New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY 133
crucial concept of the gaze is nothing other than the object small a in the
visual field.
The most significant loss that structures the psyche is that symbolized by
CASTRATION, and in fact Lacan sees the OEDIPAL COMPLEX as the
central moment in the formation of the unconscious, a moment so crucial
that it functions to reinterpret all previous structures in terms of its main
organizing principle: the recognition of sexual difference. Technically, the
Oedipal complex refers to the organized body of loving and hostile
wishes that the child experiences toward its parents. It gets its name from
the Greek tragedy by Sophocles which, for Freud, dramatized the rivalry
(and wish for death) with the parent of the same sex and sexual desire for
the parent of the opposite sex that he found to be a truth of psychic life.
The word COMPLEX, which refers to a group of interconnected
unconscious ideas and feelings that exert a dynamic effect on the behavior
of the individual, emphasizes the intersection of relationships rather than
the (commonsense) idea of a personality disorder. In Freud, who called the
Oedipal situation “the nuclear complex of the neuroses” (Freud 1963b:
66), this is a decisive point in the structuring of personality and the
orientation of human desire, for it defines the individual’s emergence into
sexed selfhood. The infantile theory of castration is the result of the child’s
perplexity over the anatomical difference between the sexes; the child
considers this difference attributable to the fact that the girl’s genital has
been cut off.
In the pre-Oedipal stages, both male and female child are in a dyadic
relation with the mother and equally share masculine and feminine
impulses. With the Oedipal moment, this two-term relation becomes three,
and a triangle which is sexually defined is formed by the child and both
parents. The parent of the same sex becomes a rival in the child’s desire for
the parent of the opposite sex. The boy gives up his incestuous desire for the
mother because of the threat of punishment by castration perceived to
come from the father; in so doing, he identifies with his father
(symbolically becomes him) and prepares to take his position of a
masculine role in society. The forbidden desire for the mother is driven into
the unconscious, and the boy will accept substitutes for the mother/desired
object in his future as an adult male. For the female, the Oedipal moment
is not one of threat, but of realization—she recognizes that she has already
been castrated, and, disillusioned in the desire for the father, reluctantly
identifies with the mother. In addition, the Oedipal complex is far more
complicated for the girl, who must change her love object from mother (the
first object for both sexes) to father, whereas the boy can simply continue
loving the mother.
The Oedipal complex signals the transition from the pleasure principle to
the reality principle, from the familial order to society at large. The threat
of castration and the Oedipal complex are the symbolic imposition of a