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An initial situation - such as the details of the marriage of one's parents - would be transformed into certain rules in one's own life, completely unconsciously, to generate situations - such as one's own marriage or love life - which both repeated the initial situation and transformed it in important ways. The laws of this transformation process could be given the same mathematical formalization that anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss were employing.
Lacan's contact with structural anthropology was also to result in a revision of the classical psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex. Several anthropologists had noted that in certain societies the father is less the object of awe, fear and rivalry than the maternal uncle. The oedipal structure does not suppose the existence of the "typical" nuclear family, but, via the wife - giving maternal uncle, it involves the whole tribe or clan. The sociologist Marcel Mauss had elaborated the idea that society is constituted and held together by ''a perpetual cycle of exchange of gifts'' both within and between generations. (Gifts of property, goods and even people are what gives the symbolic texture to society.) The givint itself rather than what you give is the key factor. It is symbolic. =====EditThe Name of the Father=====Now, from these theories, it follows that a marriage will serve to cement relations in the community and will make of the man and woman involved mere players in a larger symbolic organization. A marriage involves a whole community and not just the immediate relatives and parents. ''The man and woman thus become part of a symbolic chain''. The real, biological father is thus to be distinguished from the symbolic structures which organize the relation of man to woman. Paternity has a symbolic side to it, and Lacan called this agency of paternity ''the name of the father''. ''It is not a real person but a symbolic function''. This should not be confused, as it often is, with the real name of the father. It is merely a term to designate the symbolic side of paternity as opposed to its real nature, reduced in the modern world to sperm. A woman can become pregnant today without having had sexual intercourse with a man: artificial insemination is made possible by science, a fact which still illustrates the Lacanian distinction between real and symbolic agencies. =====The Phallus=====Now, Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex will result in the child's entering the symbolic circuit and moving away from the immediate relation with the mother. This relation, however, is not a dual one. It does not involve simply mother and child. (There are three terms present: the mother, the child and the object of the mother's desire - what Lacan calls "the phallus".) (However much the mother loves her child, there will always be some margin, something to indicate to her child that what she desires is beyond it. The child realizes that he or she is not identical with what his or her mother desires.) Once this triangular structure is established, the child can try, with the many games of seduction that children are so good at, to become this third term, the object of the mother's desire. ''It is an attempt to be the phallus for the mother'', to incarnate the phallus in whatever form is particular to the individuals in question.
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