At one level of description, Freud's theory of the oedipus complex involves a drama that each child experiences within the family. In-evitable and ineluctable, the oedipus complex was for Freud also something more, the experience of a passage the individual must undergo in one manner or another to become human in a social order. For Freud, this passage has all the weight of fate invoked in the original myth; as such, the oedipus complex attains the status of a structure. It was as an underlying process of subjective organization that Freud referred repeatedly to the oedipus complex, identifying it as the nuclear