Oedipus Complex, Patriarchy
and the Two Drives
LIN Qihe
The Classical Oedipus Model and its Continuation
culture
nature
occupies
Mother
Child
Primal
dyad
Father
phallus?  differentiation
rivalry
New Father
New Mother external love-object
New Child
……
Its selfhood will depend on its assumption of a sexual identity,
not merely anatomically determined, but psychically
constructed. Until this is achieved, the infant's sexuality is
“polymorphous”: it is at the mercy of the 'component
functioning independently and varying in their aim, their
object and their source (Wright 13-4)
Freud: It seems, then, that a drive is an urge inherent in
organic life to restore an earlier state of things (BP 30) […] the
aim of all life is death (BP 32)
As signifier of the difference between the sexes, the phallus
comes to stand for all the differences that structure the
symbolic order (Ellmann 19)
His function is to introduce the law against incest into the
Oedipal drama of the home. By forbidding “incest”- or
merger - with the mother, the father instates the symbolic
order, which distinguishes parent from child, mother from
father, sister from brother (Ellmann 18)
[A]ll pleasures will be substitutive, for sexuality consists of
the pursuit of metaphorical alternatives to lost felicities
(Ellmann 18)
(Freud, EI 30)
(Freud , EI 32)
(Freud , EI 33)
Some Reflections
(Freud , EI 28)
Art, or repressed wish
Kristeva distinguishes two orders within language: the symbolic,
dominated by the father, the phallus, and the law; and the
semiotic, haunted by the vengeful traces of a lost pre-Oedipal
maternal world […] Kristeva insists that the forces of the semiotic
must be harnessed by those of the symbolic lest they should erupt
into a fanaticism of the instincts, such as fascism […] Avant-garde
art, she argues, circumvents fascism by channelling the semiotic
into an exploration of the limits of language, where the fixities that
grammar imposes on the world succumb to flux (Ellmann 25)
Works Cited
Ellmann, Maud, editor. Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. Longman,
1994.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. WW Norton, 1961.
---. The Ego and the Id. WW Norton, 1989.
Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytical Criticism: Theory in Practice.
Routledge, 1990.