ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4 I discussed the relation between death, life and doubling in Freud’s texts. Whereas in his early work Freud theorised the Oedipal Complex in terms of libidinal desires that had to be repressed in relation to the reality principle and the threat of the castrating father, in his later theory repression becomes an internal and mimetic anxiety in relation to the early mother. I have argued for the Oedipal Complex as a mimetic identification and doubling, which is both a defence against, and repetition of, the earlier primal bond with the mother. The Oedipal Complex is thus a defensive mastery of identification with the early mother, manifest at a symbolic level as a splitting into active and passive, masculine and feminine, language and the body. But the Oedipal is also imaginary fantasy, thus not differentiated from pre-Oedipal fantasy, and as such can be repeated to create new and immanent selves of a lived duration.
