Oedipus Today

The topic “Oedipus Today” develops an ambiguous representation. An initial interpretation seems to me to be based on the following prepositional sequence: for psychoanalysis, the “paternal function” is the psychic mainspring of the “law” that assures the establishment of the subject. The historical evolution of modern societies is unquestionably characterized by a decrease in the social power accorded to fathers. The decline in the social power of fathers therefore raises the question as to how, in the future, the paternal function, and thereby the constitution of the subject, can take effect.

In one form or another, this outline appears in the vast majority of works by “shrinks” (psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists) as well as by sociologists, historians, legal scholars, and social workers. This relative consensus among the historical and the mental-health disciplines has replaced the debates—now relegated to the past—about the universality of the Oedipus complex as formulated by psychoanalysts. Those who entered into discussion with the psychoanalysts at that time were primarily cultural or structural anthropologists. And the debate was mostly a theoretical one, focused on the applicability of the oedipal schema across a range of cultures.

Today, however, the discussions are more likely to engage the interest of historians, sociologists of the family, and jurists. And the latter are very concretely involved in the transformations of present-day societies. The importance of this shift in the framing of the problem may not have been given enough consideration.

Needless to say, the threefold schema that I have isolated here contains two insurmountable difficulties. The first of these difficulties is of a historical nature. No sociological work can rest content with time-worn considerations of “decline” (of the family, the father, and so on) without depriving itself, from the outset, of the means by which to think about its object—namely, the current forms of th