On the tyranny of the Oedipus complex

Excerpt from a conversation between Adam Phillips, the psychoanalist and author, and Ileene Smith 

IS: Where did the concept ( of unforbidden pleasure) come from? Was it sparked in your consulting room?

 AP: It came from a combination of things. One was in terms of the clinical work in my professional life—my interest in the tyranny of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis, and the tyranny therefore of the idea of forbidden incestuous desire, and the way in which my sense of psychoanalysis is that Freud discovered something extraordinary about pleasure, and in a way he partly reneged on it or abjured it so that he ended up talking really only about the formative effects of forbidden pleasure as a consequence of a kind of obsession with the father, and a kind of anxious disinterest in the relation of the mother—that whole pre-Oedipal stage of development.
So it seemed to me that the people I was seeing—I don’t really like to generalize about this—were sometimes as inhibited about unforbidden pleasures as about forbidden pleasures. One of the things I find myself doing in the therapy I do is enabling people to find out where their real enjoyment is. And being in some way surprised how difficult it is for people to discover what they really enjoy, having had so much enjoyment foisted upon them growing up. Everyone knows what they should like, what they should attend to, what they should be interested in. But it’s sometimes quite difficult to know what we are actually enjoying.