Int J Psychoanal 2004;85:1175–89

The cause is worse:

Remeeting Jocasta1

BARBARA STIMMEL
1185 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10128, USA — barbara.stimmel@mssm.edu
(Final version accepted 21 August 2003)

This paper will help bring Jocasta, a figure relatively neglected by psychoanalytic
theory, whose lens upon her son has left her to the side, into greater focus. It is not
that Jocasta is completely ignored but rather that, when studied, she appears as
the dangerous, castrating, forbidden woman to be placated or avoided at all costs.
So, although she stands at center stage as the fulcrum of Oedipus’s destruction,
it is never as a mother longing for her son. The author contends that Jocasta is
the personification of an ongoing developmental need on the part of all mothers to
separate from their children coupled with a universal longing for reunion. As with
Oedipus, Jocasta—a character in a play—is an example of the perverse outcome of
forbidden gratifications; but also, as with Oedipus, she is the figurative presentation
of normal variations on a theme.

Keywords: Jocasta, Oedipus, loss, motherhood, incest, replacement fantasy

These women who say quite casually of their sons: ‘He’s going through the Oedipal stage’; it
never seems to occur to them to think to themselves, even for a moment: ‘I’m going through
my Jocasta stage.’ If Oedipus is thought of as the universal model of man, maybe it’s time
Jocasta was thought of as the eternal myth of the woman-and-mother (Olivier, 1989, p. 2).

As they went into the room Rosa turned to look at Tommy and had an impulse to go back, to
get into his bed with him and just lie there for a while feeling that deep longing, that sense
of missing him desperately, that came over her whenever she held him sleeping in her arms
(Chabon, 2000, p. 553).

Introduction
Scholarship on the Oedipus myth is long and complex, reaching as far back as
Aristotle who considered Oedipus the king ‘the benchmark for excellence in tragedy’
(Rudnytsky, 1992). Sophocles’s play brings the psychopathology of narcissistic
anger and hunger vividly to life as its hero fulfills his destiny by committing two
crimes which most civilizations abhor: parricide and incest. Oedipus has come to rest
securely at the center of Freud’s thought, historically helping to define psychoanalysis
in a way immediately accessible to the larger culture. It was left to Freud’s genius
to understand that Oedipus’s devastating victory, a tale of tragedy and woe, is also

An earlier version of this paper was read at the IPA conference on Women and Power, Atlanta, February
1

2000.

©2004 Institute of Psychoanalysis

1176 BARBARA STIMMEL

an ordinary run-of-the-mill developmental dilemma. Entangled in his tragic fate of

gratifying commonplace childhood desires, Oedipus was used by Freud to describe
the ordinary affective yearnings of young children. This eponymous stage of infantile
development, which captures the dynamics of love, aggression, hate and lust carried
to their extremes in an ancient myth of murder, incest and guilt is, ironically, the
ordinary stuff of childhood.
Oedipus, a character in Greek tragedy, did the unthinkable; his infantile
counterpart thinks the undoable. But these outlawed wishes are not neurotic symptoms
in themselves. Thus do we have one of the most tragic figures in literature, whose
fate is unbearable, teach us of a conundrum in childhood which is unavoidable, in
one form or another, and in one culture or another; a fable of growing up. Adequate
management of the dilemma which Oedipus bungled hopefully leads to a future
whose vision offers solace and pleasure rather than one filled with the blind pursuit
of the past in the present. Oedipus the king is a cautionary tale of the woes of success
when these prosaic dreams come true, for mother and child.
Yet Jocasta, Oedipus’s mother, appears surprisingly rarely in the critical
literature.2 When she does it is solely as a destructive and dangerous presence in
the life of her son, beginning when Laius’s specter tells Creon, in one version of the
Oedipus story, ‘Thy Thyrsus wave, in madness rend thy sons. The greatest crime
of Thebes is mother’s love’. Jocasta, dangerous, castrating and taboo, is a familiar
maternal representation to be placated or avoided at all costs. Her perverse choices
of infanticide and incest make her understandably feared and hated as a figure of
maternal seduction and desire gone amok. She easily fits the forbidden and forbidding
role of one indulging in projected and wished-for boundary crossings of which we
have all dreamed at one time or another. Awe, fear and forbidden excitement in
response to woman/mother are transparent and haunting elements in the depiction
of Jocasta.
The psychoanalytic lens has been forcefully aimed at the child’s perspective
of parricide and incest; with the damaging consequences of parental aggression
and sexuality directed toward their child painfully familiar. But, by focusing
instead on Jocasta, her relatively neglected perspective comes further into view,
thereby adding nuance and depth to this most complex intergenerational saga. This
article will amplify Jocasta’s conflicts in order to pay attention to an unavoidable
maternal developmental demand: individuation from her child. The birth experience
(Winnicott, 1975b) is pivotal for the mother as well as the infant, as parturition
promotes regression for a variety of reasons, including physiological shifts causing
dramatic mood swings. But perhaps the first and the strongest unleashing has to do
with a revival of the mother’s individuation from her own mother. This, coupled with
her identification with both her infant and her mother, sets into motion a lifelong

2
In a panel (1985) on the reevaluation of the Oedipus complex, Jocasta is barely mentioned and, after
extensive review, it seems there is only one book which addresses directly the question of Jocasta from
the point of view of desire and longing for her child which does not entirely conform to the image of
Jocasta presented in the bulk of the analytic literature (see Olivier, 1989). As I will show later, Jocasta is
repeatedly described as a dangerous, destructive force.
 THE CAUSE IS WORSE 1177

encounter with phases of separation from her child, a primary and primarily loved
object.
Although her agony and anguish are evident throughout the play, Jocasta, in
contrast to Oedipus, is rarely if ever pitied. The defensive horror she inspires is
mirrored in the disparity between the punishments of death and blindness which
Jocasta and Oedipus suffer respectively (see Stewart, 1961). But the complexity of
Jocasta’s maternal longing and desire, although difficult to convey, is nonetheless
elusively suggested in several contexts, waiting to emerge. In addition to her own
powerfully forbidden oedipal sexual and aggressive impulses toward her child,
Jocasta was attempting to undo parturition and loss.
The compelling and tellingly ignored prism of a mother mourning the loss of
her child through which Jocasta views the world refracts a more universal tale of a
mother’s wishes for reunion with her child, which are not inherently pathological,
only potentially so. Thus, Jocasta’s longing for the return to her body of her lost
child with the promise of restored regressive symbiotic bliss is one subtext of the
Oedipus myth. In suggesting a normative side to the longings and perils of Jocasta’s
life and their tragic impact on the life of her son, the case is made that a mother’s
separation from her child, beginning at parturition, is a repetitive, lifelong task,
replete with ambivalence, anguish and joy. This coming apart, with a trajectory of
its own, happens again and again as each developmental spurt incrementally moves
the child from the womb to the world.
Sophocles, however obliquely, hints at Jocasta’s maternal grief which leads to
the disastrous outcome of the myth (Naiman, 1992). Freud too must have given
Jocasta’s desire some thought since he was aware of the role of the mother in
childhood seduction, ‘By her care of the child’s body she becomes its first seducer’
(1940, p. 185); she is also its first caretaker. Jocasta abjured both of these appropriate
and gratifying roles in Oedipus’s early life only to careen into a mad maelstrom of
maternal, sexualized longing when encountering her child as an adult (re)appearing
at the gate. Since Jocasta had abandoned him to die in his infancy, the reader and
theatergoer can only imagine the wonder, shame and even promise generated by his
return.
Jocasta is a woman whose tragic end was set in motion manifestly at the beginning
of her son’s life, although latently long before. She is, for some, the primordial
mother to be avoided at all costs—a version of the dreaded Sphinx—seducing her
son so that he became her lover, thus ensuring his madness and her death. However,
our acceptance of Oedipus as a universal representation of normal childhood
affects and dreams gone awry strongly suggests that we consider that Jocasta, too,
represents a universal developmental path (at least) for mothers, derailed by the
misery that ensues from her perverse adaptations. From beginning to end, Jocasta
takes extreme action in the face of commonplace demands. From infanticide to
incest, she is a pathological caricature of everywoman. While it goes without saying
that her seductive and incestuous behavior cannot be dismissed when considering
Oedipus’s fate, other things were also going on. Among them, as this article will
demonstrate, is that Jocasta was seeking reunion.
1178 BARBARA STIMMEL

The myth
We are most familiar with Sophocles as the great storyteller of the myth, but there
are others (e.g. Euripides) who give life and language to this harrowing myth. A less
well-known version of Oedipus was written by the Roman playwright Seneca. His
version (here adapted by Ted Hughes) is different in several subtle ways. Among
these is the role of Jocasta, which is pivotal not just because she is desired but more
because she desires. The headlong tragedy into which they will descend is sensed
by Oedipus, as he grasps early on that his fate is intertwined with the plague which
besets Thebes, and by Jocasta, there prominently from the beginning trying to turn
his eyes from that which he is beginning to see.
Oedipus: the plague is more than enough for

any King, but something beneath it, something under the roots of it is worse and
for me alone

Jocasta: the dead are burning and rotting the living are dying in agony

in terror this is your people what could be worse?

Oedipus: the cause is worse (Hughes, 1972, p. 16).

Laius, King of Thebes, was believed to be homosexual and more interested in

his protector’s son, whom he had abducted, than in his wife. One night, while in
a drunken stupor he was seduced by Jocasta, his queen, whom he impregnated;
Oedipus was the progeny of this unloving, perverse union, which dramatically
foreshadows the tragic events to come. Told that his son would kill him and lie with
his wife, Laius, with Jocasta’s assistance, sent his infant son to a mountaintop to
die. Their accomplice disobeyed orders to kill the child, binding and hobbling him
instead. This baby with pierced and swollen feet (henceforward Oedipus) was found
and given to another royal, but childless, couple, the king and queen of Corinth, to
raise as their own. Being called a bastard by a drunken guest at his (unbeknownst
to him) adopted parents’ home sent Oedipus in search of the truth of his heritage.
When told by the oracle that he would kill his father and bed his mother, Oedipus
ran away from his parents so as to protect himself from the inevitable. Although now
apparently safe, he remained unsure. The rest, as they say, is history.
Parental abandonment and attempted infanticide inform us that revenge as much
as lust must be among the motive forces that drove Oedipus onward to his destiny.
Even before his fate was described to him by the stranger, something was troubling
Oedipus, an angry, impetuous young man. If not for these traits, coupled with his
restless curiosity, he might never have killed his father when struck by him in a clash
at the crossroads. It was the blow of the father that unlocked the rage of his son,
opening the door to their family’s destruction. An additional intersection between
Oedipus’s and Laius’s fates is embedded in this murder with its underside of suicide.
Remembering that suicides are laid to rest at a crossroads, a place where no man
tarries, the psychoanalyst appreciates the role Lauis plays in his own death. He is
Oedipus’s accomplice as Oedipus is his. Laius’s death, then, can also be understood as
 THE CAUSE IS WORSE 1179

penance for his murderous cowardice many years earlier. His guilt and participation
in his own destruction foreshadows Jocasta’s seduction and suicide, as the family’s
psychic regression marches on.
Arriving in Thebes, Oedipus immediately encounters his mother, Jocasta, in what
might be considered a kind of rebirth but one filled with dire promise. Denying his
terror and anxiety when confronting the embodiment of the plague which threatens
civilization when its fundamental laws are broken, Oedipus boasts,
whatever there is that frightens men in this world

whatever shape terror pain and death

can come in it cannot turn me back not even Fate frightens me not even the
sphynx twisting me up in her twisted words she did not frighten me she straddled
her rock her nest of smashed skulls and bones her face was a gulf her gaze
paralysed her victims she jerked her wings up that tail whipping and writhing she
lashed herself bunched herself convulsed started to tremble jaws clashing together
biting the air yet I stood there and I asked for the riddle I was calm … yet I took
it I undid it I solved it …

yet she’s not dead as if I’d never solved her riddle

she never died she changed I drove her off the rock and the questions stopped but
her rottenness is flying her stench is a fog smothering us as if we were living inside
her carcase (Hughes, 1972, pp. 18–9).

In unwitting anticipation of his reunion with his mother, Oedipus imagines living
inside the Sphinx. By defying fate, he has brought a scourge to Thebes, heralding the
crime and destruction to come. Although Oedipus is driven homeward by actions
which appear beyond his control to the onlooker, the chorus, he continues to contend
they are of his own doing. His parricidal triumph is all but trumpeted through the
lens of misery and suffering by his Theban subjects. But why, he wonderingly asks
his mother, is he spared? The answer has all to do with his eventual union with
Jocasta, his mother.
As the play ends, Oedipus blinds himself before his mother can escape, through
suicide, the full horror of what her symbiotic regression has wrought. Encountering
her blind son, Jocasta wails,
what can I call you now what shall I call you

you’re my son shall I call you my son

you are my son I lost you

you’re alive I’ve found you

speak to me

show me your face

turn your head towards me

show me your face (Hughes, 1972, p. 53).

1180 BARBARA STIMMEL

Jocasta has said aloud that which she could not before. What she now must face,
which she chose to risk, is that she has ruined the life of her child, twice. This
presentation of the myth is darker than Sophocles’s in its attempt to dramatize Jocasta
as a woman driven by the same madness that drove Oedipus into the wilderness.
In Seneca’s play, different from that of Sophocles, the pestilence that Oedipus
will carry off with him into exile includes the symbolic murder of his mother and
wife, Jocasta. In the Greek version, Jocasta passively provides Oedipus with the
instruments of his self-blinding when he tears his eyes out with the brooches from
the dress on her already hanging and dead body. Centuries later, Seneca has Jocasta
beg her son to kill her after discovering he has blinded himself; still unable to leave
him she insists that he leave her. Her ambivalent attachment to her child has run its
course from infantile fantasy, to adolescent pregnancy and parturition, to a return of
the repressed. Oedipus is back ‘living’.

Context
For a myth to endure it must reflect multiple strands of the human condition, the
metaphoric use of which offers us a flexible and creative narrative to be applied to
universal existential dilemmas. Some though, responding to the phallocentric nature
of the tale of Oedipus, have proposed other myths, Electra, Antigone, Medea and
Persephone (see, for example, Kulish and Holtzman, 1998; Leuzinger-Bohleber,
2001), believing them to better describe the particular nature of female infantile
sexuality. These tales, however, tell important but different developmental stories.
While there are embedded differences in mothering sons and daughters, the power of
the Oedipus/Jocasta relationship is that it encompasses both the general and specific
challenges for the mother who watches her child increasingly disappear into time
and space. And, in this sense, the ultimate anguish Jocasta suffers transcends the sex
of her child.
Oedipus remains therefore a compelling representation of at least some critical
aspects of the intergenerational, incestuous longings of childhood, male and female.
Although it is unacceptable to maintain that female development is simply the inverse,
or mirror, of male development, it is equally important to keep in the forefront of our
thinking the multiple figures for which one character can stand. In other words, we
need to transcend the concrete, anatomical realities of these classical protagonists
and instead consider their universal narratives, all of which are apposite for both
sexes. There is, however, an identical element in each myth which, although central
in its impact, is most often adjunctively presented and that is the role of the parents.
Each of these children—Electra, Antigone, Medea, Persephone, Oedipus—asks us
to contemplate the passions of their parents as well as their own.
In particular, the Oedipus story captures powerfully the marriage of drive and
relationship in early development between mother and child. The conceptualization
of a clear line differentiating the pre-oedipal period from the oedipal dilemma is
undoubtedly forced. And for some—one thinks of Melanie Klein—the oedipal stage
is so early that the idea of a pre-oedipal phase must be reduced to a moment. Much
is made of the separation and individuation needs of the pre-oedipal child, often
 THE CAUSE IS WORSE 1181

glossing over the sexual and aggressive shared and reciprocal fantasy life of mother
and child. Maternal passion fuels infantile desire in the crucible of their mutual
struggle to navigate attachment and difference between them. Even without invoking
Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit or its French version après-coup, we appreciate
the sense of preparation in this earlier stage for more complicated things to come,
most dramatically depicted in the relationship between Jocasta and Oedipus.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a simmering controversy about the oedipal phase and
its implications engrossed Freud, Abraham, Ferenczi, Jones, Horney, Klein, Riviere,
Fenichel and others. Its focus, primarily on female sexuality and the mix of infantile
sexuality and aggression, had a lasting, complicated impact on psychoanalytic theory.
Embedded issues of mourning the lost breast—the first beloved part-object—the
role of the father in the mother, primary femininity, penis envy and awe, womb envy,
and dread and fear of the retaliatory mother as well as father were strongly debated.
Prominent among these emerging perspectives was Ferenczi’s (1926) proposition
that the basis of all sexual joining, for both sexes, is the return to the mother’s womb.
He included an explication of the complex, hallucinatory and displaced manner in
which this aim is achieved by boys and men.
But what of the possibilities for girls and women as they go through life struggling
with their longing for return to the oceanic environment of the maternal womb? One
powerful psychic and physical answer is motherhood. Reproduction, as part of the
definition of being a woman, is a complicated and ambivalent life event.3 Nonetheless,
even if ultimately undesired, unavailable or unsatisfactory, motherhood presents as
an option in early mental life. Boys develop a variety of defenses against their pain
and envy at not being able to participate as do their mothers in the powerful, life-
changing bodily experiences of pregnancy and parturition.
Girls obviously have a very different set of possibilities available; they only
have to grow up, or so it seems. Thus their early, complicated incestuous desires for
union with both, and alternately, mother and father become completely imbricated
in their fantasies of motherhood. As Raphael-Leff points out, ‘childbearing focalizes
the inexorable human processes of gestation, birth, growth, entropy and death’
(1997, p. 123). These pushes and pulls stimulate all manner of desire, both sexual
and aggressive, in the pregnant and new mother, much as she witnessed in her own
mother. However, although implied, unnoted in this life progression from gestation
to death is separation. Pregnancy promises, through introjection and identification,
a reconnection to the maternal womb; an undoing of that first and irrevocable
separation.
The primordial wrenching apart in childbirth is thus yet another beginning of
a lifelong trail of differentiation and loss for the new mother. The disruption of
the fantasy of having returned to the womb, via the identification with her own
fetus, is a critical element of parturition. For most women, elation mixed with
melancholy is an apt description of mood swings that accompany the early days

As ambivalent a mother as Medea put it, ‘Men talk of how our life is passed indoors, far from all
3

dangers, while they go out and fight. Fools! I would rather stand in the ranks of battle three times than
bear a child once’ (Williamson, 1990).
1182 BARBARA STIMMEL

of motherhood. For some more vulnerable women murderous rage accompanies

childbirth as witnessed in our mythology and reality; some mothers hate, maim and
murder their children. Powerful as they are, Jocasta, Medea, Hera and Demeter are
merely characters in plays and myths but Susan Smith, Andrea Yates and Hedda
Nussbaum—all women who murdered or allowed the murder of their children—
appear on the front pages of our newspapers.
It is easy to forget that Jocasta did not just bed Oedipus; earlier, she tried to kill
him in infancy. The stage is set for Jocasta remeeting her son at the intersection of
her infantile desires and her maternal longings; a guilty, heartbroken mother longing
for her lost child. She was desperate to reconnect and bring back into her womb the
child who had once lain there. She knew her child, in the way any mother would,
when he stood before her with his ‘cradle scars’ (Rosner, 1988). Bross (1988)
presents a comprehensive review of the words Jocasta and Oedipus exchange in
order to demonstrate the ‘maternal ring’ to her language. He (and others) convinces
us that she knew who it was that she talked out of his anxiety regarding the oracle’s
threat of incest and murder. Jocasta, short-circuiting her own ambivalent struggle
of individuation from her child by banishing him in infancy, was instrumental in
her son’s denial of what he was about to do. In the end, Oedipus gave Jocasta, his
mother, not only himself but also other replacement babies. As she utters a now
familiar consolation, Jocasta, proverbial woman and mother, defines the Oedipus
complex as she places it on another royal road, the dream:
As to your mother’s marriage bed – don’t fear it.

Before this, in dreams too, as well as oracles,

Many a man has lain with his own mother (Bross, 1988).

Devereux (1988) highlighted the reciprocal and complicated nature of parent–

child seduction in the Oedipus myth. He described the sadistic, homosexual
underpinnings of the language of desire between infant and parent and used these
ideas to enrich the layered analysis of Oedipus the king. His postulations add to
our appreciation of why this drama of incest, destruction and death endures; in it
we undoubtedly see ourselves. I would add that, in particular, mothers’ dilemmas
intersect with their children’s as they shakily figure out ways to sever the symbiotic
pre- and neonatal connections to them as they send them on their way; very few send
them to Cithaeron to die but they must send them away.
Jocasta, an abandoning, filicidal, terrible mother, whose maternal narcissism
intensifies the oedipal conflict (see for example Hart, 1958; Kanzer, 1988;
Schwaber, 1988; Rascovsky, 1995), stands at the fulcrum of Oedipus’s destruction.
Linked by some with the Sphinx whom Oedipus slays but who returns to haunt
him, Jocasta possesses a ‘dentate vagina, and all the other terrifying images of the
castrating female’ (Kanzer, 1988, p. 88). Stewart describes the Sphinx/Jocasta as
an overpowering phallic woman who represents the universal, internal persecutory
mother. He develops the idea that denial of the penis which arises in response to penis
envy is the basis of the fantasy of parthenogenesis among many women. Performing
incest with her son who then fathers her four children apparently gratifies this wish
 THE CAUSE IS WORSE 1183

since her son is once again a part of herself: ‘his penis is her penis and mother and
son are a phantasy unity’ (1961, p. 429). This is the entirely forbidding Jocasta we
meet in the myth.
But her story, its choices and their consequences, is multidimensional. The
eternal problem which all mothers face when confronting the inextricably entwined
threads of maternal emotions and their infantile antecedents resonates throughout
the myth. And, although the desire most women experience to have babies is also
strongly independent of oedipal longings, historical remnants of their childhood
attachments and oedipal derivatives color these needs, thereby adding to adult
pleasure and pain. The intensity of these complex feelings of the pregnant woman is
undoubtedly strengthened by other contradictory experiences.
Procreation, even in the face of increasing knowledge on the molecular level,
is unceasingly mysterious and emotionally unfathomable. Abundant literature on
the interaction of physiology, psychology, culture and fantasy elaborate this most
stunning of life’s natural events as gestation forms the wellspring of maternal
attachment, ambivalence and all. A testament to the capacity for human development
is that mothers allow and assist, even if imperfectly, their offspring to leave them
psychologically after their first great wrenching apart in childbirth. There are
templates in childhood for this capacity as one learns to give up breasts, feces and
phantom body parts. Still there is nothing quite like a baby springing forth from
one’s body to allow one transcendence of the human limitations, if only fleetingly,
‘inside her carcase’.

Clinical vignette—three ‘generations’

A supervisor, her candidate supervisee and the candidate’s patient present varying
levels of this reading of Jocasta’s struggle to separate from her child, ambivalently
and continually. The patient became pregnant and her life went into an immediate
tailspin which became more chaotic as she neared delivery; her paranoid fantasies
of the expected death of herself and her unborn child ran rampant. The transference
to her analyst was colored by feelings of smug superiority and anxious oedipal
triumph as she spun fantasies of her analyst’s inability to become pregnant. When
her little girl was born, the patient became morose and depressed, enough to warrant
a medication consultation, as the therapist and supervisor became increasingly
alarmed by the patient’s threatened violence toward her child. The patient has a
continuing, enmeshed relationship with her own mother, whose third child she was.
Her mother’s cruel intrusiveness was mirrored in the new mother’s highly conflicted
attachment to her infant, one which included intense object hunger oscillating with
frequent withholding of her breast. The analyst and patient experienced this push-
pull in the analysis which led to a similar situation in the supervision.
Things were dramatically complicated by the candidate/analyst’s pregnancy
during the last trimester of the patient’s. Now all three women, two directly (patient
and analyst) and one indirectly (supervisor) were grappling with expectations,
memories and fantasies about pregnancy, childbirth and separation. Although much
can be said about the varieties of competition, especially sibling and intergenerational
rivalry that developed among all three, for purposes of understanding Jocasta and her
1184 BARBARA STIMMEL

prototypical appearance in the life of mothers, my interest here is on the intersection

of separation—loss and rage—within the several layers of our combined work.4
When the patient discovered that her analyst was pregnant, all hell broke
loose. The patient became her own infant and anticipated the same rejection and
smothering from her analyst/mother/self that she visited on her baby. She panicked
when thinking of her analyst’s maternity leave, which would occur not too long
after the patient returned from hers. The patient’s associations revolved around
comings and goings, particularly remembering her own individuating milestones
and anticipating those of her daughter.
The analyst experienced strong guilt and shame because of her wish to abandon
her patient/baby and focus inward on her own growing fetus. She worried that she
too would experience some of the same rage toward her own infant that her patient
exhibited toward hers. The analyst also felt a guilty sense of pleasure because she
was as fertile as her patient and because she too would have her very own daughter
to cherish and exhibit. She was also increasingly aware that this milestone in both
their lives spoke to the actual separation existing between the analyst and patient
which they had colluded in ignoring.
The supervisor felt waves of sadness and loss when hearing about and witnessing
the developing pregnancies of the two women in her ‘care’, remembering her own
pregnancies and parturitions. Her awareness of ongoing pangs of separation as her
children attained different levels of their own individuation transformed the supervision.
It was intensified through the exploration with the analyst of her countertransference
reactions. They considered how they reflected, and even exacerbated, her patient’s
struggle to allow her child a beginning journey away from her and into the world of
her father, nanny, grandparents etc. This work allowed the candidate and supervisor
to pay attention to the bittersweet and increasing separation between them as the
candidate became more sophisticated in honing her analytic skills.
This short vignette is meant to describe Jocasta herself as she handled her
murderous rage at her baby, as she struggled with guilt and shame over wishes she
had to replace other objects with her infant, and as she struggled to find a way to
keep her child close. Jocasta mishandled all these possible, probable stages, just
as Oedipus mishandled his. But the patient, the candidate and the supervisor were
able to work these normative conflicts through with the help of each other and other
therapeutic objects. Jocasta had no help.

Discussion
The profound attachment pregnant women feel toward the body growing inside
their bodies is not unalloyed. In addition to nurturing, cradling and protecting this
miracle, a mother-to-be often experiences simultaneously the invasion of her body
by a hungry, ever-present, faceless organism who deforms and demands center stage.
Remembering that mothers were once children, the past as prologue makes its presence
powerfully felt when she is pregnant. Klein, Jones and Horney convincingly describe
4
For other perspectives on supervising the pregnant candidate see Goldberger et al. (2003).
 THE CAUSE IS WORSE 1185

the early oral rage the little girl experiences when frustrated at her mother’s breast.
Among other theoretical threads woven into this version of the oedipal story is the
powerful image of the child destroying/devouring the contents of her mother’s body.
This wish naturally gives rise to the fear of mother’s reciprocal retaliatory destruction
of her child’s body contents which will come back to haunt the now-pregnant adult.
A pediatrician cum psychoanalyst such as Winnicott was most able to recognize the
extraordinarily complex feelings a mother has for her child and his familiar list of
reasons mothers hate their babies ‘from the word go’ includes the following: ‘If she
fails him at the start she knows he will pay her out for ever.’ And, ‘He excites but
frustrates—she mustn’t eat him or trade in sex with him’ (1975a, p. 201).
This reminds us of Jocasta, that most ambivalent of mothers. For her the most
ordinary but painful and difficult of developmental tasks for a woman, the launching
of her child, is the stuff of tragedy. For other, more ordinary mothers, the quotidian
task of separation is thankfully less dramatic. Pregnancy and childbirth, though,
require a stalwart sense of oneself as new mothers learn to accept an empty space
in their center. The longing to fill that space, just like the child’s role in the oedipal
script, is a normal and expected life experience. Like the oedipal child who learns,
willy-nilly, that he is safer if his wishes do not come true, the mother of that grown
and refound child knows that she (and he) is safer with transformed gratifications
and sublimated passion.
This is one way to think about things when we listen to our female patients
describe wistful longings for some things that could never be. I invite you to hear in
these whispered wishes and guilty recriminations a reference to a time of a certain
kind of wholeness (pregnancy), which lasts a very short while and which contains
within it the adult woman’s own childhood oedipal dreams. The child is not only the
father to the man; she is also the mother to the woman. Embedded within her adult
experiences of motherhood will be the woman’s template of her infantile, incestuous
fantasies about carrying her father’s (and mother’s) baby. Her affective longing for
reunion with her once carried within her child is layered upon unconscious pining
for the baby she wished to create during her own babyhood.
The oedipal drama unfolds in childhood, intensifies in adolescence, and lingers,
as unrequited love and hate, in all adult relationships. It is how things look early on
but it rests on the same two thrusts of development, biology and society. A little later
there are more possibilities, people and body parts to contend with, but the inner
experience of the child remains essentially the same. How can I get what I want and
need from my parent(s) without paying too great a price for this gratification?
Since mothers too were once oedipal children they empathically recognize the
5
need of their children to live in their wombs and go on to leap from their laps.
To the extent that a mother traversed her own childhood path of attachment, lust,
aggression and individuation successfully, so too will her child. To the extent that
she did not, an attenuated version of Jocasta will come forward. She remains our
shadowy and horrifying image of the desperate mother fused with her oedipal child

5
It is here that one considers ideas about the role of separation in the ‘Oedipus’ of the little girl as
described by Kulish and Holtzman (1998) and its reappearance in her life as a mother.
1186 BARBARA STIMMEL

because of her perverse refusal to stay the course as she breaks the incest taboo. She
thrusts the past into the present so that parent and child are one. As we have seen,
her choices as a new mother hauntingly characterize her later plight.
Object loss, and object refinding, do not describe Jocasta alone. Other mothers
too confront their own oedipal adolescence in the midst of their trying to manage
the vagaries of attachment and separation. Since adult sexuality is often the most
convenient context for other basic unresolved existential dilemmas of identity and
personhood, it comes as no surprise that the dramatic severance between Jocasta and
Oedipus would be the emotional and dramatic backdrop of their sexual encounter.
Love, lust, anger, incorporation and rejection describe the experience for mother
and child. How could it be otherwise?
Because of this, I advocate for Jocasta. She deserves the same commonplace
context into which ultimately Oedipus has been placed. She too is the representation
of a predictable psychological task, one that all mothers have to master. The
unfulfilled wish from childhood to bear a child, coupled with the actual loss of the
child from her body in adulthood, is a compelling combination which most women
work through in myriad ways. It is our task as psychoanalysts to help our female
patients work through their guilt in response to affective hunger for bodily reunion
with their children as they separate, at all stages of their trajectories of leave-taking.
If we expect this longing to be there, remembering Jocasta, we will be prepared to
help them divest from this affect state their childhood dreams of procreation with
their longed-for mothers and fathers. As with all psychoneurosis, parsing out the past
makes the difficulties of the present more bearable. The normative psychological
waters of intense attachment, rekindled oedipal desires and heart-rending separation
are those through which all mothers navigate. The giving up of a child is a most
formidable requirement of motherhood, so that the conversion of longing for reunion
into its opposite of stable separation is an impressive accomplishment. It is her
strength and her reward that she allows the past to stay repressed and transformed.
If heaven and the fates forbid she and her child will come to a horrifying end.

Conclusion
Several thousand years is a long time to tell the same story. Oedipus and Jocasta
carried out our most forbidden wishes and their sacrifice forms a pillar of our
survival. We cannot procreate with our children or with our parents; we would all
perish in the defiance of fate. But we all, men and women alike, carry deeply buried
remnants of both Oedipus and Jocasta, which is why we are amazed at their audacity
and moved by their suffering.
Jocasta’s forceful guilt over the expulsion of her infant son into the wilds of Mount
Cithaeron in conjunction with her powerful longing for his return are played out when he
returns to Thebes as a young adult. He is in the primacy of his sexual development just
after committing murder and conquering the Sphinx. The fused sexual and aggressive
image standing before her is obviously overwhelming and Jocasta succumbs to her
passion and her longing. The myth is carried forward by sadistic energy as the play
races toward its apotheosis of self-destructive punishments of mother and son.
 THE CAUSE IS WORSE 1187

Jocasta, our cautionary mother, leaves us, mournfully howling into the abyss as
she prepares to take her own life, as her father Menoeceus did before her:
nothing in me moves can I not feel I shared the wrong

how to share the punishment it’s me I’m at the root of it

I am the root my blood is the dark twisted root

this womb darkness swallowing all order and distinction

so die let out this hell that lives in you

nothing would be enough to punish it smashed his whole universe on to me

it wouldn’t be enough a mother a morass all I want is death find it you killed
your father finish it

the same hand your mother finish it is this the sword that killed him is this it that
killed my husband and my husband’s father with a single stab

where shall I have the second stab this point under my breast or this long edge across
my throat don’t you know the place it’s here this the place the gods hate where
everything began the son the husband up here (Hughes, 1972, p. 54)

Translations of summary
Die Sache ist noch schlimmer: Wiederbegegnung mit Iokaste. Dieser Essay wird dazu beitragen, Iokaste
stärker ins Zentrum rücken, nachdem sie von der psychoanalytischen Theorie eher vernachlässigt wurde,
weil sich deren Blick im Wesentlichen auf ihren Sohn beschränkte. Iokaste wurde zwar nicht vollständig
ignoriert, doch wenn sie untersucht wird, erscheint sie als die gefährliche, kastrierende, verbietende
Frau, die es um jeden Preis zu beschwichtigen oder zu meiden gilt. So steht sie zwar als Angelpunkt von
Ödipus’ Zerstörung im Zentrum des Geschehens, doch nie als Mutter, die sich nach ihrem Sohn sehnt. Die
Autorin vertritt die These, dass Iokaste die Personifizierung eines dauerhaften Entwicklungsbedürfnisses
aller Mütter verkörpert, sich von ihren Kindern zu trennen, eines Bedürfnisses, das sich indes mit einer
universalen Sehnsucht nach Wiedervereinigung paart. Ebenso wie Ödipus ist auch Iokaste als Dramatis
persona ein Beispiel für die perversen Konsequenzen verbotener Befriedigungen; aber ebenso wie Ödipus
verkörpert auch sie normale Variationen über ein Thema.

La causa es peor: reencuentro con Yocasta. Este ensayo ayuda a enfocar mejor a Yocasta , una figura
relativamente descuidada por la teoría psicoanalítica, por lo general más atenta a su hijo. No es que Yocasta
sea ignorada por completo, sino que más bien aparece, cuando se la estudia, como la mujer peligrosa,
castradora y prohibida, que es conveniente aplacar o evitar a toda costa. De manera que aunque ubicada
al centro del escenario como el elemento y soporte determinante en la destrucción de Edipo, nunca
aparece como una madre que sienta nostalgia de su hijo. El argumento de este artículo es que Yocasta es la
personificación de una activa necesidad evolutiva que sienten todas las madres por separarse de sus hijos
junto al anhelo universal de reecontrarse con ellos. Yocasta, personaje teatral, como Edipo, es un ejemplo
del resultado perverso de gratificaciones prohibidas. Pero también, como Edipo, es la presentación figurada
de variaciones normales sobre este tema.

La raison est pire : nouvelle rencontre avec Jocaste. Cet essai a pour objet de mieux mettre en lumière
Jocaste, figure relativement négligée par la théorie psychanalytique qui, s’étant focalisée sur son fils, l’a ainsi
reléguée au second plan. Ce n’est pas que Jocaste soit complètement ignorée, mais plutôt que les études qui se
rapportent à elle la font apparaître comme une femme dangereuse, castratrice, interdite, que l’on doit apaiser
ou éviter à tout prix. Ainsi, alors même qu’elle tient une place centrale comme le pivot de la destruction
d’Œdipe, elle n’est jamais montrée comme une mère nostalgique de son fils. La thèse de cet article est que
Jocaste est la personnification d’un besoin de toute mère, compris potentiellement dans le développement,
1188 BARBARA STIMMEL

de se séparer de ses enfants, associé à un désir universel de réunification familiale. Tout comme Œdipe,
Jocaste, personnage de pièce de théâtre, est une illustration du devenir pervers des gratifications interdites.
Mais aussi, comme Œdipe, elle est la figuration des variations de la normalité sur ce thème.

La causa è peggio: incontrare nuovamente Giocasta. Questo lavoro contribuisce a mettere meglio a
fuoco la figura di Giocasta, relativamente trascurata dalla teoria psicoanalitica che si è concentrata su quella
di suo figlio, lasciando lei da parte. Non che Giocasta sia totalmente ignorata. Il fatto è piuttosto che,
quando è studiata, appare come la donna pericolosa, castrante, proibita, da placare ed evitare a tutti i costi.
Così, anche se essa rimane al centro della scena come fulcro della distruzione di Edipo, non appare mai
come la madre che ha nostalgia del figlio. L’autrice dell’articolo sostiene che Giocasta è la personificazione
del bisogno evolutivo di separarsi dai figli che, associato all’universale desiderio di riunione, si sviluppa
in tutte le madri. Come nel caso di Edipo, Giocasta, personaggio di una tragedia, è l’esempio del risultato
perverso di gratificazioni vietate, ma è anche, come Edipo, la raffigurazione di variazioni della normalità
su un tema.

References
Besdine M (1968). The Jocasta complex, mothering and genius. Psychoanal Rev 55:259–77.
Bross M (1988). Oedipus and Jocasta: A reexamination of Freud’s drama of destiny. In: Pollock
GH, Ross JM, editors. The Oedipus papers. Madison, CT: Int. Univ. Press.
Chabon M (2000). The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Picador.
Devereux G (1988). Why Oedipus killed Laius: A note on the complementary Oedipus complex in
Greek drama. In: Pollock GH, Ross JM, editors. The Oedipus papers. Madison, CT: Int. Univ.
Press.
Ferenczi S (1926). Further contributions to the theory and technique of psycho-analysis. Suttie J,
translator. London: Hogarth.
Freud S (1940). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE 23, p. 144–207.
Goldberger M, Gillman R, Levinson N, Notman M, Seelig B, Shaw R (2003). On supervising the
pregnant psychoanalytic candidate. Psychoanal Q 72:439–64.
Hart HH (1958). Maternal narcissism and the Oedipus complex. Int J Psychoanal 39:188–90.
Hughes T (1972). Seneca’s Oedipus. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co.
Kanzer M (1988). The passing of the Oedipus complex. In: Pollock GH, Ross JM, editors. The
Oedipus papers. Madison, CT: Int. Univ. Press.
Kulish N, Holtzman D (1998). Persephone, the loss of virginity and the female oedipal complex.
Int J Psychoanal 79:57–71.
March J (1990). Euripides the misogynist? In: Powell A, editor. Euripides, women, and sexuality.
London: Routledge.
Naiman J (1992). Freud’s Jocasta and Sophocles’s Jocasta: Clinical implications of the difference.
Int J Psychoanal 73:95–101.
Olivier C (1989). Jocasta’s children: The imprint of the mother. Craig G, translator. London:
Routledge.
Raphael-Leff J (1997). The casket and the key: thoughts on gender and generativity. In: Raphael-
Leff J, Jozef Perelberg R, editors. Female experience: Three generations of British female
psychoanalysts on their work with female patients, p. 237–57. London: Routledge.
Rascovsky A (1995). Filicide: The murder, humiliation, mutilation, denigration, and abandonment
of children by their parents. Rogers SH, translator. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Rosner H (1988). Oedipus and his cradle scars. In: Pollock GH, Ross JM, editors. The Oedipus
papers. Madison, CT: Int. Univ. Press.
Rudnytsky P (1992). Freud and Oedipus. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Sacks M (1985). Panel report: The Oedipus complex: A reevaluation. J Am Psychoanal Assoc
33:201–16.
Schwaber P (1988). A discussion of Rosner’s adopted Oedipus. In: Pollock GH, Ross JM, editors.
The Oedipus papers. Madison, CT: Int. Univ. Press.
Stewart H (1961). Jocasta’s crimes. Int J Psychoanal 42:424–30.
 THE CAUSE IS WORSE 1189

Williamson M (1990). A woman’s place in Euripides’ Medea. In: Powell A, editor. Euripides,
women, and sexuality. London: Routledge.
Winnicott DW (1975a). Hate in the countertransference. In: Through paediatrics to psychoanalysis.
New York: Basic Books.
Winnicott DW (1975b). Birth memories, birth trauma, and anxiety. In: Through paediatrics to
psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.