real world, and to the organization of the personality around a concept of the self as an individual.

Psychoanalytic theorists theorists since Freud have changed the staging, complicated the plot, and built up some of the minor roles in the Oedipal drama. The role of the parents in creating an overly erotic tie with the child, because of their own unconscious, unsatisfied needs, has been convincingly elaborated. Strong inferiority feelings may cause the child to maintain an overemotional investment in the parent and avoid reaching out to others. A striving for superiority may direct the child to emulate and attempt to outdo the strongest figure in his environment, resulting in a quasi-sexual competition. Establishing autonomy and striving for selfrealization have been presented as the central process to which any sexual needs are subordinate. Throughout, controversy has primarily concerned the nature and importance of sexual drives in development and adjustment to the social world. Some Neo-Freudians do not consider childhood sexual impulses significant in personality development. However, there is considerable evidence that children of 4 and 5 show an intensified interest in an awareness of the genitals, that they frequently express awareness of specific genital sensations, accompanied by emotional expression of excitement and of fear of

the newness and strangeness of these sensations, and that if permitted, they engage in sexual play with others. The child's egocentricity at this age is such that physical experiences have a psychological magnitude often uncomprehended by the adult. Therefore these inner drives do pose an important problem for the child, and must be coped with on a perceptual level as well as on the level of physical tension-systems. In our present day understanding of the conflicts of the Oedipal period, we do not minimize the role of sexual forces, but we better appreciate the importance of other needs and influences, and the total complex interplay of forces in the development of the unique pattern of each life.

Sociologists and anthropologists have by this time demonstrated that the Oedipal Complex is not universal, but occurs only in certain kinds of cultures and varies with the particular social setting. It requires a small, close family unit in a culture which imposes considerable inhibition on sexual expression from early childhood. Such chaff as innate basis, phylogenic traces, and primal horde theories has easily been blown away, but a rich harvest has accrued. We recognize that there is no more direct route to the understanding of the self and of others, than rediscovering the intense experiences with the first objects of love..

Fete

I was the odd one at the dinner table-

(A lack of planning, perhaps, or a sudden illness)

Six men, six women, and me.

We ate an oyster cocktail,

And talked of love and conquests,

And I was the odd one.

—clifford alexander