Increased knowledge of cultural differences in socialization practices and contemporary changes in child raising arrangements make urgent the task of distinguishing universal dimensions of oedipality from variations. The centrality of oedipality for the discipline of psychoanalysis is argued in terms of its three essential and universal features: (i) Conflicts around the apparent binaries of sex gender and generation; (ii) The reorganization of lived experience as the individual is inducted as a subject into the linguistically structured system of representationality; and (iii) the requirements of the incest taboo, as inscribed intrapsychically in terms of the repression barrier. The fate of Freud's specific formulation of oedipality is briefly reviewed and it is suggested that much confusion has arisen from a focus on functionaries (“mothers” and “fathers”), rather than maternal and paternal functions, as well as the child's perception of relations between them. It is argued that Freud's breakthrough was not so much the result of clinical and other empirical observations, but was necessitated by the free associative method, which led him to three coordinates by which psychic life is to be understood (resistance repression, pluritemporality, and the libidinality or polysexuality of psychic life). These coordinates mandated his formulation of oedipality as an invariably universal event in every human's life.