#oedipus complex

5th August 2026

The short vignette I’ll share here appears in file PP/KLE/D.14 of Melanie Klein’s archive, a file dedicated to notes on a number of her adult patients. I am returning to this file after some time; it was here that I initially encountered ‘Mr B’, whose long analysis I documented in Melanie Klein’s Narrative of an Adult Analysis (2023). Alongside Mr B’s material are several equally captivating though much shorter vignettes, which Klein may have kept in mind for teaching. I am reminded of Elizabeth Spillius’ remark that Klein ‘was fascinated by clinical material even to the point of losing herself in its details’, and that ‘in arguments about theory with colleagues [she] tended to resort to convincing clinical details’ (Spillius, 2007; p. 67). Certainly, it was my experience when examining Klein’s notes on Mr B that almost every detail he brought to sessions was incorporated, at some point, into an interpretation, so that it was a very great challenge to abbreviate the notes in order to make them more digestible to a wider readership!

The material I’m reproducing here concerns a female patient, ‘G’, whose homosexual longings and Oedipal guilt are stirred when she watches a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As an introduction to the material, Klein discusses the importance of interpreting not only in connection with one particular person, such as the analyst or the patient’s mother, but in connection to a whole setting. As she puts it, ‘material has to be considered and interpreted from the point of view of particular situations’ [page 1 of 146 in file D.14]. Klein thought that her vignette would illustrate this well.

The notes are dated August 1942, and G has just seen Macbeth. She feels identified with the hero to an unusually strong degree, and also rather guilty about this identification. On leaving the theatre, G is struck by feeling closer to the people around her. She associates to her longstanding difficulty in overcoming hatred, both in her past and present life, and in forgiving those who have wronged her. Her hatred, she realises, has been murderous.

In a further association, G thinks of two women who are kind and friendly, and do genuinely kind things for others. She feels great friendliness towards them. She remarks upon this change in her; progress, she feels, which has been brought about by the analysis. Yet there then arises a doubt about Klein, and a thought that Klein may even do harm with her work – may drive people mad. It occurs to G that Mrs Klein is like Lady Macbeth, and that whilst Macbeth himself is ‘definitely a psychotic type, he might have remained all right [sic], and nothing of this disaster happened if she had not prompted him and made him more mad’ [2/146].

Hearing this material, Klein clearly has in mind previous work on her patient’s homosexual desire towards her, and this comes into her interpretation. She says that in G’s mind, she and Klein are married, with G being the man. She points out, ‘not only are we then in a love relation, but we are allied against the father, represented here by MacDuff’ [2/146]. Klein (who always refers to herself in the third person in her clinical notes) writes,

‘If this is so, the situation was to her particularly emotionally loaded because it showed her the fulfilment of her homosexual desires in connection with K., but realised as a wish situation in which she allied herself with K. against somebody who would now stand for K’s husband, or some man closely connected with K. – in the past an alliance with her mother against her father, whom she wanted to kill’ [2/146].

The patient is reportedly ‘deeply impressed’ by this interpretation. She tells Klein she now recognises that her guilt is bound up with all of this, and that it connects with recent work on her homosexuality. She associates to seeing a man who was obviously unwell on an escalator. She thought he might be having a stroke, and though the man was already being looked after well by a friend, G felt she should intervene to help too. She thinks this must be some confirmation of Klein’s interpretation. She also remembers her phobia of seeing anybody sick. It seems G is driven by guilt to attend to those who stand for people whom she believes she has harmed.

Klein writes, ‘[T]he particular point which brought out all the emotions here was that K. did not leave it at the guilt connected with the homosexual relation with K. but following up this analogy, given through the identification with Macbeth, into the details and into this particular alliance against a third person’ [3/146]. Thus Klein stresses that the analyst should not only refer to the patient’s immediate feelings concerning the analyst, but must also trace these back to earlier situations from which such feelings derive. She continues:

‘Also fear of madness here which was attributed to Lady Macbeth, and in the present situation was expressed in the fear of the analyst driving her mad, was bound up with the fact that the wish to kills one’s father and to be allied with one’s mother in such an undertaking is equal to madness. The murder wish itself is felt as madness’ [3/146].

The material ends here, but I think it illustrates well Klein’s clinical focus on the ‘total transference’, which led her to interpret not simply isolated feelings which were revived in relation to the analyst (such as homosexual longing, originally felt towards the mother), but the complex situation in which such feelings arose, i.e. in connection with a wish to get rid of the father, which the analyst should also reach for, and speak of.

These notes also highlight vividly the very frightening nature of Oedipal strivings, which may make the patient feel as if she is being pulled into madness. Just as with G, the analyst may readily be seen not only as colluding with the patient in inviting all sorts of feelings into an analysis, but in driving the patient to madness in the process.

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