ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the state of the psyche emerging from the Oedipus complex as an uneasy peace, based on the elimination of the early mother with all the passionate feelings, fears, and anxieties attached to her. The roots of cultural experience are situated long before the Oedipus complex and the emergence of sex difference, and have to do with the relationship between mother and baby. At the end of the Oedipus complex the good and bad objects are reversed: mother becomes the ‘bad’ object, and the ‘castrating’ father becomes the protective, idealised superego. The collusion between man and woman to slay the maternal monster—and to substitute it with an innocuous, defenceless virgin—establishes a gender division and a psychic organisation based on severe splitting. The chapter argues that at the core of the life of the Western individual lie powerful narcissistic and phallic defences, which deny the parental couple as the source of that life.
