Oedipus as an Attractor

This metaphor is at the crossroads of two orders of reflections. First of all, there is a question about what can become of the Oedipus today, at a time when appeal is so easily made to early traces and fixations in the mind to approach the pathology of patients. Then there is the dialogue with chaos theories that allow us to consider that a portion of determinism remains compatible with a certain appearance of chaos, a determinism underlying this appearance, and is represented by the notion of attractor.

Oedipus as an attractor includes four constantly interacting tendencies. Two of them are inherent to the subject (“inside”): that of basic triangulation - here, the concepts of the “other of the object” (Green, 2011), or of the “non-mother” (Le Guen, 2007), must be linked up with the notions of the depressive position (Klein, 1935), of sixth or eighth-month-anxiety (Spitz, 1965 [1958]), etc., - and that of the Oedipus complex, with its own four tendencies, which are themselves reactualised and reorganised during the second phase corresponding to puberty and adolescence. Two other tendencies are inherent to the environment (“the outside”): that of the psychic functioning of each of the parents or of their substitutes - whatever form it takes this functioning has in any case itself been permeated by the Oedipus; it is here that we can identify what is generally called the “transgenerational”- and that of collective functioning in general, which is what Freud's group psychology refers to. This tendency concerns the space in which the symbolic order has been established throughout human history, an order that towers above the individual and the collective order of the moment; it is situated at a distance as well as being an object of reference, including at the unconscious level.

In each individual, these different dimensions organise a unique, specific and singular hypercomplex ensemble. And, of course, it fluctuates and is modified in the course of the subject's evolut