Hans loewald the waning of pax and son

Free full text in Europe PMC. Hans Loewald, a towering figure in American psychoanalysis, is often regarded as one of the first American ego psychologists who recognized the central importance of object relations. Many analysts had already reached the conclusion that conflict theory, compromise formation, and the Oedipus complex had limited explanatory value in treating the spectrum of patients appearing in analysts' consulting rooms with more severe psychopathology.

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A decade later Heinz Kohut suggested that a new theoretical model was needed to understand the narcissistic personality so often seen in analytic practice. Coming from an influential ego psychologist, this statement helped others in mainstream American psychoanalysis to become more flexible in their clinical and theoretical approach to psychoanalytic work.

Loewald's intent in this paper, however, was not simply to document the rise and fall in popularity of the Oedipus complex as an organizing construct in clinical psychoanalysis. He also was using the term waning to describe developmental moments of the life cycle where the triangular oedipal conflicts loosen their grip on the individual.

This view complemented the traditional perspective that the Oedipus complex was ruled by an intense threat of retaliation by the powerful same-sex parent. Leowald turned this object-relational paradigm on its head by suggesting that the real damage, in the child's mind, is inflicted on the parents, not by the parents, at least in fantasy.

Resolution of the Oedipus complex, then, involved the symbolic destruction of the parents as libidinal objects. In Leowald's focus on normal preoedipal experience as an important foundation for the oedipal conflicts that follow, he argued that a psychotic core is always active, even in neurotic patients. He related this core to the earliest vicissitudes of the ambivalent search for primary narcissistic unity and individuation.

In this regard, not unlike Kohut, Leowald argued that the oedipal struggles had to be viewed as newer additions of earlier conflicts involving narcissistic strivings associated with the union—individuation dilemma. Loewald's classic paper, then, heralded a pressing need within classical psychoanalytic thinking to understand more fully what happened before and after the oedipal phase of development.

Both the guilt-laden mourning process following the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the narcissistic struggles preceding it joined triangular oedipal conflict at center stage of the psychoanalytic theater.