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Social anthropologists have focused their attention on “the rule of rules”, the rule of incest that separates nature from culture. The incest taboo, in its structuring function, organizes any society along gender and generational lines. Anthropologists then distinguish between what is transmitted along matrilineal or patrilineal lines, among the roles of the father, mother and sister’s brother in the family structure. In this chapter, I return to some points of reference in the discussions among psychoanalysts themselves in order to point out how both disciplines are dealing with similar, universal questions.
Although there is no single paper in which Freud outlines his whole conceptualization of the Oedipus complex, it is a concern that permeates his work (see Chapter 1). One cannot but be surprised at the long path Freud travelled in his discovery of the full dimensions of the Oedipus complex, from The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905b) and Totem and Taboo (1912–13) and “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937). The “sociological” essays, such as Totem and Taboo and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), as well as “The Future of an Illusion” (1927) and Moses and Monotheism (1939), play an important role in this journey, as Freud not only viewed the Oedipus complex and the progressive institution of the paternal function in individual terms but was specifically interested in its role in culture. It took Freud the 26 years between his letter to Fliess of 31 May 1897 and “The Infantile Genital Organization” and “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” of 1923 and 1924, respectively, to formulate his theory.