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The author reviews a thesis he developed in his book, The Original Oedipus. Le Guen is dissatisfied both with Freud's phylogenetic speculations concerning the primal horde and with Melanie Klein's ultraprecocious ego and object with an equally precocious oedipal situation. The Kleinian view is even more obscurantist, he feels, than Freud's anthropological speculations. Psychoanalysis furnishes the means to analyze myths, but should not itself rest on a myth. However, if the Freudian and Kleinan mythologies concerning the origin of the oedipus complex are put aside, the question of origins remains to be answered. For Le Guen, the problem is more epistemological than historical. Whatever is said about the first days, weeks, and months of life must always remain purely speculative, because the only arguments available rest on assumptions and cannot be criticized. In his book Le Guen suggested the advent of stranger anxiety as a central moment in the development of the psyche. At this moment the nuclear perception of mother and not-mother begins, a triangular relationship is established, and the maternal object is constituted only with the aid of a third object, the intruding father. The infant's perception of the nonidentity of the stranger with the mother comes to signal to the infant the possibility of the absence of the mother. It is this experience of the loss of the primary object which makes that primary object come to exist for the infant as separate. At the same moment the infant experiences himself as an individual separate from the primary object. The stranger, however, is not invested as an object, but is only the signifier of the possible loss of mother. This "negation of a presence and affirmation of an absence" is called by Le Guen the "not-mother." Thus there develops the first pair of opposites (mother/not-mother) in what is actually a triadic relationship. Le Guen concludes from this that no relationship is ever actually dual. The subje