Oedipus complex

French: complexe d'Oedipe

The "Oedipus complex" is a term used by Sigmund Freud to describe the unconscious desire of the child -- especially a male child -- for the parent of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by hostility and rivalry with the parent of the same sex.

The "Oedipus complex" is a concept used by Sigmund Freud to describe the unconscious (sexual) desire of the child -- especially a male child -- for the parent of the opposite sex, and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex.

The "Oedipus complex" is a concept used by Sigmund Freud to refer to the unconscious (sexual) desire of the child -- especially a male child -- for the parent of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by hostility and rivalry with the parent of the same sex.

The "Oedipus complex" is a term developed by Sigmund Freud to designate the attraction on the part of the child toward the parent of the opposite sex and rivalry and hostility toward the parent of its own.

Background

The "Oedipus complex" is first introduced by Freud in 1901; it comes to acquire central importance in psychoanalytic theory thereafter.

Oedipus Rex

The Oedipus complex is named after the mythical Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother.

It comes from the Greek myth of Oedipus, a Greek hero who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.

The term derives from Oedipus was a prominent figure in Greek mythology who killed his father and married his mother.

Freud attributes the "gripping power" of Sophocles' play, Oedipus Rex to its depiction of what Freud considers a "universal event in early childhood."

Phallic Stage

The Oedipus complex coincides with the phallic stage of psychosexual development, dur

ing which the primary erogenous zone of the body consists of the genital sex organs. when awareness of and manipulation of the genitals is supposed to be a primary source of pleasure during which a child becomes interested in his or her own sexual organs

The Oedipus conflict, or Oedipus complex, was described as a state of psychosexual development and awareness first occurring around the age of 5 and a half years (a period known as the phallic stage in Freudian theory).

Freud came to assume that, by the time he has reached the ‘phallic’ stage of development, at around the age of four or five, the small boy is sexually interested in his mother, wishes to gain exclusive possession of her, and therefore harbours hostile impulses towards his father.

Psychosexual Development

The "Oedipus complex" was posited by Sigmund Freud as the central organizing principle of psychosexual development.

rucial stage in the normal developmental process.

The Oedipus complex emerges in the third year of life and then declines in the fifth year, when the child renounces sexual desire for its parents and identifies with the rival.

It occurs during the phallic stage of the psycho-sexual development of the personality, approximately years three to five.

Unconscious Desire

The Oedipus complex was defined by Freud as an unconscious set of loving and hostile desires which the subject experiences in relation to its parents; the subject desires one parent, and thus enters into rivalry with the other parent.

In the "positive" form of the Oedipus complex, the desired parent is the parent of the opposite sex to the subject, and the parent of the same sex is the rival.

UNIVERSAL Followers of the psychologist Sigmund Freud long believed that the Oedipus complex was common to all cultures, although many psychiatrists now refute this belief.

Castration Complex

The hostility towards the father arouses the fear that the father will remove the offending sex organ of the boy, called castration anxiety.

The castration complex arises from the boy's assumption that, because girls are without a penis, they must have suffered castration.

The reality of castration is borught home to the boy when he sees the sexual anatomy of the girl, which is lacking the protruding genitals of the male.

The girl appears castrated to the boy. "If that could happen to her, it could also happen to me," is what he thinks.

As a result of castration anxiety, the boy represses his incestuous desire for the mother an his hostility for the father, and the Oedipus complex disappears.

Psychopathology

The Oedipus complex or conflict is a concept developed by Sigmund Freud to explain the origin of certain neuroses in childhood

Freud argued that all psychopathological structures could be traced to a malfunction in the Oedipus complex, which was thus dubbed "the nuclear complex of the neuroses".

The Oedipus complex is closely connected to the castration complex.

Resolution of the Oedipus complex is believed to occur by identification with the parent of the same sex and by the renunciation of sexual interest in the parent of the opposite sex. Freud considered this complex the cornerstone of the superego and the nucleus of all human relationships. 

Jacques Lacan

Lacan first addresses the Oedipus complex in his 1938 article on the family, where he argues that it is the last and most important of the three "family complexes."

At this point his account of the Oedipus complex does not differ from Freud's, his only originality being to emphasise its historical and cultural relativity, taking his cue from the anthropological studies by Malinowski and others.

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It is in the 1950s that Lacan begins to develop his own distinctive conception of the Oedipus complex.

Though he always follows Freud in regarding the Oedipus complex as the central complex in the unconscious, he now begins to differ from Freud on a number of important points.

The most important of these is that in Lacan's view, the subject always desires the mother, and the father is always the rival, irrespective of whether the subject is male or female.

Consequently, in Lacan's account the male subject experiences the Oedipus complex in a radically asymmetrical way to the female subject.

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The Oedipus complex is, for Lacan, the paradigmatic triangular structure, which contrasts with all dual relations (though see the final paragraph below).

The key function in the Oedipus complex is thus that of the father, the third term which transforms the dual relation between mother and child into a triadic structure.

The Oedipus complex is thus nothing less than the passage from the imaginary order to the symbolic order, "the conquest of the symbolic relation as such."

The fact that the passage to the symbolic passes via a complex sexual dialectic means that the subject cannot have access to the symbolic order without confronting the problem of sexual difference.

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In The Seminar, Book V, Lacan analyses this passage from the imaginary to the symbolic by identifying three "times" of the Oedipus complex, the sequence being one of logical rather than chronological priority.

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The first time of the Oedipus complex is characterised by the imaginary triangle of mother, child and phallus.

In the previous seminar of 1956-7, Lacan calls this the preoedipal triangle.

However, whether this triangle is regarded as preoedipal or as a moment in the Oedipus complex itself, the main point is the same: namely, that prior to the invention of the father there is never a purely dual relation between the mother and the child but always a third term, the phallus, an imaginary object which the mother desires beyond the child himself (S4, 240-1).

Lacan hints that the presence of the imaginary phallus as a third term in the imaginary triangle indicates that the symbolic father is already functioning at this time.

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In the first time of the Oedipus complex, then, the child realises that both he and the mother are marked by a lack.

The mother is marked by lack, since she is seen to be incomplete; otherwise, she would not desire.

The subject is also marked by a lack, since he does not completely satisfy the mother's desire.

The lacking element in both cases is the imaginary phallus.

The mother desires the phallus she lacks, and (in conformity with Hegel's theory of desire) the subject seeks to become the object of her desire; he seeks to be the phallus for the mother and fill out her lack.

At this point, the mother is omnipotent and her desire is the law.

Although this omnipotence may be seen as threatening from the very beginning, the sense of threat is intensified when the child's own sexual drives begin to manifest themselves (for example in infantile masturba­tion).

This emergence of the real of the drive introduces a discordant note of anxiety into the previously seductive imaginary triangle.

The child is now confronted with the realisation that he cannot simply fool the mother's desire with the imaginary semblance of a phallus -- he must present something in the real.

Yet the child's real organ (whether boy or girl) is hopelessly inadequate.

This sense of inadequacy and impotence in the face of an omnipotent maternal desire that cannot be placated gives rise to anxiety.

Only the intervention of the father in the subsequent times of the Oedipus complex can provide a real solution to this anxiety.

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The second 'time' of the Oedipus complex is characterised by the interven­tion of the imaginary father.

The father imposes the law on the mother's desire by denying her access to the phallic object and forbidding the subject access to the mother.

Lacan often refers to this intervention as the "castration" of the mother, even though he states that, properly speaking, the operation is not one of castration but of privation.

This intervention is mediated by the discourse of the mother; in other words, what is important is not that the real father step in and impose the law, but that this law be respected by the mother herself in both her words and her actions.

The subject now sees the father as a rival for the mother's desire.

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The third 'time' of the Oedipus complex is marked by the intervention of the real father.

By showing that he has the phallus, and neither exchanges it nor gives it (S3, 319), the real father castrates the child, in the sense of making it impossible for the child to persist in trying to be the phallus for the mother; it is no use competing with the real father, because he always wins.

The subject is freed from the impossible and anxiety-­provoking task of having to be the phallus by realising that the father has it.

This allows the subject to identify with the father.

In this secondary (symbolic) identification the subject transcends the aggressivity inherent in primary (imaginary) identification.

Lacan follows Freud in arguing that the superego is formed out of this Oedipal identification with the father.

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Since the symbolic is the realm of the law, and since the Oedipus complex is the conquest of the symbolic order, it has a normative and normalising function.

"The Oedipus complex is essential for the human being to be able to accede to a humanized structure of the real."

This normative function is to be understood in reference to both clinical structures and the question of sexuality.

The Oedipus complex and clinical structures

In accordance with Freud's view of the Oedipus complex as the root of all psychopathology, Lacan relates all the clinical structures to difficulties in this complex.

Since it is impossible to resolve the complex completely, a completely non-pathological position does not exist.

The closest thing is a neurotic structure; the neurotic has come through all three times of the Oedipus complex, and there is no such thing as a [[neurosis without Oedipus.

On the other hand, psychosis, perversion and phobia result when "something is essentially incomplete in the Oedipus complex."

In psychosis, there is a fundamental blockage even before the first time of the Oedipus complex.

In perversion, the complex is carried through to the third time, but instead of identifying with the father, the subject identifies with the mother and/or the imaginary phallus, thus harking back to the imaginary preoedipal triangle.

A phobia arises when the subject cannot make the transition from the second time of the Oedipus complex to the third time because the real father does not intervene; the phobia then functions as a substitute for the intervention of the real father, thus permitting the subject to make the passage to the third time of the Oedipus complex (though often in an atypical way).

The Oedipus complex and sexuality

It is the particular way the subject navigates his passage through the Oedipus complex that determines both his assumption of a sexual position and his choice of a sexual object (on the question of object choice).

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In his seminar of 1969-70, Lacan re-examines the Oedipus complex, and analyses the myth of Oedipus as one of Freud's dreams.

In this seminar (though not for the first time) Lacan compares the myth of Oedipus with the other Freudian myths (the myth of the father of the horde in Totem and Taboo, and the myth of the murder of Moses) and argues that the myth of Totem and Taboo is structurally opposite to the myth of Oedipus.

In the myth of Oedipus, the murder of the father allows Oedipus to enjoy sexual relations with his mother, whereas in the myth of Totem and Taboo the murder of the father, far from allowing access to the father's women, only reinforces the Law which forbids incest.

Lacan argues that in this respect the myth of Totem and Taboo is more accurate than the myth of Oedipus; the former shows that enjoyment of the mother is impossible, whereas the latter presents enjoyment of the mother as forbidden but not impossible.

In the Oedipus complex a prohibition of jouissance thus serves to hide the impossibility of this jouissance; the subject can thus persist in the neurotic illusion that, were it not for the Law which forbids it, jouissance would be possible.

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In his reference to fourfold models, Lacan makes an implicit criticism of all triangular models of the Oedipus complex.

Thus, though the Oedipus complex can be seen as the transition from a dual relationship to a triangular structure, Lacan argues that it is more accurately represented as the transition from a preoedipal triangle (mother-child-phallus) to an Oedipal quaternary (mother-child-father-phallus).

Another possibility is to see the Oedipus complex as a transition from the preoedipal triangle (mother-child-phallus) to the Oedipal triangle (mother-child-father).