The baby not getting what he hopes for, those feelings that frustration invoke, are vital links in the chain of consequences which lead to the ‘experience of satisfaction’. The consequences of this entire process are momentous because the experience of getting it, (which Freud regards also as our first moral experience), embeds an expectation, yet our development is all about getting less and less of it. We adapt to not getting it. Freud suggests that this adapting and the feelings invoked by it, reach a type of crystallization during what he calls the resolution of the oedipal complex.
When Laplanche and Pontalis suggest that ‘the relationship between the child and his parents is destined to be internalised and survive in the structure of the personality’(Laplanche,J &Pontalis, J-B 1973 :286), they imply that what we felt then provides the markers of how we conduct adult relations. By age 5 there’s a blind imprint. The Oedipus complex is about how we bore the cultivation, and subsequent rejection, of our incestuous desires.Whether these feelings of rejection, rage, loss are ever abolished as Freud suggests, isn’t really clear. Perhaps this is because this first moral act, that gave the feeling of complete satisfaction, was also the start of a most powerful seduction, a cultivation of incestuous desire for our parent. ‘Here’, said Freud of his seduction theory ‘I had stumbled for the first time on the Oedipus complex ‘, (Freud, 1926: 33).
I am using the term primal seduction to describe a fundamental situation in which the adult proffers to the child verbal and non verbal signifiers pregnant with unconscious sexual signification (Laplanche, 1989: 126).
Were we cruelly seduced, as Laplanche suggests, into believing that a feeling of complete satisfaction might be for life? Our endless attempts to retrieve that feeling through all the things we can do with our frustration—tantrums, furies, spiteful rages deceptions—don’t disappear easily. As Laplanche would have it in his reformulation of Freud’s theory of seduction; ‘The first crime, the origin of sexual action, is not on the side of the child as Freud claims, but on the side of the parent’, (Laplanche, 2010). So the child is cultivated, for a time there was everything to hope for.