Talk:Oedipus complex

Sigmund Freud

Definition

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.

History

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 Oedipus, a prominent figure in Greek mythology who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother.

Phallic Phase

The Oedipus complex emerges in the third year of life and then declines in the fifth year. The Oedipus complex coincides with the phallic stage of psychosexual development. 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).

Jacques Lacan

Symbolic Structure

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.

Three Times

In The Seminar, Book V, Lacan analyzes 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 characterized by the imaginary triangle of mother, child and phallus.

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

First Time

In the first time of the Oedipus complex, then, the child realizes 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.

Second Time

The second 'time' of the Oedipus complex is characterized 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.

Third Time

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,, 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 realizing that the father has it. This allows the subject to identify with the father. Lacan follows Freud in arguing that the superego is formed out of this Oedipal identification with the father.

Structure

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 normalizing 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).

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.

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In Lacanian terms, the Oedipus complex marks the transiiton from a dual and potentially incestuous relationship with the mother to a triadic relationship in which the role and authority of the father or the Name-of-the-Father are recognized.

Failure to negotiate this transition is held by all schools of psychoanalysis to be the primary cause of [neurosis]].

Freudians normally date the Oedipus complex to the ages of three to five years; according to Klein, it occurs much earlier.

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References to the Oedipus complex can be foudn in some of Freud's earliest writings.

In a letter to Fliess

It initially refers to the boy's perception of his mother as a sexual object and of his father as a rival, but Freud's description of this 'universal phenomenon' becomes more complicated as he integrates the findings of his studies of the 'sexual theories of children.'

These theories are attempts to explain the phenomenon of seuxal difference, and assume the existence of a primal state in which tonly maleness exists; the fact that a girl does not hav emale genitals is therefore the result of her castration, castration being an equivalent to the blidning of Oedipus.

a gay may beieve that she has been castrated by a jealous mother who resents her sexual feelings for her father, whislt theboy fears that he might be castrated by a jealous father.

as he comes both to a ccept the reality of that threat and to identify with the father, the idssolution fo her ---

Although Lacan follows Freud in making the Oedipus complec the curcial moment in human development, he modifies the concept in a number of ways, both by introducing the idea of a symbolic phallis which is distinct from the biologicla penis, and by mapping it onto the transition from nature to culture described by Levi-Strauss.

A succesful negotiation of the Oedipal triangle is a preconditionfor entry into the human symbolic order.

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