The Oedipus Complex from Freud to Lacan

Freud considers the Oedipus complex – the classical narrative of the boy's desire to sleep with his mother and to kill his father – to constitute the ‘peak of infantile sexuality’. For Freud, in the Oedipus complex the boy develops an attachment or ‘object-cathexis for his mother’, originally related to her breast. The boy deals with the father by ‘identifying himself with him’, and while for a time these two relationships (boy–mother, boy–father) ‘proceed side by side’, the ‘intensification’ of the boy's ‘sexual wishes’ in regard to his mother portrays the father as an obstacle and it is, for Freud, from this that the Oedipus complex originates. Despite emphasising the heterosexual nature of the complex (boy–mother), Freud sees the erogenous zones as ‘subordinated to the primacy of the genital zone’ only after puberty. Prior to puberty,

For him, the Oedipus complex targets boys and girls differently – the girl undergoing a ‘negative’ form of the complex – but he seems to contradict himself by allowing the heterosexuality of the complex to coexist with a non-genital reading of the zones prior to puberty. Prepuberty, the zones are autonomous and independent of the genital zone for both the girl and boy, and treated much the same for both sexes.

Because of what he calls ‘complet[e] contradict[ions]’ in the Freudian conception of the relation between the genital and other zones, Lacan considers both girls and boys to undergo the same initial stages of the Oedipus complex. Lacan argues that the two sexes only fully differentiate themselves upon the initial resolution of the complex, and that the parents’ sexes are also only fully distinguished from one another for the infant at this stage.