Murdered father; dead father: Revisiting the Oedipus complex1

Abstract

This paper recovers the notion of the sacrifice of sexuality as the central, tragic, element of the oedipal structure. This notion has been largely abandoned in the psychoanalytic literature that has tended to reduce the oedipal structure to processes of exclusion. The paper traces the development of the theoretical and clinical transformations of Freud ’s ideas on the role of the father and suggests that they allow us to more fully comprehend the Oedipus complex proposed by Freud. A paradox is explored: the killing of the father is, in Freud ’s view, the requirement for the creation of the social order which, from then on, prohibits all killings. The father, however, has to be killed metaphorically only, as the actual exclusion of the father lies at the origin of so many psychopathologies from violence to the psychoses and perversions. The paper analyses the fundamental asymmetry that is present in the Oedipal structure and suggests that the three elements of the oedipal triangle constitute the law (of the dead father, that institutes the sacrifice of sexuality), desire (for the lost object) and identification (with both father and mother). Two clinical examples are discussed. In the first, one can identify a perverse structure in which the father has been murdered; in the second, there is a progressive construction of the dead (symbolic) father in the analytic process.

Key words:

• après‐coup
• dead father
• desire
• identification
• Oedipus complex
• sacrifice
• sexuality

1. This title was inspired by the book Dead Father/Sacrifice of Sexuality edited by Maurice Godelier and Jacques Hassoun (1996), although my views differ from theirs, as I will explain. This paper was first presented at the Symposium on ‘The Dead Father’ organised by the Association of Psychoanalytic Medicine in New York, April 2006. I am grateful to Lila Kalinich and Stuart Taylor for their invitation, and to Dana Birksted‐Breen and my anonymous readers for their comments that allowed me to clarify my argument.

1. This title was inspired by the book Dead Father/Sacrifice of Sexuality edited by Maurice Godelier and Jacques Hassoun (1996), although my views differ from theirs, as I will explain. This paper was first presented at the Symposium on ‘The Dead Father’ organised by the Association of Psychoanalytic Medicine in New York, April 2006. I am grateful to Lila Kalinich and Stuart Taylor for their invitation, and to Dana Birksted‐Breen and my anonymous readers for their comments that allowed me to clarify my argument.

Notes

1. This title was inspired by the book Dead Father/Sacrifice of Sexuality edited by Maurice Godelier and Jacques Hassoun (1996), although my views differ from theirs, as I will explain. This paper was first presented at the Symposium on ‘The Dead Father’ organised by the Association of Psychoanalytic Medicine in New York, April 2006. I am grateful to Lila Kalinich and Stuart Taylor for their invitation, and to Dana Birksted‐Breen and my anonymous readers for their comments that allowed me to clarify my argument.

2. Lacan states: “[Freud’s] reflection led him to tie the appearance of the signifier of the Father, as author of the Law, to death – indeed, to the killing of the Father – thus showing that, if this murder is the fertile moment of the debt by which the subject binds himself for life to the Law, the symbolic Father, insofar as he signifies this Law, is truly the dead Father” (2006, p. 557).

3. Godelier (2004) has challenged Freud and Lévi Strauss’s assumptions that link incest and exogamy. Jack Goody, however, has pointed out that Godelier’s book does not deny the assumption that the incest taboo is universal in that in every society there is a category of people who are excluded from the field of sexual exchange (Goody, 2005).

4. My hypothesis is that phallic symbols are present in funerary rituals because at those occasions there is an attempt to recreate a social order which is ‘complete’ and contains a promise of eternity (Perelberg, 1998, p. 222). Leach (1961) suggested that religious ideology uses the promise of rebirth in order to negate the finality of death. This idea stresses the way in which ‘irreversibility’ is disguised as ‘repetition’.

5. See my distinctions between the notion of the ‘individual’ and the ‘person’ (Perelberg, 1980). See Dana Birksted‐Breen (1996) for an exploration of the significance of the notion of phallus.

6. In 1980 I discussed the similarity of Tallensi views on the person and Freud’s ideas on the decentring of the subject in terms of the ego, id and superego (Perelberg, 1980). Psychoanalysis too does not see the ‘I’ as expressing the whole of the person and has pointed out the fundamental role of the id and superego. The totem can be understood as a vivid expression of the ego ideal.

7. “Perhaps it would be safer to say ‘with the parents’ for before a child has arrived at definite knowledge of the difference between the sexes, the lack of a penis, it does not distinguish in value between its father and its mother” (Freud, 1923, p. 31, footnote 1).

8. It is uncanny that this lecture was given on the very evening on which Lacan received the news of his expulsion as a training analyst of the IPA, which could itself be interpreted as another killing of the father (or the son).

9. This example has been more fully discussed in Perelberg, 1999a, 1999b.

10. This example is more fully discussed in Perelberg, 2007.

11. In a recent paper I have suggested that the phantasy of ‘a father is being beaten’ (Kristeva, 2008) is a crucial achievement in the analysis of many male patients (Perelberg, 2009).

12. As far back as the 12th century, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides pointed out the sexual restrictions imposed on Jewish men through the ritual of circumcision (Maimonides, 1963). It expresses the insertion of sexuality into the cultural domain.