Oedipus complex is completely resolved when the child, irrespective of sex, iden-
tifies symbolically with the father, and thus internalizes the Law.
3.2 The Mythical State before Frustration, and
Primordial Frustration
In the first part of Seminar IV, Lacan begins his discussion of the pre-Oedipus
by claiming that the relationship between the child and the mother can neverbe
dual. This is essentially due to the fact that there is no actual phase in which “a per-
fect reciprocity between what the child demands from the mother and what the
mother demands from the child” is established.^8 The mother is already an active
part of the Symbolic and, being embedded in its differential structure, is always
lacking something: she is a desiring being. Although the child finds himself in a
similar position long before actively entering the Symbolic by way of the resolu-
tion of the Oedipus complex, Lacan postulates a mythicalmoment in which he does
not lack anything.
Originally, the child is in a “direct relation”^9 with the object of his needs, the
mother’s breast. This object, according to Lacan, should be considered as “real”
even though it is not yet perceived by the child as an object: the breast “begins to
exert its influence on the subject’s relations long before the latter can perceive it as
an object. It is only as a function of a periodicity in which gaps and lacks appear
that a certain [active] mode of relation on the subject’s behalf will be established.”^10
Lacan then distinguishes the “real” object from its “agent,” the mother.^11 The lat-
ter does not initially appear as real—that is, according to another meaning of this
term, as an object of everyday reality—but as symbolic. What does this mean? The
symbolic mother as agent of the “real” object corresponds to the opposition be-
tween her presence and her absence, +/−, which the child masters with his cries:
“The maternal object [the breast as distinct from the mother] is precisely asked for
when it is absent and it is rejected when it is present.”^12 At this mythical stage, the
mother is supposed to be always present wheneverthe child needs to be fed and ab-
sent wheneverhe is satiated: in other words, the child has not yet been frustrated.
Lacan believes that this scansion of the appeal/cry shows us the beginningof the
child’s entry into the symbolic order:^13 however, in order properly to access the
Symbolic, the opposition +/−will successively have to form for the child “a se-
quence which is groupedas such.”^14
I believe there is one fundamental problem with this otherwise fascinating
account of the mythical stage that precedes primordial frustration. Lacan fails to
distinguish clearly between time 0, in which the child is in a protoanimalic ab-
solutely “direct relation” with the object, from time 1 , in which, although he is