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Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish 48/4

THE FEMININIZATION OF THE

1

FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX,

PART I: A RECONSIDERATION
OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
SEPARATION ISSUES

Freud’s insights about the oedipus complex have been universalized to

include the psychology of the girl. The authors argue that this crucial
developmental phase for girls has uniquely feminine characteristics
that have not been fully recognized or cohesively incorporated into
psychoanalytic theories. This paper addresses these differences, which
are based on characteristic patterns of object relationships, typical
defenses, and social considerations. The authors argue that “female
oedipal” is an oxymoron, and propose that this constellation be named
“the Persephone complex” after the Greek myth of Persephone, which
seems to capture better the typical situation of the little girl. They focus
on the issue of separation and its complicated and necessary role in the
triangular situation of females. Using illustrations from clinical material,
the authors argue that the frequent appearance of separation material
linked to triangular heterosexual competitive fantasies can and should
be differentiated from material in which ideas about separation stem
from dyadic and earlier issues. Misunderstanding how these separation
conflicts tie into triangular “oedipal” relationships can lead to a “preoedi-
palization” of the dynamics of girls and women.

P sychoanalytic thought has long considered the oedipus complex

a cornerstone of psychic development. Based on the story of a

1
According to Webster’s dictionary, feminize means to make effeminate; to make
a woman out of; to have marked woman-like traits of character; to be wanting in
manly strength; or to be especially marked by weakness, softness, and love of ease
as in an ef feminate civilization. All of these def initions carry negative
connotations. This phallocentric and biased view of the term feminization is not
ours. Feminization becomes derogatory only if feminine traits, and being a female,
are seen as negative or undesirable.

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

male, and emerging from Freud’s understanding of his own uncon-

scious conf licts, the paradigm posits a triangle in which a boy loves
his mother and competes with and wants to get rid of his father. These
insights have been universalized to include the psychology of girls, and
an analogous triangular situation was postulated: that is, the girl loves
her father, and competes with and wants to get rid of her mother.
However, triangulation for girls is not simply a mirror image of
what happens in boys. It has unique feminine characteristics that have
not been fully recognized or cohesively incorporated into our psycho-
analytic thinking and lexicon. In this paper we will address these
uniquely feminine characteristics, which are based on gendered dif-
ferences in object relationships, defenses, and social considerations.
Further, we argue that the term “female oedipal” is an oxymoron. We
will focus on the issue of separation and its complicated and neces-
sary role in the female triangular phase proper. We will use clinical
material to demonstrate that the virtually ubiquitous appearance in girls
of separation material linked to triangular heterosexual competitive
fantasies can and should be differentiated from material in which ideas
1414
about separation do not include any so-called “oedipal elements” and
express earlier dyadic issues. The concerns about separation so often
attributed to females demonstrate triadic as well as dyadic object rela-
tions, and “oedipal” as well as preoedipal conf licts.
One idea about the difference between the triangular situations of
little girls and little boys has run through psychoanalytic writing from
Freud on down through his apologists to his critics and his revision-
ists: that is, the importance to the girl of her relationship to her mother,
and its role in the development, shape, and resolution of her “oedipal”
situation. It is this relationship on which we will focus, concentrating
specif ically on the importance of issues of separation from the mother
in girls’ triangular conf licts.
In a previous paper (1998) we argued that the Persephone myth is
a better f it for the description of the little girl’s situation than is the
Oedipus myth, and we suggested that the term “oedipal complex” be

Deanna Holtzman is Training and Supervising Analyst, Michigan Psychoanalytic

Institute, and Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Wayne State
University School of Medicine. Nancy Kulish is Training and Supervising Analyst,
Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of
Psychiatry, Wayne State University School of Medicine.
Submitted for publication April 1, 1999.

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

replaced with “Persephone complex.” For over a thousand years, the

Eleusinian mysteries, celebrating fertility and the Demeter/Persephone
myth, were the most important of the widespread Greek mystery
cults and rituals (Foley 1994). The myth tells the story of Kore’s
(Persephone’s) straying from her mother to pick f lowers, her sexual
abduction by the lord of the underworld, her mother Demeter’s
mournful search for her, and the establishment of the seasons by their
separations and reunions over the cycle of the ensuing years.
Our source for this tale is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (see Foley
1994), in which the story goes as follows: Kore/Persephone, the young
daughter of Demeter and Zeus, is gathering f lowers in a meadow with
other young girls. As Kore plucks a particularly beautiful narcissus
that has attracted her, the earth opens suddenly and she is abducted by
Hades, God of the Underworld and Death. Nobody hears her screams
and cries. (Some versions of the story make a rape more explicit.) When
Kore next appears, she is with Hades in the underworld. Hades is
pictured “reclining on a bed with his shy spouse, strongly reluctant.” It
is important to note that prior to her stay with Hades and (presumably)
1415
the loss of her virginity, the girl is known only as “Kore,” which in
Greek literally means “maiden.” Afterwards she is known by the new
name of Persephone.
Demeter, goddess of fertility and Persephone’s mother, descends
from Olympus and frantically searches the earth for her daughter.
In her fury and pain, she causes famine and drought to spread over
the earth. Zeus is impelled by this catastrophe to persuade Hades
to release Persephone. However, Persephone has eaten some pome-
granate seeds. (In some versions she is tricked or forced by Hades; in
others, she takes the seeds willingly.) She has broken an injunction
not to eat in the underworld, and is now bound to Hades. A com-
promise is worked out among the gods, by which Persephone spends
one third of the year with Hades and two thirds with her mother.2 This
compromise is the ancient explanation of the origin of the seasons.
Winter rules while Persephone is away from her mother and living
with Hades, and the earth f lowers in spring and summer while she
is with her mother. The poem ends with Demeter’s foundation of
the Eleusinian rites.
2
The proportion of time that Persephone spends with Hades and with her mother
varies from version to version of the story. In some it is half and half. The number
of seeds ingested also varies.

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

Persephone’s story is the story of a close mother-daughter rela-

tionship, of separation and reunion, and of a way of resolving conf licts
about entering the sexual world. The positive feminine oedipal situ-
ation requires the girl to maintain a relationship with her mother while
at the same competing with her. We emphasize that the Persephone
story involves a sexual triangle in which the girl creates a compromise
solution by separating in time and space her relationship with a
woman/mother and a man/father. She oscillates between two worlds:
as Persephone in the murky, sexual world of Hades where she rules
as queen, and as Kore in the sunny, safe world of Demeter where she
is an innocent virgin picking f lowers. We see this as a clear paradigm
of a heterosexual conf lict of loyalty: the desire both to stay with mother
and to run away with father. This is the little girl’s dilemma.
Other writers have selected different stories, Cinderella or Electra,
for example, as paradigmatic of the girl’s oedipal situation.3 Our objec-
tion to Cinderella, which Bernstein (1993) favored, is that aspects of the
maternal object are split between the bad stepmother and the good fairy
godmother. Splitting is generally an earlier, preoedipal phenomenon.
1416
In contrast, in the tale of Persephone, male and female (whole) objects
are separated in time and place; this is a means of dealing with the
conf licts of that later stage. Thus, we feel that the story of Persephone
better captures a girl’s typical solution to her “oedipal” dilemma. She
is caught between her attachment to her mother and her attraction to
her father. We selected this myth not because it necessarily represents
the ideal of mature female development, or the best resolution of this
situation, but because it represents a common defensive compromise by
which the concerns of that stage of development may be managed.
In a previous work (1997) we demonstrated that themes of sepa-
ration from the mother typically accompany women’s memories and
experiences of their loss of virginity and entry into adult hetero-
sexuality. In addition, unconscious incestuous fantasies about the
father are usually intertwined with this material. We found that the
concerns about separation from a mother that accompany a daughter’s
stepping into her world as a heterosexual rival are not regressive,
dyadic, or preoedipal, but are part of the triangular experience and
development itself.

3
Freud (1931) rejected the idea of Electra, proposed by Jung, as paradigmatic
of the girl.

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

From the beginning, Freud (1925) noted differences in the oedipal

situations of little girls and little boys. He stated that “the fateful com-
bination of love for the one parent and simultaneous hatred for the other
as rival is found only in boys” (Freud 1931, p. 229). According to
his early theories, different reactions by girl and boy to the anatomical
differences between the sexes—that is, penis envy versus castration
anxiety—had major consequences for oedipal development, and
ensured that entry into the oedipal situation, its length, its resolution,
and its inf luences on the development of the superego are dif ferent
for boys and girls, as are their eventual sexual aims and their choice
of sexual object.
Dissatisf ied with his early formulations about female psycho-
sexual development, Freud welcomed contributions from female col-
leagues, who explained and elaborated aspects of female development
through the exploration of the preoedipal phase. Lampl-deGroot
(1927), Deutsch (1945) and Bonaparte (1953) emphasized preoedipal
dyadic relationships between girls and their mothers to explain some
of the observed differences between the female and male oedipal
1417
complexes. At the same time, they adhered closely to Freud’s model for
the oedipal situation itself.
These early ideas about the female oedipal complex, and the ways
it resembles and differs from that of the male, have been addressed by
subsequent analytic thinkers. Freud (1931) had cautioned that the
duration of the girl’s attachment to her mother should not be under-
emphasized. Lampl-deGroot (1927) supported Freud’s formulations,
and documented a negative oedipal complex that preceded the positive
oedipal in the girl. Fenichel (1954) did not regularly f ind this con-
stellation as a forerunner to the positive female oedipal in his case
material. He stressed object relations, and presented clinical material to
demonstrate that the woman’s oedipal complex owed its special form
almost entirely to a transfer of traits from the pregenital relationship
with the mother onto the genital relationship with the father. The early
Kleinians (Jones 1935; Klein 1928) proposed that an innate drive, rather
than penis envy, impelled the girl into the heterosexual oedipal situa-
tion. Others also vigorously questioned the centrality of penis envy
in female psychosexual development, in terms of its inevitability and
its meaning (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1970; Grossman and Stewart 1976;
Horney 1924; Schafer 1974). Researchers in early infant and child
development (Moore 1976) pointed out that the observation of sexual

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

differences did not come as late as Freud proposed, so that reaction

to it could not explain the entry into the oedipal period. Others beside
Fenichel questioned the inevitability of a negative oedipal preceding
the positive (Edgecomb and Burgner 1975). There has been serious dis-
agreement about the girl’s supposed weaker motivation for resolving
the oedipal conf lict, and the implications of this for the formation of the
superego (Bernstein 1990; Blum 1976; Gilligan 1982; Schafer 1974).
In this paper we will address the so-called “positive oedipal” trian-
gular situation and the development of heterosexual interests in girls.
Our focus will highlight the girl’s conf licted entry into heterosexual
triangular development. In the traditional “old-fashioned” family situa-
tion, a little girl, three to six years old, begins to feel that her mother,
her primary object, is her rival for father’s affection and interest. This
rivalry threatens her basic security, because of frightening fantasies of
loss of maternal nurture, and evokes conf licts about loyalties to the two
parents. At this age, the little boy’s primary caretaker and object of
blossoming (positive) oedipal desires are one and the same: his mother.
His rivalrous and angry feelings are directed primarily toward his
1418
father, on whom he does not depend in the same way as he does upon
his mother. Thus, separation issues are not as much to the fore with
the boy at this time as they are with the girl.
We are not saying that boys do not have separation issues. However,
the typical situation for little girls at this stage of development (the
entry into triangulation) brings up separation issues with particular
intensity. Nor are we saying that girls’ oedipal struggles are more
diff icult than those of boys—only that they are different. Ultimately, of
course, both girls and boys have to deal with the developmental tasks
of loosening infantile ties to internal parental objects and integrating
disparate parental imagos.
In emphasizing one component of the triangular picture, separation
issues, we acknowledge that we are extracting one aspect of a very
complex process, and that we run the risk thereby of misconception and
oversimplif ication. Indeed, different and intricate patterns of anxieties,
urges, fantasies, defenses, and object relationships comprise the oedipal
phase for each sex.
We deliberately speak of separation issues, not separation prob-
lems. Separation and psychic development are interwoven, beginning
in infancy with separation of self from object, and proceeding to the
establishment of object constancy and a rudimentary sense of self, the

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

achievement of a solid core gender identity, and a sense of bodily

autonomy. Disruptions and conf licts in these areas can lead to major
problems such as ego def icits and separation anxieties. And there
are characteristic separation tasks that must be handled throughout all
stages of development. Colarusso (1997) has outlined complex issues
of separation-individuation as they occur throughout the life cycle. We
will build on the observations of the many psychoanalysts who have
written about the role of separation issues in the girl’s oedipal complex.
Contemporary theorists such as Chodorow (1978) and Lerner
(1980) have suggested that separation is especially diff icult and salient
for the little girl as compared to the little boy. Chodorow posited
that in the course of development the girl must separate from the
primary object, the mother, while she identif ies with her as the
same-sexed object. In contrast, his identif ication with the same-sexed
object, the father, helps the boy with separation from the mother, but
leaves him more vulnerable to an exaggerated need for autonomy.
Chodorow suggested that the boundaries between mothers and
daughters are more permeable and less def ined than those between
1419
mothers and sons, and she argued that the girl’s oedipal complex is
affected by these conf igurations:

The turn to the father, however, is embedded in a girl’s external

relationship to her mother and in her relation to her mother as
internal object. . . . Every step of the way, as the analysts describe
it, a girl develops her relationship to her father, while looking back
at her mother—to see if her mother is envious, to make sure she
is in fact separate, to see if in this way she can win her mother, to
see if she is really independent. Her turn to her father is both an
attack on her mother and an expression of love for her. . . . The
male and female oedipal complex are asymmetrical. A girl’s love
for her father and rivalry with her mother is always tempered by
love for her mother, even against her will [pp. 126–127].

Echoing these ideas, Burch (1997) linked them to the myth of

Persephone. She cogently described the girl’s attempt to hold on to the
mother “while she embraces the father,” and concluded that “the myth
of Demeter and Persephone more aptly describes the daughter’s
developmental crisis” (p. 19).
Chodorow’s arguments have been inf luential in laying forth the
differences between girls’ and boys’ situations in family oedipal rela-
tionships. While we agree with many of her descriptions, we question

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

her conclusions about the permeability of the girl’s ego boundaries,

which seem to us to be overly generalized and not necessarily true.4 This
kind of thinking has perhaps unintentionally furthered the belief that
girls are more prone to preoedipal pathology and f ixation than are
boys. Hoffman (2000) suggested that relational analysts tend to sub-
ordinate conf licts over oedipal passions to earlier relational issues, and
that a lack of appreciation of girls’ passion in psychoanalytic theory
in general has resulted in a preoedipalization of their dynamics. “It thus
makes sense to consider that it is much safer to talk about object rela-
tions than about powerful sexual and aggressive feelings” (p. 16).
Lax (1995) identif ied aspects of separation in the oedipal period,
though in the context of penis envy. Person (1982) stressed that the
little girl is more intimidated in the oedipal situation than the little
boy (that is to say, less able to show overt hostility and competition)
because her rival, the mother, is also her source of nurturing. Tyson
(1989) and Chasseguet-Smirgel (1970) have made related points about
the importance of the girl’s tie to the mother in the shape, progression
into, and resolution of the girl’s oedipal situation. Benjamin (1990) and
1420
Torok (1992) suggested that conf licted preoedipal relationships with
their mothers predispose girls to diff iculties in owning and enjoying
their sexuality.

CLINICAL MATERIAL

We have selected the following examples from many possible cases

to elucidate separation issues experienced by female patients in rela-
tionship to their mothers within the context of heterosexual triangular
situations. These patients were relatively well functioning, neurotic
individuals with no serious impairments of ego functions or object rela-
tions. In each of these examples there is a theme of conf lict between two
separate worlds. One world, the mother-daughter dyad, is contrasted
with the other world, that of secret and dangerously exciting sexuality
with a man. While the material appears initially to be organized around

4
Research (Olesker 1990) has documented gender-linked differences in infants’
and toddlers’ achievement of the awareness of psychological separateness from
their mothers. Girls seem to become aware of their separateness earlier than boys.
We interpret this f inding as support for the argument that girls tend to be more
sensitized to and interested in issues of relatedness and separateness where their
mothers are concerned, and not as an indication that they have more diff iculty
establishing the boundaries between self and internal primary object.

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

dyadic separation issues, eventually triangular competitive and sexual

themes emerge as the central conf lict.

Case 1
The following session is from the second year of the analysis of
a young woman about to be married, Miss R. In the session we will
highlight, themes of attraction to a father f igure, of missing her mother
and competing with her, and of fears of bodily injury and separation as
punishment for winning the rivalry are all present. The image of cutting
off a f inger in response to a pleasurable, but conf licted, experience
occurs as well. Miss R’s husband-to-be is a man she considers a good,
comfortable choice, but not someone towards whom she feels strong
passion. At this point in the analysis the patient was talking about
her plans for her wedding and the analyst’s upcoming vacation. The
approaching wedding has re-evoked anxious feelings and fantasies that
her father was always more interested in her than he was in her mother.
In the sessions preceding this one, Miss R had spoken about her dog,
imagining what it would be like to be the dog, and how miserable it
1421
would be to be pushed outside into the wintry cold away from desired
warmth and closeness. She also reported a vignette about her hair-
dresser, who was “a bitch, beneath a nice exterior . . . so busy talking
about a party she was giving while I had to sit there. There she was
behind me showing off and I had to wait.” The analyst interpreted Miss
R’s anger about being pushed away into the cold while the analyst was
off enjoying her private life. In response, the patient became tearful and
vented some of her hurt and anger at the analyst. This material appeared
to be garden-variety dyadic reaction to separation from the analyst.
In the next session the patient began, “This is very close to my
wedding, but I’m having these images that are just terrible—images
about cutting tomatoes and cutting off the end of a f inger. I think it was
an image, but not a dream. I don’t know. A terrible thing that gives me
anxiety to think of, so I tried to think of a f ield of f lowers. [Note the
similarity of this imagery of a f ield of f lowers to the setting of the
Persephone myth.] But every time I thought of that particular image
I felt the pain of it. In my chest. It’s like my whole self. A whole bodily
feeling. How easy it is to lose the extremities. It seems like all is going
so well now that it scares me. Work is going good. Bob [her f iancé] and
I have a lot of new friends. Last night we went to dinner with this guy
and his date. I felt out of my league. I enjoyed the whole ambiance of

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

the expensive dinner, but it all scares me. And then I come home and
have images of cutting off my finger! It’s like I can see the fruits of my
efforts. I’d be the one chopping. It would be my f inger. No one else
would be responsible for it. It would bring me back to reality, the real
world, and I would know this is the world I live in. This is a situation
I could manage. As awful as it would be, it would be my hand and my
problem.”
The analyst asked her to tell her more about that. “I don’t know.
It’s like everything keeps getting better and better, and it seems very
scary. At the dinner we were at it’s almost as if people are taking me
away from things that are familiar to me. It’s like I really missed my
mom. My parents were out of town this weekend. I wanted to talk to
her. I feel pulled away then.”
The analyst asked, “Pulled away?”
“Pulled away from my mom. I now spend evenings with people she
doesn’t know. There’s kind of a loneliness in me. Maybe like the same
thing when I went to college. When I went away I was there with all
people my mom didn’t know, and when we went to this dinner it’s
1422
similar. I feel like I don’t really belong, and I feel pulled away from
what I feel is so comfortable. I’m becoming someone I’m not—in rela-
tionship to me. I don’t know why I’m comparing all the time, but the
whole thing makes me feel more alienated from my mother.”
Miss R went on to say that the other guy, who is in the computer
business, turns out to have the same f irst name as her father: Jim. She
commented, “It is really strange that it’s the same name. I’m afraid with
this guy because he is so sophisticated. . . . He’s a real good catch, but
that bothers me because I don’t want to feel that way—I’m engaged
to Bob.” Then she described how Jim R, the guy with her father’s
name, had said forcefully to his date at the dinner, “Taste this.”
“I was attracted to him but I don’t like domineering men. Whoa—
that reminds me of my dad a little because he can be that way. ‘Take
a bite,’ he’d say. I’d say no.5 He wouldn’t force it of course, but the
date, she’d do whatever the guy said. And it was like Chuck, my former
boyfriend, who was also in computers. And this guy . . . Wait a minute,
I gave you the wrong name, the name I gave you, Jim R, is really a

5
Note the similarity to the eating aspects of the Persephone myth, in which
Persephone is enticed, fooled, or on her own eats pomegranate seeds—the forbidden
fruit. It is this prohibited act that seals her fate, and forces her return each year to the
underworld to reign as Hades’s queen.

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

cousin of my dad. The guy’s name is really Tim R. I don’t know why
I called him Jim R—I used to have a crush on Jim.”
Her thoughts turned again to competition; this time she com-
pared herself with Tim’s date (her rival, the woman belonging to the
father substitute). The patient said, “We both can’t be good, we both
can’t be successful. It’s like a see-saw. We both can’t be up at the
same time.”
The analyst said, “This worry about alienation from your mother
stems from your concern that you both can’t be successful at the same
time.” The patient responded, “Well, I think that’s true because we can
never be together at the same level. Cutting off the f inger is the same
thing. It’s like separating from a part of yourself. Like I could destruct
and kill off a part of myself. Like if a little part of my f inger was like
my relationship with my mother and I cut it off. Maybe going to dinner
with that guy last night, the four of us, is like a separation. Maybe
it’s also a separation from my f iancé, because I was really interested
in the other guy. To be safely married to someone not so sophisticated
as the other guy [and not as sexually exciting, we believe] is like my
1423
mother’s world. If I step out of the world of my mom, I become dis-
connected. It’s interesting and yet funny. With the same name as my
dad, this guy seems more dangerous, like dangerous new territory.
I don’t trust this guy. Or my cousin. They’d be condescending with
me just like my dad. It was exciting to enter into his territory but
always humiliating.”
This session had been preceded by separation material that appeared
to be preoedipal, related to the mother-daughter dyad. It concerned two
people, the analyst/mother and the patient/daughter, and the parent/dog,
hairdresser/client themes of early loss—being pushed out, ignored, and
rejected. It became apparent that this material had evolved into triadic
sexual concerns. The patient was preoccupied with an attempt to bal-
ance two different worlds. She contrasted the world of the close-knit
comfort of mother and family with the world of excitement and for-
bidden sexuality. She clearly linked her father with the male relative of
the same name. The slip she made in the matter of the name demar-
cated the emergence of a conf lict about an incestuous attraction with
its accompanying anxieties and guilt. Her anxieties about competitive
rivalry with her mother led to fears of being alienated from and losing
her mother, and being punished by having a part of herself cut off. The
cut-off f inger can be understood and interpreted in terms of castration,

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

but this patient’s associations alerted us to the important awareness

that it referred to the loss of her relationship with her mother as well.6
The two worlds Miss R described concretely parallel the story of
Persephone, who is queen of the underworld—“the world below”—and
mate to her uncle Hades for part of the year, but who returns to be with
her mother, Demeter, in the fertile “world above” for the rest of it. A
balancing act is required to keep her mother’s love and nurture while at
the same time she becomes sexual with a man. Competitive rivalry,
incestuous heterosexual attraction and anxiety, and conf licts around
loyalty to one parent versus the other are all present.
In the transference a similar situation was developing. The patient
talked about her competitiveness with the analyst, and her desire to be
just like her and to possess everything the analyst had. She anxiously
described a movie in which a young woman moves in with and wants
to be like her new roommate. The patient recognized herself in this
character. Eventually the character takes over the roommate’s posses-
sions, her lover—her entire life. The patient’s competitive and aggres-
sive feelings were emerging in fuller form.
1424
Case 2
Mrs. L, a married woman in her forties, was in the fifth year of
her analysis. In the clinical material to be presented the main theme is
that winning the competition with her mother is dangerous and means
loss. As in the previous case and the one to follow, the patient had
associations involving losing a part of herself. This can be understood
as fear of losing the mother, as well as of bodily injury as punishment
for unacceptable wishes.
Prior to this session, Mrs. L had been talking about her mother,
who, according to the patient, did not approve of her growing up.
“Maybe she wanted me to stay a little girl.” Mrs. L reported anxiety
when she realized she had things in common with the analyst, such as
the interest in books and art that she deduced from observing the

6
A cut-off member or part of a finger is an element that appears in many fairy
tales such as “The Enchanted Pig” and “The Little Mermaid,” both of which are
discussed by Bettleheim (1975). He attributed to these images the notion of a girl
giving up a piece of herself (the hymen) in order to achieve a sexual or marital
partnership. In addition, he suggested that it symbolized fantasies of castration: loss
of a phallus. Our material suggests a new interpretation. The cut-off part represents
not only castration or def loration, but also being cut off from the mother. In her
mind, the girl fears that in order to marry she must lose her mother.

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

analyst’s off ice. She went on to describe how she and her mother
would do lots of things together—cooking, for example—and how
homesick she would become when she was not with her mother. She
described her mother as sometimes depressed, thus available only
erratically. “She would turn on and off in terms of her interest in
me.” These feelings about an unavailable mother sounded at this point
like dyadic preoedipal material. The analyst interpreted the patient’s
parallel experience in the transference: that is, that the analyst, being
not always available, seemed like her erratic mother. The patient
responded, “I got so screwed up in my relationship with my mother.
The more successful I got, the less she was there for me.” Competition
is visible here as a precipitant for the emergence of anxieties about
separation.
The next session began with Mrs. L talking about her going away
to college. “I remember when I went off to college in the big city. There
would be drinking parties, smoking, smoking dope, drugs, marijuana.
My mother would have had a hard time with that. I think that she had
a vested interest in me staying a child. She was not aware of it, but it
1425
was there. The attachment that we had was so great. My mother often
says, ‘I love how you used to be.’ My mother never saw that part of
me. The cut-up part of me.” The analyst asked, “Cut-up part?” The patient
responded, “The silly part, the sexual part of me. That world was not
known to her—the party me. It gave me a sense of myself. I was sepa-
rated from my mother, which was good for me. I became a person unto
myself; I wasn’t that when I was with her. I f igured out who I was.
The f irst year was a very big adjustment. At f irst I was very lonely and
very unhappy and then I found I preferred it; I liked it and I wanted to
stay at school. When I was there I felt separate. College was a very dif-
ferent world than the world at home. The world at home was so different
I was shocked when I returned. The tempo of life differed—my mother
around . . . I missed that world at college. I knew all about the seasons.”
The patient replied to the analyst’s question about what she meant:
“When I got away from school and I felt I lost that part of myself.
I would look at the sky and get a sense of time—spring, the smell
of plants. I was never at college for the summer. Fall was gorgeous. At
f irst the days lasted long like they do when you’re younger. They go
too fast when you are older. The rhythm of life was different. I felt
when I was there, f inally after a period of adjustment, I had grown up. I
remember missing my mother a lot but then I got used to it and then I

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

didn’t want to come home after a while. The summers, they were
hot—no air conditioning, sticky, unbearable, hot, and bugs. But at
school you had no sense of the world outside. . . . In the dorm we
lived next door to poverty, the ghetto. Incest was the thing; it was all
over. Lots of mentally retarded, with a lot of incest between fathers
and daughters. These were poor, poor people. . . . There were a lot of
f lat-head faces [i.e., retarded people]. Everybody talked about it,
everybody knew about it. For my community service, I went into a
house once with a dirt f loor. There were pockets of communities like
that, poverty like you would never believe. Some experience! There
was one preacher who owned the whole neighborhood and I met his
daughter. She couldn’t wait to get out of that place.
“I remember so much missing my mother. She was upset that I was
gone and yet I think she still had a life of her own. She missed me; she
didn’t fall apart, but she did miss me. However, she was never dis-
traught. I was more missing her, more attached, at the beginning. I
would come back and spend two months at home and everything was
okay, and then I would be trying to get back to myself. I missed that
1426
part of myself. I would wake up there unburdened. . . . It’s like there are
two different worlds—my mother’s world and my school world. I think
that they don’t have to be antagonistic.
“When I got married, again I felt like I lost half of myself. I had
been very dependent on my mother, who I think felt that she was losing
me. I was so attached to her. I felt unseparated from her. Just being
with her made me feel better. I had a good marriage and I produced
a life of my own. I was in my own world. Before that everything was
close and good, and after that, when I would go back to the city where
she was living, I would feel suf focated by her. Something about
the intensity. I would feel that I was a child, and I couldn’t stand
it. Something changed. I grew up. I started to feel separate. I had felt
before that she could take my suffering away just by my being with
her, and I felt that I could do the same for her. When I got married, some-
thing switched. My husband and I had a life of our own, a house of our
own, we were happy. My mother really didn’t know me. She didn’t
know what I was like. Before, I would tell her all my worries. It was
something about me being young. I would get annoyed later on, the
way she would talk, but I felt like I was stuck in the category of ‘little
girl,’ which drove me crazy. She would lecture to me. She would have
a critical edge toward me or others.”

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

When the analyst asked why the criticism, she was surprised by the
patient’s reply: “Well, there may have been something about competi-
tion, but I don’t know what about. That I wasn’t good enough. That was
the feeling that I always had.” The analyst interpreted the defense:
“If you feel you are not good enough then you don’t have to fear
competition.” The patient responded, “It feels like I have this hidden
part of me, this competitive part. Dangerous. I do go after what I want.
I don’t know if my mother approved or not. After I was married [she
married a man in the same profession as her father] I wasn’t there for
my mother. I couldn’t go shopping with her. Couldn’t spend enough
time. I felt guilty. [Silence.] I am thinking of competitive. Competition
means loss. The better I did, the less I had in common with my mother.
. . . I felt I lost my mother when I went to work. One more separation.
I felt like it was to go off and do something by myself, on my own, in
a different space. It has something to do with competition.”
The analyst asked, “How?”
“There were parts of my mother that were very feminine and viva-
cious and would go to parties, dress very feminine, very f lirtatious—
1427
but not seductive. Appropriate. And she, I think, was really disappoint-
ed with my father. I remember her being angry with me. I had dated a
boy for two years and we went somewhere to make out. My hair was
disheveled, and she told me I was grounded, and she was mad. . . .
Dating was OK but she did not want anything sexual. She was very
threatened by real sexual passionate attachment. . . . All I want to do
now is relax and dig in my garden. I want to play and dig in the dirt. In
spring I would go into the garden and weed it. I just loved putting my
f ingers in the dirt and the smell of the dirt and the f lowers. There is
something about it that is calming. I love to watch things grow. . . . It
piques my curiosity.” The session ended with the patient returning to
the theme of separations, this time in her experiences at camp.
All these separations—at camp, in college, in marriage, at work—
represent “straying from mother.” When Persephone strayed from her
mother, abduction, rape, and eventually marriage and separation from
her mother resulted. This patient, like Miss R, stresses the experience
of two different worlds. The world of the intimate closeness with
mother again contrasts starkly with the world of exciting forbidden
sexuality, parties, and incest. Like Miss R, Mrs. L suffered loss as she
entered the world of sexuality. The loss is of a part of herself, and yet
she also finds a part of herself—the sexual part—that the mother does

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

not know. As the two worlds oscillate, there is throughout this session
a merging of separation themes—earlier with later issues and dyadic
with triangular ones, such as loss of mother’s care, or divisive compe-
tition. The patient’s guilt is associated with incestuous erotic fantasies
of competing with her mother. (Persephone strayed from her mother to
go after what she wanted, a special f lower, and was abducted.) “It’s
dangerous to go after what I want” is followed by expressions of guilt.
The appearance of associations about seasons and about gardening
seem at f irst glance peculiarly out of place, but they contain underlying
meanings of birth, fertility, and periodicity that do seem to f it. Again,
the story of Persephone playing in the garden, with the f luctuation of
the seasons, is evoked.

Case 3
Miss A had been in analysis for a short time, and was just about to
become engaged. Here again, the anticipation of taking on the role and
place of the mother as a married woman brings fears of maternal loss
and conf licting loyalties to father and mother. An enactment between
1428
analyst, f iancé, and patient demonstrates these conf licts.
In the previous session Miss A had talked about a dream in which
she had left some red luggage behind at a train station. She was with a
group of people, all of whom had left their luggage. After some hours
she returned to the station and was told that it was too late, and she
could not get her luggage. She associated to a weekend trip to a rock
festival with her boyfriend and a group of his friends. It had been his
idea, and it was the f irst time she had gone on a trip like that. Although
she had been apprehensive, it had turned out to be fun. The train
reminded her of recent travels. Leaving luggage had something to do
with getting married and fears about losing a part of herself. The red
was a red f lag about something—danger. She was worried that she
would not be able to hold her own with her boyfriend. He was consid-
erate, but forceful and sure of himself. She often was afraid that her
ideas and needs would be submerged by the strength of his personality.
She felt she was “less together” than he was.
We suppose that this phrase contains at least three meanings. In the
f irst sense, she was talking about her emotional state. She felt that he
was “more together,” less open emotionally, altogether less vulnerable
than she was. In the second sense, it referred to her previously articu-
lated notion of the female genitals as “being open,” and the male genitals

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

“closed over” (Mayer 1985). Third, and most salient for our discussion,
she and her mother would be “less together.” Here “less together”
referred to separation from her mother, who gave her needed support
and care that she feared her boyfriend might not provide. In association
to “everybody’s luggage,” the patient guessed that this referred to some-
thing she shared with others who were “in the same boat—like other
women.” [Retrospectively, we speculate that the “red luggage and being
late” may have ref lected fears and anticipations about being pregnant:
that is, her period being late.] She had previously expressed conf lict
about having children. Thus, anticipation of being married was evoking
feelings of vulnerability (her view of the woman’s role).
The analyst suggested to Miss A that this idea of “being in the
same boat” was connected with often stated worries that she would
become like her mother in ways that she did not like. Earlier in this ses-
sion the patient had talked about how her mother always let her father
have his own way when they traveled. In general she pictured the
parental relationship as one in which the mother was dominated by the
father. The analyst ref lected the patient’s worries that she would dupli-
1429
cate her parents’ relationship in her own future marriage. The patient
agreed. Miss A had in fact uncharacteristically allowed her f iancé to
dominate and direct their recent travel plans. The analyst felt that
in general Miss A was a very strong and not at all submissive young
woman. In this instance, her submissiveness was a stance that actual-
ized the dangerous unconscious desire to take the mother’s place. The
analyst did not explore this desire at this time.
In the following session Miss A reported that she had told the
dream to her boyfriend, who said it had to do with losing one’s freedom
(this was clearly his concern). She had unconsciously acted out her
stated fear, and allowed her boyfriend to be dominant in determining
the meaning of the dream. But she thought, and stated somewhat hesi-
tantly, that the dream was not about losing freedom, but concerned
friends. It felt to her that the “something” she was losing might be
friends, specif ically girlfriends [that is, feminine support]. The analyst
supported the patient’s tentative explorations by saying that it was
the patient’s dream, and that it was the patient’s associations that were
important. Thus, the analyst entered a mini-enactment of competition
with the boyfriend about whose associations to the dream were impor-
tant. Miss A had set up a possible rivalry between his interpretation and
that of the analyst.

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

Miss A then began to talk about how she had lost or left behind
friends in her moving around the country, to go to college and more
recently to follow her boyfriend to his new place of employment. She
speculated about her future bridesmaids, one a girlfriend from grade
school, one from college. She would like to get in touch with another
old girlfriend with whom she had lost contact. She told a story about
how she had gotten a brush-off when she had tried to contact another
friend. She lamented that she had not been able to make very many new
close friends since moving to the area. “The two friends I have made
here are both women who have recently lost their mothers. I don’t know
what that means—a sick fascination with that somehow.”
Her thoughts went to her mother, and about times in the past in
which she experienced a closeness with her. These associations sub-
stantiated the notion that the patient’s feeling of loss here referred to the
loss of her mother.
She mused, “Sometime in the summer I might want to travel with
a girlfriend, but how could I do that, travel with a friend, if I’m
engaged? And how would it work being married and maintaining
1430
friendships with women?” The analyst asked, “So you are worried
about losing your connection with your women friends?”
“Yes.” She became tearful. “How can I balance that? How can
I f ind ways to balance my old friends and this new world? The world
of women and the world of men. How can I balance these worlds?”
She began to cry harder. Her thoughts returned to the coming summer.
Maybe she could travel with her women friends then, during that
season, separate from her boyfriend. “But that doesn’t make sense. . . . ”
She was worried about how she would balance her relationships
with her mother/analyst and her husband-to-be. This worry was
becoming more of a reality as she anticipated stepping into a world
where she will be wife and mother. Maternal loss is clearly the danger
she is experiencing in this material. One important meaning of “losing
part of herself ” is the loss of female companionship, support, and
familiarity. Here again is Persephone’s dilemma, by now familiar to us:
how to balance these perceived conf licts between the worlds of the
mother and of the father. The delicate balance that preserves female
attachment, originating with mother, while moving into the world
as a sexual woman with a man, is represented poignantly by Miss A’s
anxiety about how to have both without losing in either sphere. The
issue of loyalty faced by this patient, which we feel is a typical

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

feminine dilemma, is an example of the divergent type of conf lict

described by Kris (1988), which requires that one object or aim be
given up in the interest of another.

DISCUSSION

In this clinical material we see issues of separation and triangular

conf licts occurring simultaneously. In all three cases, fears of bodily
damage intertwine with fears of loss in reaction to the threats of oedipal
gratif ication. These female patients had relatively close and untroubled
relationships with their mothers. In our previous work on the Persephone
myth (1997), in which we used biographical as well as clinical material,
we also found these kinds of conflicts around separation. These previous
cases showed greater diff iculties in separating from their mothers,
manifested in these women’s inability to marry or to enjoy sex. Troubled
preoedipal relationships with their mothers made this later separation
phase more perilous, and contributed to their sexual symptoms. Their
conscious identif ication with the Persephone of Greek myth alerted
1431
us to an important central unconscious conf lict: the division of
allegiance between mother/caretaker and father/lover. Our current
cases demonstrate and elaborate our thesis that separation issues
during the “oedipal” triangular phase do not necessarily indicate earlier
or major separation issues. Nor do they necessarily represent signs of
major preoedipal pathology, f ixations, or regressions.
All of these female patients, like many others in our clinical experi-
ence, have the idea that passionate sexuality, especially with a “forbid-
den” male, is opposed by the mother. Sexuality is seen as belonging
to the mother and not to the girl. This perception produces the striking
need in the girl to compartmentalize intrapsychic representations of a
sexual and nonsexual self. We view this compartmentalization primarily
as defensive, in the interest of sustaining the tie to the mother while
entering into an erotized relationship with the father. Thus passions and
sexuality are relegated to a secret part of the self, separate from mother.
The feminine body, with its unseen inner cavities and passages lends
itself to this psychic sequestering. This kind of inner separation does not
necessarily mean, as has been suggested by others, that girls have greater
difficulty than boys in separating self from object. We suggest that this
kind of psychic compartmentalization is a typical developmental occur-
rence, with adaptive as well as neurotically conflicted meanings.

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

The typical dangers of childhood—loss of the object, loss of the

love of the object, castration, and superego guilt and/or punishment—
have been thought to mark and signal a developmental chronology.
However, as Brenner (1982) and more recently Nersessian (1998) have
suggested, these feared calamities are inextricably interwoven with each
other. Brenner writes that they appear in sequence during development,
but later become so interwoven that they cannot be artif icially separated
(p. 94). We feel that there has often been a spurious assignment of level
of development to the differing calamities—separation from and loss of
the object and loss of the love of the object are considered necessarily
preoedipal, while castration anxiety is seen as more characteristic of
the oedipal period. If traumata around separation characterize the fem-
inine triangular situation, but they are automatically schematized as
early- or preoedipal, then it would follow logically, but erroneously, that
girls tend to be f ixated at earlier developmental levels. We argue that
this view is erroneous both theoretically and clinically. Person (1988)
has pointed out that fears of loss of love, which are part of the oedipal
constellation for women, are often expressed in oral, sometimes canni-
1432
balistic, terms. We concur that competitive fears can take these forms
because “the object of competition is also the source of nurturant
and dependent gratif ication” (p. 170). We also argue that castration
fears are not necessarily characteristic of “later” developmental phases.
Galenson and Roiphe (1971), for example, observed that castration
anxiety occurs very early, preoedipally. Others, such as Sachs (1962),
have argued that castration anxiety often carries very early preoedipal
terrors of annihilation and separation. In our patients, we see the inex-
tricable intertwining of castration and/or female genital anxieties with
separation anxieties and oedipal guilts. For example, in our current
cases, the appearance of fantasies of a “cut-up” or “cut-off ” or “lost”
part of the self were linked to the idea of a severed maternal relationship.
That is to say, they referred to separation and not only to lost or damaged
genital body parts.
Brenner (1982) writes that “passionate sexual wishes characteristic
of the oedipal phase are most intimately bound up in every child’s mind
with object loss, that is, with the disappearance of one or both parents”
( p. 103). We feel, however, that maternal object loss or separation
has especially important signif icance for a little girl during the oedipal
period. Because the mother remains nurturer while she is, at the same
time, a sexual object for the boy, his positive oedipal yearnings are not

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

as fraught with fears of her loss. Out of fear, he may renounce his sex-
ual longings for his mother, but he is not required to give her up as care-
taking object. Earlier dyadic needs for nurturing are easily masked by
his triadic oedipal desires. Castration anxieties, therefore, are more
visible in this situation. For the little girl the fact that her rival is the
primary caregiver gives a greater weight to object loss and separation
issues in her triadic picture. Chodorow, Person, and many others have
stressed such gendered differences. We emphasize that these differ-
ences between males and females do not necessarily ref lect f ixations
at or characteristics from different levels of development.
We feel that this idea has important clinical consequences. Women
are infantilized and demeaned if their separation fears are routinely
perceived as primitive or infantile. Furthermore, misdiagnosis or mis-
interpretation of the level of the separation issues can produce a stale-
mated or endlessly regressive treatment. It is true that preoedipal issues
around separation always inf luence and are intermingled with later
separation material. The triangular separation issues we have focused
upon, however, do not necessarily signal or originate in earlier separa-
1433
tion problems. The separation themes and defenses characteristic of
triadic conf licts for women, as shown above, can be differentiated
clinically from earlier material. First, they frequently are precipitated
by important developmental steps in the lives of women, such as start-
ing college, a f irst sexual encounter, marriage, or a new career. Second,
they intertwine with rivalrous competitions with other women, such
as a new job or a successful love affair. Above all, to be so designated,
they necessarily appear in the context of triangular relationships, be
they rivalries with mother for father’s love (or vice versa), or the work-
ing out of loyalties between two compelling loved ones.
Desires for agency with regard to erotic sexuality and passion are
frequently and typically concealed by females. A sense of agency is
hidden behind inhibition, clinging, and secrecy. Women often hide their
eroticism with the defensive stance of helplessness or externalization;
Persephone claimed that “Hades made me do it.” For Oedipus, in
contrast, the defensive stance was that “I didn’t know I did it”: that
is, disavowal or denial. The girl’s defensive need is particularly exag-
gerated when realistic problems with a mother make such develop-
mental forays into sexuality as dangerous in reality as in fantasy.
In her exploration of the preoedipal origins of women’s problems
with superego development and expressing anger, Tyson (1998)

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 Deanna Holtzman / Nancy Kulish

focused on the mother/daughter relationship. In several of her clinical

vignettes, we note that separation conf licts were precipitated either by
a fantasy about marriage or the actuality of an upcoming marriage. In
one case, for example, a young woman about to be married struggled
in the transference with fears that the analyst/mother would disapprove
of the engagement and marriage. The patient expressed fears that she
would be ejected, and not be able to see the analyst again. Is this not the
very dilemma we have been describing: the need to balance the fear of
separation from the mother with the wish to move into the adult sexual
world? Here again is the fantasy that heterosexual victory might mean
the loss of her mother/female analyst.
Tyson also described the case of a little girl whose favorite game
was to pretend that she was Cinderella and that her idealized fairy
godmother gave her everything she wanted. Thus, she got the prince.
With the fairy godmother as her procurer, she avoided the danger of
assertively or aggressively taking what she wanted for herself. Tyson
reported that the girl had a history of provoking her mother’s anger
and then fearfully clinging to her. Tyson’s focus was on the preoedipal
1434
origins of these narcissistic entitlements and sadomasochistic interac-
tions. We would add that this little girl’s conf lict around anger at that
moment in the treatment had triangular meanings as well: that is, she
wanted to marry the prince. As Tyson clearly illustrated, the rage and
fear of abandonment had preoedipal determinants, but they emerged in
full bloom with the “oedipal” wish to get the prince. Thus we think that
the oedipal situation with its anxieties about maternal loss gave added
intensity both to her anger and to her conf licts about its expression.
This paper is an attempt to examine the paradigm of triangular
development as it applies to women: that is, to “feminize” the so-called
female oedipal complex and to clarify its clinical implications. We have
found that issues of mother-daughter separation are a fundamental part
of the female oedipal paradigm. For that reason we feel that the trian-
gular phase for girls is not well characterized by the Oedipus myth,
and propose renaming it the “Persephone complex.” Persephone’s com-
promise between innocence and sexuality, her conf licting loyalties to
her mother and her father, and her means of traversing the boundary
between childhood and adulthood typify for us central aspects of
female development.
In future work we hope to examine homosexual interests, the
so-called negative oedipal conf licts, and the role of aggression and

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 THE FEMININIZATION OF THE FEMALE OEDIPAL COMPLEX

superego development in women. Many additional questions can be

raised, and we look forward to further discourse with our colleagues.

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