Is the Prohibition of Incest a Law?

The title of the conference Oedipus Today seemed to make the assumption that the existence of the oedipal complex is the effect of a family structure dominated by a paternal figure whose function is to impose on his children the very law that makes society possible. If this assumption is correct, how do we comprehend the fact that an American conference on culture and psychoanalysis chooses to implicitly dismiss over fifty years of psychoanalytic research, research that has kept psychoanalysis alive precisely by chipping away at the oedipal dynamics and their vicissitudes: from object relations, to self psychology, most post-Freudian theories have successfully undermined the paternal function. They brought to the forefront of the psychoanalytic stage the very psychic connection that resists the pull of social change: the pre-oedipal dynamics and the nurturing function of the mother.

For most of American psychoanalysis, therefore, the question of Oedipus Today was resolved long ago. Yet for the organizers of this conference, who clearly have not been sitting on the margins of history, the issue is still burning.

If this assumption is correct, the title Oedipus Today recognizes that the post-Freudian approaches are based on premises that no longer fit the prerequisites of the present academic debate. This debate is informed by the epistemological cut that structuralism imposed on the human sciences in general, and on psychoanalysis in particular. By placing the emphasis on the preoedipal, post-Freudian theories have sidestepped the most tricky part of the oedipal story—namely, its impact on sexual difference and gender roles. Moreover, by rejecting what they perceive to be Freud's biological determinism, the post-Freudian have returned to a pre-Freudian, even pre-Durkheimean, position. Having thrown out the Oedipus complex, they have ended up with a concept of an individual who, while interacting with the social, is nevertheless not produced by it.

This being said, the p