ABSTRACT
The theme of the killing of the father permeates Freud’s writings, from Totem and Taboo (1913) to Moses and Monotheism (1939). Freud oscillates between hypothesizing, on the one hand, that this was a real event that took place in the distant past, was repressed yet preserved in the unconscious, and, on the other hand, regarding it as a myth. He thus presents a paradox: the killing of the father is the requirement for the creation of the social order that from then on prohibits all killings (Godelier, 1996). The father, however, has to be killed only metaphorically in that the exclusion of the father lies at the origin of so many psychopathologies, ranging from violence to the psychoses and the perversions. Jacques Hassoun has proposed a distinction between the murdered father and the dead father. The passage from one to the other inaugurates both the law and genealogy (1996, p. 17). I suggest that if the Oedipus story represents the former – the story of the murdered father – the Oedipus complex represents the latter, the dead father. The shift from the murdered to the dead father represents the attempt to regulate desire and institutes the sacrifice of sexuality. From then on certain categories of kin are excluded from the field of sexual exchanges. This exclusion constitutes the crucial marker of the beginnings of culture.2 The regulation and sacrifice of sexuality is thus a critical indicator of the passage from nature to culture.
