The retroactive character of pre-Oedipal symbolic processes is equally valid for
pre-Oedipal unconsciouslife. Freud always insisted on the retroactivity of the trauma:
a traumatic experience that occurred very early on in one’s life—for example, the
witnessing of parental copulation—is actually repressed only years later, that is,
paradoxically, when it is possible for the subject to make some (unconscious) sense
of it. In other words, proper repression requires proper individuation, and the un-
conscious may properly be so named only in concomitance with the emergence of
self-consciousness. (As I attempted to demonstrate in Chapter 1 , despite the early
constitution of imaginary identifications, the child’s self-consciousness is entirely
dependent on a primal symbolic identification—that is, the ideal ego must be sup-
plemented with the ego-ideal.) The unconscious is a symbolic structure and, as
such, it is not inherited by the individual subject: quite the opposite, it is strictly
dependent on the (resolution of the) Oedipus complex. If, on the one hand, by the
time the child starts to formulate his first phonemes and to convey his demands
with them, a certain repression has indubitably already taken place—what he
demands is, by definition, alienated in language, that is, given the latter’s non-bi-
univocal nature, it is necessarily misinterpreted and thus always doomed to ever
greater frustration—on the other, we can speak of an unconscious stricto sensuonly
after the Oedipus complex has taken place. Enabling the child to access the sym-
bolic order as an individual, the resolution of the Oedipus complex retroactively
structures both his pre-Oedipal language and his pre-Oedipal unconscious.
I have already pointed out how the big Other can be considered from three
different standpoints: language, the unconscious, and the Symbolic. In Chapter 2 ,
I was mostly concerned with an analysis of the relation between the Other as lan-
guage and the Other as unconscious. In this chapter, by examining Lacan’s notion
of the Oedipus complex, my primary intention is to explore the relation between
the Other as language and the Other as Symbolic (how does the child manage
to properly symbolize the letter?). In the last section of the chapter I shall also
investigate the relation between the Other as Symbolic and the Other as un-
conscious (why is the unconscious symbolic? How does it specifically become
un-conscious?).
It should be clear by now that the key notion at work in Lacan’s Oedipus com-
plex is retroaction: “One has always to grasp that which, by intervening from
outside at each stage, retroactively rearranges what had been outlined in the pre-
vious stage; this happens for the simple reason that the child is not alone.”^3 In
spite of this, my explanation will be chronological. It must be noted how Lacan’s
own most detailed accounts of the Oedipus complex (to be found in Seminars
IV and V) are themselves chronological. He repeatedly felt obliged to justify his
choice in two different ways: (a) a chronological approach is pedagogically more
effective;^4 (b) despite not being chrono-logical, the logical stages (temps) on the
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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