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This book recovers the notion of the sacrifice of sexuality as the central, tragic element of the oedipal structure, a notion that has been largely abandoned in the psychoanalytic literature. Freud’s work progressively elaborated the role of the father. In Studies on Hysteria (Freud, 1893–95), he emphasized the importance of a real seduction of his female patients by their father; in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900), unconscious phantasies are discovered; in Totem and Taboo (1912–13), he introduced the notion of the distinction between the murdered father and the dead father; and in Moses and Monotheism (1939), he put forward his notion of a more abstract paternal function. This book traces the development of these theoretical and clinical transformations and suggests that they allow us to comprehend more fully the Oedipus complex proposed by Freud.
Lacan was the first psychoanalyst to give conceptual status to the term dead father, used by Freud in Totem and Taboo, establishing the equation between the symbolic father and the dead father.2 This line of thinking was further developed by Rosolato (1969) in his distinction between the idealized father and the dead father. Stoloff (2007) traces the progressive development in Freud’s work towards a delineation of a paternal function (see also Green, 2009), but it was Jacques Hassoun (1996) who proposed the conceptual distinction between the murdered father and the dead father explored in this chapter. The passage from one to the other inaugurates the law and genealogy (Hassoun, 1996, p. 17). If the Oedipus story represents the former, the story of the murdered father and patricide as
a universal infantile phantasy, the Oedipus complex represents the latter – the institution of the dead father as the symbolic third. 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 fie