ABSTRACT
The Oedipus complex as defined by Freud involved the prohibition of unconscious, incestuous desire. This chapter elaborates the structural analysis which Jacques Lacan made of this in his Seminar V, framed by the recurring theme of father-love in Freud and Lacan. What had been thought of as a privation of the child is analysed by Lacan as a detachment of the child from his or her subjection to the desire of, and for, the mother. The child who had been helplessly captivated by trying to be the phallus for the mother is freed to take up a masculine or feminine relation of having or desiring the phallus. Prohibited from being an object a of the mother and from finding its own object a in the mother, the child becomes subject of a desire caused by the loss of the object. It moves from an imaginary to a symbolic position, in which the real of sexual jouissance, as prohibited, becomes that which the phallus signifies. This occurs via a linguistic operation called by Lacan the Paternal Metaphor, in which the signifier Name-of-the-Father metaphorically substitutes for what represents to the child the desire of the mother, resulting in the new signification of the phallus. This chapter briefly goes on to outline the changes in this theory in Lacan’s later work.
