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L. Poenaru
The father's strong influence on the nuclear family, supported by loving and ambivalent feelings, is irrefutable. The same applies to the mother. It goes without saying that these influences have an effect on the psycho-sexual and instinctual development of the child. However, in the Freudian perspective, the father (and his phallic monism) embodies a particular power as he is the representative of law and its prohibitions (the mother being presumably lacking the adequate psychic means to respect this law), which produce castration and submission.
The formation of the Superego, a personality structure seen as the heir of the Oedipus complex and playing the role of a judge and censor within the psychic apparatus, depends on him. Additionally, the father is responsible for the integration of the difference between sexes and generations (and their logical corollary of socio-political-economic hierarchies that produce subjectivities and determine the criteria of inclusion-exclusion within the war of classes, sexes, races, etc.). The castration complex, stemming from castration anxiety, is a crucial factor—as an organizing element of sexual difference—within the Oedipus complex. In psychoanalysis, this latter term refers, according to Laplanche and Pontalis (1997), to:
"An organized set of loving and hostile desires that the child experiences towards their parents. In its so-called positive form, the complex appears as in the story of Oedipus Rex: the desire for the death of the rival figure of the same sex and sexual desire for the figure of the opposite sex. In its negative form, on the contrary: love for the parent of the same sex and jealous hatred of the parent of the opposite sex. According to Freud, the Oedipus complex reaches its peak between the ages of three and five during the phallic phase; its decline marks the entry into the latency period. It experiences a revival during puberty and is overcome with varying degrees of success in a specific type of object choice. The Oedipus complex plays a fundamental role in the structuring of personality and in the orientation of human desire" (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1997, pp. 79-80).
Problematics
The refutability of these reductive, normative, and pathologizing assertions has been the subject of endless debates since Freud (1900) proposed his concept. Indeed, the Oedipus complex condenses within itself very complex issues. Aside from the systematic refutation of its universality or even its existence (which I do not address here due to space constraints), let us note some other epistemological objections:
The empirical reality of the Oedipal configuration, its arbitrariness, and its validation by scientific studies (Fisher & Greenberg, 1985; Borch-Jacobsen, 2002; Chatard, 2004). The term "validation" is not used here in Karl Popper's (1959) sense, which poses an immense epistemological trap for psychoanalysis, but rather in the sense of validation through qualitative methods in social sciences (Poenaru, 2020), in which psychoanalysis could be included.
Its socio-political-economic promotion, mainly in Freudian France (Turkle, 1982), as a norm for maintaining dominant patriarchal powers that determine the proper classes, sexes, and races within a vicious circle of subjectivity production.
The centrality of the castration complex (on which the psychic organization of sexual difference would depend) has been at the heart of critiques from gender studies (Preciado, 2020). "The boy fears castration as the fulfillment of a paternal threat in response to his sexual activities; this results in intense castration anxiety for him. For the girl, the absence of a penis is felt as a disadvantage that she seeks to deny, compensate for, or repair" (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1997, p. 74). By placing the penis at the heart of castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex, Freud (and psychoanalysis) clearly produces a phallocentric and patriarchal psychic model. This model is nonetheless functional as long as the environment and society initiate (priming effect) and condition the child and the future adult through these organizing elements of total war (Alliez & Lazzarato, 2016). Bourlez (2018) invites psychoanalysts to resituate analytical praxis at the crossroads of theory and politics.
The biological avoidance of incest seems to demonstrate the fallacious nature of a complex supposedly organized by the incest taboo. The Westermarck effect (1934) posits the existence of a natural mechanism for avoiding incest (also observed in animals through ethology). Independent studies in humans (Talmon, 1972; Shepher, 1983) and primates (Paul & Kuester, 2004; Pusey, 1990; Albert, 1999) confirm this hypothesis. "Sexual reproduction between a parent and their adolescent or adult offspring is extremely rare in all species under natural conditions, and non-human species do not have culturally transmitted laws on the age of consent nor incest taboos, which are generally believed to prevent such behavior in humans (...). Yet, to some extent, these same 'wild' animals, under certain conditions of captivity, as well as domestic animals in yards, backyards, and pastures, often mate with their own adolescent or adult offspring" (Feierman, 1990, p. 9). This raises questions about the potential perversion of animal instincts by socio-economic "captivity" and the constitution of the family unit as a disciplinary enterprise (Foucault, 1976; Alliez & Lazzarato, 2016) that destroys human nature.
The origin of neurosis not in Oedipal dynamics, but in the social dynamics of class struggle (class neurosis, De Gaulejac, 2016) related to the social construction of gender (Chatard, 2004). From this perspective, psychoneurosis is not determined by sexuality but by the socio-economic status that subjugates sexuality to its hierarchies. It is therefore possible to postulate the existence of a neurotic domino effect involving class, sex, race, all articulated with appearance strategies established by the bourgeoisie for production-consumption profit for the dominant classes. This raises questions about the necessary and inevitable entanglement of sexuality with social, political, and economic dimensions (Poenaru, 2023).
Its schizophrenic nature (involving the denial of the bio-psycho-socio-economic-political reality) in collusion with capitalist schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972) and biopower (Foucault, 1976), and their disciplinary actions on the body and sexuality (Foucault, 1975). This aspect is another source of confusion and cognitive dissonance inherent to the psychoanalytic discipline (Poenaru, 2019). In "Œdipus without Complex," Vernant (1967) calls psychoanalysts "new Tiresiases" (the blind seer of the Oedipus myth) who claim "a gift of double vision (...) to reach, beyond the mythical or literary forms of expression, an invisible or profane truth" (p. 3). For Vernant, the Freudian demonstration "has all the apparent rigor of reasoning based on a vicious circle" (p. 4).
This aggregation of problems, associated with the undeniable empirical reality of parent-child love (inevitably tinged with eroticism) and the socio-political-economic dimensions grafted onto it, allows the maintenance of epistemological confusion. As suggested earlier, there is a multitude of early and historically evolving influences that determine and condition psycho-sexual and instinctual development. Should this factorial complexity be called the "Oedipus complex"? Why use a myth that forcibly introduces adult sexuality, incest, marriage, murder, blindness, and the hierarchy of sexes and generations onto the child's psychic stage? Why begin with a theoretical transfer and a mutilating-castrating knowledge-power when the risk of incest, murder, or sexual relations for a baby or a three-year-old child is nil? Why project onto a baby the perversion of "captivity" in industrial society (Feierman, 1990) that distorts instincts and animality (and its genetic rejection of incest)? To prepare the child from birth for the future of machinic devices (Guattari, 1979)? What about psychic queersexuality (Poenaru, 2020), differences, and the plurality of HLGBTIQ+++ genders? Why does not "overcoming" (necessarily) this normative complex mean being "immature" or even pathological? Why not call all of this the "psycho-socio-economic-political complex" or the "captivity complex"?
Deleuze and Guattari (1972) believe that the more incest takes center stage, the more repression and its correlates—suppression and sublimation—will be based on supposed transcendent dictates of civilization. They analyze the dual operation of civilizational manipulation vectored through the Oedipus complex:
"The Oedipus complex, the Oedipalization, is thus the product of a double operation. It is in the same movement that repressive social production is replaced by the repressive family, and that the latter gives a displaced image of desiring-production, representing the repressed as incestuous familial drives. The relationship between the two productions is thus replaced by the family-drives relationship, in a diversion where all of psychoanalysis is lost. And one can clearly see the interest of such an operation from the point of view of social production, which could not otherwise ward off the power of revolt and revolution in desire. By holding up the distorting mirror of incest (so, this is what you wanted?), one shames desire, stupefies it, puts it in a no-win situation, and easily persuades it to renounce 'itself' in the name of the superior interests of civilization (and if everyone did the same, if everyone married their mother, or kept their sister for themselves? There would be no differentiation, nor possible exchange...). One must act quickly and early." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, pp. 222-223).
It is clear: societies (religious, colonial, capitalist) are obsessed with masculine domination, sexuality, captivity (the origin of consumption-production and its disciplinary enterprise), destructiveness, and murder inseparable from total war (Alliez & Lazzarato, 2016), the accumulation and fetishism of commodities, the bourgeoisie turned into a myth of elevation, the lack of knowledge (repression), and the knowledge-power [as Wakefield (2023) recalls with Foucault (1976)]. All of this is part of a whole, a system whose elements are interdependent. These socio-historically constructed, even naturalized, obsessions are transmitted to children through education, the disciplinary society, and its codes (conscious and unconscious), injected through various channels that continuously produce new forms of sexuality (D’Udine, 1990; Domjan, 1990). To speak of Oedipus in the face of this complexity is both reductive and a participation in civilizational manipulation.
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