The Hera complex: 'nepenthes mourning', desexualisation and bisexual identifications through the reconstruction of the combined figure in latency.
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| Title: | The Hera complex: 'nepenthes mourning', desexualisation and bisexual identifications through the reconstruction of the combined figure in latency. |
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| Authors: | Tzikas, Nikolaos (AUTHOR) |
| Source: | Journal of Child Psychotherapy. Apr2026, Vol. 52 Issue 1, p124-137. 14p. |
| Subjects: | Fantasy (Psychology), Psychotherapy, Defense mechanisms (Psychology), Bisexuality, Parent-child relationships, Human sexuality, Psychological adaptation, Family relations, Psychosexual development, Child development, Psychoanalytic theory, Ego (Psychology), Child behavior, Children |
| Abstract: | This paper explores a developmental paradox observed in latency-aged children where anxieties surrounding the recognition of the parental sexual relationship evoke pre-Oedipal fantasies of fusion and oneness with the parental couple. A new psychic formation is introduced, the Hera complex, named after the Greek goddess who conceived a child without union. This complex embodies a fantasy of creation without sexual contact, serving as a defensive structure that protects the child from the painful awareness of the parents' separateness and sexual connection following the dissolution of the Oedipus complex. Drawing on clinical material from two latency-aged children, the paper examines how, in the aftermath of Oedipal resolution, a process of 'nepenthes mourning' - a mourning that cannot be fully processed and where what cannot be mourned must be restructured and reorganised - is set in motion. The libidinal energy withdrawn from the parental objects is redirected towards the ego and transformed into narcissistic libido, enabling new identifications and internal reorganisations. Within this process, the child constructs fantasies in which the parents share, exchange, or merge bodily parts and functions to create a baby without physical intimacy, through magical thinking and omnipotent control. In this state, the child reconstructs an internal combined figure that contains both maternal and paternal functions. Through this reconstruction, the ego achieves a more bisexual form of identification, integrating masculine and feminine elements and transforming the internal landscape of objects, while avoiding the anxieties of difference, exclusion, and loss. By reframing latency not as a period of psychosexual quietude but as a dynamic phase of desexualisation and psychic transformation, the paper invites a reconsideration of the creative and defensive processes through which children rework pre-Oedipal and Oedipal anxieties into new structures of meaning and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| Database: | Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection |
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