basis of which the Oedipus complex is investigated can occur only in a “given
succession.”^5
More precisely, I shall proceed as follows: first, I will discuss what is defined by
most psychoanalytic schools as the “pre-Oedipus,” showing how Lacan renders it
a paradoxical notion while nevertheless acknowledging its importance. Secondly,
I shall closely analyze the three stages into which, according to Lacan, the Oedipus
complex can be divided. Finally, I will examine the intricate interactions between
two notions which are consubstantial with Lacan’s description of the Oedipus
complex: the Name-of-the-Father and the phallus.
For the sake of clarity, it may be convenient at this preliminary stage to list
briefly the main tenets of Lacan’s reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex:( 1 ) the Oedipus complex provides the individual subject with the necessary key to
enter the symbolic order understood as the Law of culture;
( 2 ) this is possible only if, in parallel, the subject is sexuated: if he or she assumes
his or her symbolic position as man or woman;
( 3 ) the process through which the Oedipus complex is produced can be compared
to a metaphor; by substituting itself for the signifier Desire-of-the-Mother, the sig-
nifier Name-of-the-Father (the symbolic father as the bearer of the Law) initiates
phallic signification in the child. This complicated operation will later be explained
in much greater detail. For now, it is enough to realize that Lacan rereads what is
arguably the most well-known theory of psychoanalysis through linguistics;
( 4 ) the child is introduced to the three logically sequential “stages” of the Oedi-
pus complex through three different “crises.”^6 Each crisis is based on the subject’s
assumption of a distinctive lack of a distinctive object. Frustration, defined as an
imaginary lack of a real object, first and foremost the mother’s breast, initiates the
child to the first stage, that of the “pre-Oedipal” dual relation with the mother,
which Lacan rethinks in terms of the triad child–mother– (imaginary) phallus. The
child then accedes to the second stage as soon as he realizes that the mother is “de-
prived,” that she lacks (in the Real) a symbolic object, the (symbolic) phallus; at
this stage, which could easily be related to Freud’s phallic phase,^7 the child is in-
volved in an aggressively imaginary rivalry with the (imaginary) father in order to
control the mother. This stage corresponds to the doxastic idea of what the Oedi-
pus complex is: “loving” the mother and “hating” the father (for Lacan, bothboys
and girls love the mother). Lastly, the third stage is initiated by the (real) father who
shows the child that he is the one who has what the mother lacks: the child real-
izes that he cannot compete with him. This is the child’s castration proper, to be
understood as a symbolic lack of an imaginary object, the imaginary phallus. Theoedipus as a metaphor