The Oedipus Complex and the Signifying Chain: A View from Anthropology

Freud was sure that the Oedipus complex was his most important discovery; the basis of love and sexuality as well as the core of perversion and neurosis, it even seemed to figure in human origins and the hidden meanings of culture. Needless to say, Freud's assessment is not widely accepted. Many scholars question the very existence of the Oedipus complex, not to mention its usefulness for understanding personality and culture. Sociobiologists opine that animals, human beings included, have built-in mechanisms for avoiding close inbreeding. In the Westermarck version of this argument, inbreeding avoidance is activated by social familiarity. Whether the biological mechanisms alone or the mechanisms in combination with attachment produce incest avoidance, oedipality1 is unlikely or impossible (see Wolf). Discourse theorists often object in particular to the implication that the Oedipus complex lays the basis for romantic love and marriage. To their way of thinking, romance and marriage are social inventions, not the likely outcomes of normal childhoods (Katz). They contend that oedipality is irrelevant in any event in a world in which sexuality is increasingly shaped by street culture and the hyper-real imagery of the mass media (Simon). Psychoanalysis itself has been turning away from oedipality and sexuality for some time. Many psychoanalysts now doubt that oedipality plays a significant role in child development and focus instead on object relations.2

I argue nonetheless that there are good reasons for thinking that oedipality is everywhere important in the emotional development of children, male and female. It varies in onset, intensity, and duration, and it is subject to diverse idiosyncratic and cultural displacements in the symbolic register, but it is not peculiar to any one culture or type of family. It is no less important in contemporary society than in other societies. If anything, it is more so. Freud's critics and the post-Freudian revisionists miss the fo