Loewald uses parricide to describe the child’s appropriation of authority previously held by the parents. Parents' authority, protection, and responsibility are gradually taken over by the developing individual. At the same time, their place as the central objects of childhood desire is relinquished. Loewald deliberately gives this process a disturbing name. He wants to preserve the aggression and guilt involved in emancipation, which can be obscured when development is described only as a natural unfolding. We may love and admire our parents while also wishing to surpass them, reject their claims, or free ourselves from their influence.
In this article, Loewald illustrates these ideas through a student who has difficulty completing a thesis in the same field as his father, who died approximately a year earlier. Although capable of finishing, the student procrastinates, doubts his originality, and seeks support while insisting that the work is his own responsibility. Loewald hears two meanings in this insistence on responsibility. The student is speaking about taking charge of his work, but he may also be expressing an unconscious sense of responsibility for a crime. His achievement is entangled with wishes to surpass his father, hostility toward him, and guilt connected with his death.
The student eventually becomes able to finish as these conflicting attachments and ambitions become more reconcilable. Completing the thesis can express both independence from his father and an identification with him. Loewald understands the change as an integration of conflicting needs, rather than primarily as a successful defense against one of them.
Guilt, Atonement, and the Development of Conscience
For Loewald, guilt is not equivalent to a need for punishment. Punishment can become a way of attempting to cancel guilt without understanding or transforming the conflict that produces it. Its relief is temporary, making repeated self-punishment necessary.
A different possibility emerges when guilt can be borne long enough for mourning and reconciliation to occur. Loewald uses atonement in the sense of becoming “at one”: bringing conflicting strivings into a more workable relationship.
The formation of the superego expresses this double movement. Taking over parental authority displaces the parents, but it also preserves and transforms aspects of the relationship within the self. Internalization is therefore both an act of emancipation and a form of restitution.
This gives conscience a meaning beyond prohibition. Mature self-responsibility includes acknowledging one’s desires and impulses as one’s own. A harsh, inflexible superego fails in this respect because it cannot respond to the person’s actual emotional life. Psychological maturity involves developing an internal authority capable of responsibility without depending on relentless punishment.
Maturity as Continuing Reconciliation
Loewald presents maturity as an achievement that must continually be renewed. We become more autonomous by transforming our relationships with those who first cared for us, taking responsibility for our desires, and tolerating the guilt and loss that independence can bring.
The Oedipus complex “wanes” when its original organization gives way to richer forms of inner life and relationship. Its underlying conflicts remain available for further transformation. Becoming a person in one’s own right involves both separation and preservation: relinquishing earlier forms of attachment while carrying them forward in conscience, identity, and the capacity to love.
References:
Loewald, H. W. (1979). The Waning of the Oedipus Complex. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 27:751-775
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