In his psychoanalytic excerpt, “The Oedipus Complex,” Sigmund Freud reflects on how children develop bonds with their parents. According to Freud, children develop intimate bonds with their parents by adopting the roles and values ​​of the parent whose gender they share. Conversely, the parent of the opposite sex becomes a cherished object of affection. The Oedipus complex involves a boy adopting his father's identity (and roles) in hopes of gaining his mother's affection. Inevitably, the boy's attempts to become his father and to live the role of husband/wife between himself and his mother are destined to fail. According to Freud, these futile and misunderstood efforts cause the child to “fall in love with one parent and hate the other” (NA, 919). In other words, the boy envies both his father for his mother's love and his own inaccessibility to that love. Freud goes on to list two literary masterpieces whose protagonists exhibit this complex: Hamlet and Oedipus the King. By superimposing his own psychoanalysis on the literary masterpieces, Freud aims to validate his own concepts. Perhaps it is fitting then that, since the height of Freudian psychoanalysis, literary writers have adopted, reevaluated and, ultimately, modified Freudian concepts. In Toni Morrison's novel Jazz, Joe Trace displays typically Oedipal characteristics, but for all the Oedipal tendencies that Trace seems to possess, he also has psychological characteristics that seem to go against the "Oedipus complex." complex”, those opposite characteristics, apparently generated by the circumstances of his childhood, function as plausible possibilities indicating the limits of Freudian psychoanalysis, ... middle of paper ... described in “The Oedipus Complex”. Just as Freud used literature as the foundation, or backbone, to support his psychoanalytic theories, literary writers have used Freudian psychoanalysis to build on literature. As a result, novelists, such as Toni Morrison, have often adopted and modified Freudian psychoanalysis. Specifically, Joe Trace reveals the possibilities of psychological variation and promotes a case-specific reality in which psychological universals, while relevant, prove narrow and limited in assessing the psychological interior of fictional characters.English 300 5Works CitedFreud, Sigmond . "The Oedipus Complex." The Norton anthology of theory and criticism. New York: W. W. Norton Company, 2001. 919-923. Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: First International Vintage Edition, 2004.