Oedipus myth illustrates the failure of Oedipus to work-through his complex: Oedipus has fulfilled his unconscious wishes, he has killed his father and married his mother. What role did the affects play in this failure? For the author, the fact that Oedipus has two parental couples, parents from Thebes who abandon him and parents from Corinth who adopt him, has a universal phantasmatic significance: the dichotomisation avoids setting the terms of the conflict and prevents its working-through. Through clinical illustrations the author shows that this dichotomisation of the parental imago corresponds to a dichotomisation of affects. Just like in the case of Little Hans, the integration of affects requires the patient to acknowledge as important the existence of the father during childhood in order to become aware that “the father whom he could not help hating as a rival was the same father whom he had always loved”.