linked to the Real. With regard to this last point, I should mention one final detail:
all metaphoric substitutions that follow the paternal metaphor also differ from it
because, in their case, one signifier substitutes itself for another propersignifier; the
substitutive operation is notin direct contact with any traumatic Real.^190 In paral-
lel, this is also what distinguishes primal repression—of a Real—in the paternal
metaphor from secondary repressions—of a signifier—which are brought about
by successive metaphoric substitutions, and which all presuppose the paternal
metaphor.^1913 7 The Oedipus Complex and the Birth of the Unconscious
Both Freud and Lacan are extremely reluctant to discuss openly the notion of
primal repression—that is to say, precisely how the unconscious first arises. As
Laplanche and Pontalis point out, however, it is clear that Freud believed that pri-
mal repression was the consequence of a “very intense archaic experience.”^192 For
this very reason, I think that this notion should be related to that of “primal scene”
understood as an (at least partly) actual traumatic event—corresponding to the
witnessing of parental coitus—which is only later retroactively signified by the
fundamental fantasy, the basic structure of the unconscious. Having thoroughly
explained Lacan’s Oedipus complex and the way in which it can be understood
linguistically in terms of a metaphor, in this final section I put forward the hy-
pothesis that Lacan endorses and expands such an interpretation of Freudian pri-
mal repression through his notion of primordial frustration. This corresponds in
fact to an archaic traumatic event generated by the absence of the mother and, as
such, should be considered as the logical cause of primal repression. After all, frus-
tration occurs because the mother is (sexually) busy with the father.... The child
cannot make sense of what he either materially sees or infers from other clues (the
primal scene), hence he does not know what his mother’s desire wants (from him).
In order to corroborate this speculative parallelism between Freud and Lacan,
we should focus on two interrelated sets of questions: ( 1 ) Does Lacan, at the time
of his reelaboration of the Oedipus complex in Seminars IV and V, implicitly rely
on Freud’s theory of the “ideational representative” (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz), which
is key for the notion of primal repression? If so, is such a theory compatible with
Lacan’s basic tenet according to which the unconscious is made up of signi-
fiers?^193 ( 2 ) At which stage of the Oedipus complex does the fundamental fantasy
emerge for Lacan and, more importantly, how does it impose itself as the basic
structure of the unconscious?^194 We can certainly answer affirmatively to the first
set of questions. For Freud, ideational representatives are “delegates of the instinctoedipus as a metaphor