Son and Father: Before & Beyond the Oedipus Complex

by Peter Blos

A psychological look at the father/son relationship This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0029036801
• ISBN13: 9780029036808
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Son and Father

While the role of the early son-mother relationship in the male life cycle has been extensively examined by psychoanalysis, the role of the father has remained woefully neglected and incomplete. But in this pioneerng book distinguished author and analyst Peter Blos proposes a fundamental modification of the traditional view of male personality formation, challenging the centrality of the Oedipus complex both to male development and to the origin of neurosis. Divided into three sections Son and Father first presents Blos's original theory - the culmination of his decades of psychoanalytic work with male children, adolescents, and adults. Emphasizing that every father has first been a son, Blos traces the reciprocal influence of son-father dynamics over a three-generation course, as son relates first to father and then, as father himself, to son. While he concurs with the position of traditional theory that the male child resolves his attachment to the mother before entering latency, he demonstrates that the son does not reconcile his feelings toward the father - repressed during the decline of the Oedipal stage - until adolescence. Next, Blos illustrates his view with literary evidence drawn from Franz Kafka's autobiographical Letter to My Father, documenting the novelists unresolved emotional attachment to his father. He then compares Kafka's confessional work with Freud's Schreber case, in which the father complex plays a central role in the development of a psychotic illness. Blos also applies his concepts to Shakespeare's Hamlet, focusing on the infantilizing power of the title character's never abandoned early idealization of his father. Finally, using examples taken from his extensive clinical work, Blos places his theory of the complex son-father relationship within the larger framework of male personality development and the conflicts and anxieties of adolescence. Essential reading for professionals in psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, social work, education, and counselling, and for the student and inquiring lay readers interested in developmental theory, Son and Father fills a crtical gap in our comprehension of male object relations. Throughout, it places the son-father relationship in a wholly new perspective as it examines its strengths, its significance for psychosexual development, and its lasting effects in life. --- from book's dustjacket