**5. Traumatic primal scene**

In his dreams, Carlo turned to the Oedipal fantasy whenever he was overwhelmed by feelings of worthlessness and helplessness. Carlo's dreams show that the Oedipal imaginary can serve a basically defensive function. It shelters the child's inner world from the excruciating jealousy elicited by the experience of the sexually interacting parental couple.

The constellation of wishes and fears haunting the active Oedipal phantasy entails a manic core: the delusional assumption to be able to gratify mother's expectations and bodily drives and to get rid of father's competitive threat. The omnipotent quality of such longing vis a vis the child's chronic helplessness and dependence on internal and external parents is obvious.

To individuals unable to reach a substantial cleavage of the primary symbiotic relationship to mother, active Oedipal fantasies appear – and actually are – worthless. The tie to mother is basically unresolved. No imaginary power or control may be established on her. Rather, separation anxieties are eased by clinging even more to her through primitive identification strategies.

However, at the time of sexual maturity, the passive Oedipal constellation shows all of its frailty. Increasing involvement in social life pushes the adolescent in many respects out of mother's symbiotic embrace. Wider narcissistic and competitive wishes come to be acted out in the extra-familial social environment.

These changes let a new set of fantasies surface within the individual's inner world. In a typical unconscious phantasy, the mother evades the child's control and is available to be penetrated in multiple ways by the internal fathers. In the adolescent's external interpersonal life, this phantasy is activated inasmuch as peers and siblings begin dating and establishing deeper and deeper sexual relations. The traumatic experience of the inner primal scene is so endlessly replicated in the real world.

Carlo's striptease dream shows how the reversible exchange of sexual identities through triangular seductive maneuvers may temporarily ease jealousy and rage, or rather project them into the father object. In a classical unconscious fantasy, father is helplessly poisoned by jealousy and despair, and mother is filled with envy, while their son invites the most abusive vagrants into the garden of earthly delight of his own young and eroticized body. However, while a passive Oedipal constellation may be suited to project anxiety into external objects and temporarily contain emotional pain, it is actually unable to permanently quench primal scene-related upsetting emotions.

Primal scene anxiety thrives on the experience of exclusion from the coitus of the inner parents. The core element, then, is the desperate effort to control the access to the inside of the inner mother. However, this aim is obviously unattainable in reality, outside symbiotic or severely sadomasochistic relations.

Only an adequate cleavage of the pre-Oedipal relationship to the mother object can enable the young male to enter deep relationships with female peers. The establishment of a sexualized object relation with an adult female has a substantial impact on the configuration of the inner primal scene. The subject may finally come to occupy in phantasy father's position within the inner coitus. New interpersonal tasks can then be posed and shall be worked out, including the question of generativity and parenthood.
