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The Oedipus Complex The boy’s close involvement with his mother’s body leads him to an unconscious desire for sexual union with her. What persuades the boy-child to abandon his incestuous desire for the mother is the father’s threat of castration. The Oedipus Complex This threat need not necessarily be spoken; but the boy, in perceiving that the girl is herself ‘castrated’, begins to imagine this as a punishment which might be visited upon himself. He thus represses his incestuous desire in anxious resignation, adjusts himself to the ‘reality principle’ . . . . The boy makes peace with his father, identifies with him, and is thus introduce into the symbolic role of manhood. The Oedipus Complex The little girl, perceiving that she is inferior because ‘castrated’, turns in disillusionment from her similarly ‘castrated’ mother to the project of seducing her father but since this project is doomed, she must finally turn back reluctantly to the mother, effect an identification with her, assume her feminine gender role, and unconsciously substitute for the penis which she envies but can never possess a baby, which she desires to receive from the father. (Eagleton 155-156) The Oedipus Complex It is the point at which we are produced and constituted as subjects. It signals the transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, form the enclosure of the family to society at large, since we turn from incest to extra-familial relations; and from Nature to Culture, since we can see the infant’s relation to the mother as somehow “natural”, and the post-Oedipal child as one who is in the process of assuming a position within the cultural order as a whole. (Eagleton 156). The Oedipus Complex The Oedipus complex is for Freud the beginnings of morality, conscience, law and all forms of social and religious authority. The father’s real or imagined prohibition of incest is symbolic of all the higher authority to be later encountered; and in ‘introjecting’ (making its