The Male Negative Oedipus Complex in Cross-Cultural Perspective

The Oedipus complex is a family drama, involving the key players in domestic society—that is, parents and children. But there is always more to society than the family or domestic unit. A distinctive feature of the vast majority of human social systems is the integration of domestic units characterized by some degree of legitimized pair-bonding and child-rearing into a wider network of relations that, while often framed in terms of an ideology of descent and kinship, is different from a family, and includes several such units in some sort of enduring, overarching relationship with each other. This encompassing system—roughly speaking the “public realm” as opposed to the “domestic” realm—operates on different principles, evokes different kinds of affects and behaviors, and may be understood both to incorporate and utilize, but also to attempt to negate or counter, the kinds of intimate family relations that prevail in the domestic unit. The mother-child relationship that necessarily forms the central social bond of the domestic unit is replaced by other forms of association in the wider sphere, and may indeed become an object of shame, secrecy, marginalization, or contempt in the public arena.

Life begins for each person in the domestic unit alone, and entails a more or less gradual or sudden separation from it and immersion in the wider arena of the public world. The family, as the initial scene of socialization, has the task of simultaneously creating primordial social and psychological structures in the child, while also providing for its own transcendence in favor of the encompassing relations that prevail outside it. In some respects, while the family shapes the conscious and unconscious life of the child irrevocably, it must also remain transparent to the cultural discourses and social values characterizing the wider world. To what extent, in any particular case, that outside world is a version of the family writ large, or, on the contrary, is constituted on new