What if everything we thought we knew about the Oedipus complex was merely the surface of a much deeper intellectual current? When Jacques Lacan famously called for a “return to Freud,” he wasn’t simply advocating reverence for the founder of psychoanalysis – he was embarking on a radical reinterpretation that would transform our understanding of the human psyche. This essay explores Lacan’s reconstruction of core Freudian concepts, revealing how it opens new theoretical possibilities for psychoanalysis.
Separating the Myths: Totem and Taboo vs. Oedipus
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) stand as foundational thinkers in psychoanalysis. Though they never met, their work is intricately linked. Lacan maintained remarkable fidelity to Freud, declaring near the end of his life in 1980: “It is up to you to be Lacanian, if you wish. I am a Freudian.” Nevertheless, Lacan’s approach constitutes a critical, meticulous rereading (what he termed a “Kantian Critique”) aimed at rescuing Freud from what he perceived as dilutions by later analysts, particularly those in America. His goal was not blind acceptance but a rigorous assessment of the logical conditions and presuppositions underlying core psychoanalytic concepts.
Lacan labeled the Oedipus complex a “Freudian Myth,” and his reconstruction provides a sharp lens through which we can discern the differences between Freud and Lacan—revealing the extent to which Lacan’s theory diverges from Freud despite his professed loyalty.
A pivotal move in Lacan’s critique was to distinguish between two narratives often conflated in psychoanalytic thought: the Oedipus myth and the primal horde myth from Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913). Where others saw continuity, Lacan identified a fundamental gap—an epistemological break separating these narratives with reversed logical structures.
In Totem and Taboo, Freud imagines a primal father, a tyrant hoarding all women. The rebellious sons band together, kill their father, and devour him in a ‘first communion.’ Only after this act of primal enjoyment and violence do they establish a law—a social contract prohibiting access to the father’s wives, born from guilt and subsequent idealization of the dead father. Here, primal enjoyment precedes the law that limits it.
The Oedipus myth, in Freud’s adaptation from Sophocles, operates inversely. The law—the prohibition against incest with the mother and patricide—exists first. Oedipus transgresses this law unwittingly, yet the law’s power is absolute, punishing him regardless of intent. Here, the law precedes the transgression.
Lacan provocatively labels Totem and Taboo a “neurotic product” of Freud’s own making, yet one that, paradoxically, testifies to a truth: the inherent difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of fully formulating the sexual relationship within discourse. The law operates to regulate sexual pleasures, thus producing desire, so that the transgressions themselves become sexualized acts.
Hamlet: Tragedy of the Mother’s Desire
Lacan’s critical method operates through symptomatic readings of texts, revealing underlying structures and challenging established interpretations. His analysis of Hamlet, detailed in Séminaire VI: Desire and its Interpretation (1958), offers a compelling departure from Freud’s classic reading of Oedipus.
Freud saw Hamlet as a modern counterpart to Oedipus Rex, but marked by the “advance of repression” from ancient Greece to modernity. Hamlet hesitates to kill his uncle Claudius, Freud argued, because Claudius has done what Hamlet unconsciously desired: killed Hamlet’s father and taken his mother Gertrude as wife. According to Freud, Hamlet’s famous inaction stems from this identification with the guilty party; he’s a “male hysteric,” revolted by sexuality and ultimately no better than his uncle.
Lacan finds this reading psychologically simplistic, or “non-dialectical.” He asks, why shouldn’t Hamlet want to punish the man who achieved what he repressed? More fundamentally, Lacan shifts the focus. The tragedy isn’t merely Hamlet’s repressed desire for the mother; it is his confrontation with the enigma of the mother’s desire—her desire for another man, be it Claudius or even Hamlet’s father. Hamlet is paralyzed by Gertrude’s perplexing lust, her “jouissance,” an excessive enjoyment that he cannot fathom or control.
It is only after confronting death (in Ophelia’s grave) and the meaning of the phallus (partly through the Ophelia/phallus wordplay) that Hamlet can reclaim his own position and desire, finally declaring, “It is I, Hamlet the Dane.” For Lacan, resolving the Oedipus complex involves “mourning the phallus,” accepting castration. It is a transition from the imaginary unity with the mother to the acceptance of symbolic castration: Hamlet must recognize that the phallus, even the real one embodied by Claudius, as ultimately a “ghost,” a “thing of nothing,” relinquishing his narcissistic attachments before he can finally act.
This literary analysis offers a richer, less reductive view than the simple rereading of Hamlet as a modern Oedipus.
Schreber: Psychosis and the Father’s Imposture
Lacan similarly recasts Freud’s analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber (1911), the judge whose detailed memoirs of his psychosis became a cornerstone of Freud’s theories on paranoia. Freud attributed Schreber’s elaborate delusional system (believing he was being transformed into a woman to redeem the world through union with God) to repressed homosexual desire for his father and doctor. The delusion, for Freud, was a complex defense and substitute formation.
Lacan, while acknowledging Freud’s insights, rejects repressed homosexuality as the ultimate key to this case. Instead, he points to a more fundamental structural issue: the “foreclosure” of the Name-of-the-Father – a failure in the symbolic order necessary to structure reality and subjectivity. He highlights Schreber’s “transsexualist practice” and the role of an excessive, unnamable jouissance in Schreber’s paranoid delusions.
Crucially, Lacan reframes Schreber’s relationship with his father. The problem wasn’t just a symbolic father figure, but the real father – a renowned, authoritarian educator – whose hypocrisy, lies, and “dictatorial orthopedics” shaped Schreber’s existence. Schreber, the Schreiber (writer), becomes, in Lacan’s reading, a rebel exposing the father’s imposture. The determining factor in Schreber’s psychosis is the function of the Name-of-the-Father, which Schreber had not been able to symbolize.
Law, Desire, and the Symbolic Order
Lacan found a powerful resonance for this function of the Law in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He points specifically to Paul’s striking insight: “I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire… when the commandment came, sin revived and I died.” (Romans 7:7-11)
For Lacan, this wasn’t merely theology; it revealed a fundamental psychical mechanism “perfectly perceptible and tangible to a psychoanalyst.” The Law (represented by the Name-of-the-Father) doesn’t simply repress a pre-existing desire; it actively constitutes desire as transgression by naming it, by prohibiting it. The entry into the Symbolic, governed by Law, paradoxically awakens or gives form to the very desires it forbids. This reinforces the idea that the Oedipal passage is fundamentally about the subject’s structuring by language and Law, not just interpersonal feelings or bad family dynamics. For him, the real significance isn’t about actual family members, but about entering the symbolic order – Lacan’s term for the pre-existing realm of language, social laws, and cultural norms we’re born into.
Two concepts are central to this understanding:
- The Name-of-the-Father (Nom-du-Père): This signifier does not represent the actual father, but a symbolic function representing Law and prohibition. It intervenes in the child’s bond with the mother, substituting for the mother’s desire, and establishing difference and order.
- The Phallus: Not the physical organ but the symbolic signifier of desire and lack. It represents what the mother desires beyond the child. The child initially wants to be the Phallus for the mother—to be her sole object of desire. The Oedipal journey involves realizing this is impossible.
Accepting one cannot be the Phallus for the mother and submitting to the Law represented by the Name-of-the-Father constitutes “symbolic castration” in Lacan’s framework. It’s not a threat of physical harm but the acceptance of fundamental lack – giving up the fantasy of fusion with the mother to gain access to one’s own desire within social structures.
The Subject as Poem: Language, Birth, and Psychoanalysis
Where does this leave us? Lacan’s critique culminates in a deep reflection on language, subjectivity, and the psychoanalytic endeavor itself. Lacan draws a critical distinction: psychoanalysts, he suggests, must authorize themselves, their legitimacy deriving from their practice, not from institutional certificates. The subject, however, is different. Our existence begins with being inscribed in language through birth certificates, names, and symbolic markers before we have any agency. “I am not a poet,” Lacan writes, “but a poem. A poem that is being written.”
This birth in language is continuous. We are constantly being written by the “hieroglyphics, the coats of arms, and the runes” inscribed in our psyches. The analyst’s task is to learn to read these obscure signs, requiring a deep engagement, not only with his client, but with language, myth, and literature. And while not every analyst needs to be a poet, Lacan insists, poetry itself – its ability to create new meaning with language – is indispensable for the work of interpretation. It allows the analyst to play with the signifiers brought by the analysand, to hear the unconscious resonances that signify, and hide, desire.
Lacan’s “return to Freud,” then, was anything but simple reverence. It was a dynamic, critical, often difficult engagement that radically reframed core concepts like the Oedipus complex, desire, and the role of the father. By dissecting Freud’s own myths and reading literature and case studies symptomatically, Lacan forces us to rethink the very foundations of how we understand ourselves as subjects shaped by language, desire, and the elusive figure of the Other. His work remains a vital, provocative resource for anyone attempting to decipher the intricate landscapes of the human psyche.