Law on the Other Side of Oedipus: Freud and Lacan on Law and Self-Formation

Abstract

This article investigates the place of law in the Oedipus complex set out by Sigmund Freud and its later revision by Jacques Lacan. Few accounts of self-formation have been as widely recognised and discussed as the Oedipus complex. Yet the tensions that Freud recovered from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex were a persistent feature of the theories of schools of psychoanalysis that broke away as much as those who followed Freud. In this article, I outline the Freudian position on the complex and its connection to the law before then examining the two phases of Lacan’s return to Freud’s Oedipus complex in Seminar VII and Seminar XVII.