Nuclear Complex

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NUCLEAR COMPLEX

The expression "nuclear complex" was first used by Sigmund Freud to designate what he would later call the "Oedipus complex." While still signifying from a genetic or structural point of view the universal Oedipus complex, the notion of the nuclear complex came to be used in the narrower perspective of psycho-pathology: this complex was described as the characteristic core of neuroses, and contrasted to pre-oedipal pathologies.

The term first surfaced in the text that Freud devoted in 1908 to the sexual theories of children. The child who, with mixed feelings, sees a little brother or sister arrive, "now comes to be occupied with the first, grand problem of life and asks himself the question: 'Where do babies come from ?"' (1908c, p. 212). Not very satisfied with the fallacious responses they get from adults, "children . . . have a suspicion of there being something forbidden which is being withheld from them . . . they consequently hide their further researches under a cloak of secrecy. . . . The nuclear complex of a neurosis is in this way brought into being" (pp. 213-214). The term nuclear complex in this text was very broadly described, suggesting an idea present since the beginnings of psychoanalysis, that of intrapsychic conflict.

From this moment forward, the definition became much more precise. Freud illustrated what he meant through the case of "little Hans," who was the subject of an extended discussion the following year. In this case the Oedipus complex was very much in evidence, as well as its correlate, castration anxiety (1909b). That same year, Freud again used the expression "nuclear complex of the neurosis" in the case of the "Rat Man" (1909d), in which he said that it "comprises the child's earliest impulses, alike tender and hostile, towards its parents. . . . It is entirely characteristic of the nuclear complex of infancy that the child's father should be assigned the part of a sexual opponent" (p. 208n). Also in 1909, in the fourth of the Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, he tied it in specifically with the Oedipus myth. The term Oedipus complex, which was introduced in 1910, prevailed subsequently, with rare exceptions.

When the term nuclear complex appears in contemporary psychoanalytic literature, it is in reference to an early phase of Freud's thought, and marks the central role of the Oedipus complex in neurotic pathology.

Roger Perron

See also: Oedipus complex.