Le complexe d’œdipe : un organisateur temporel toujours actuel

Abstract

Context

This article prolongs questions raised in the author's doctoral thesis. It engages with contemporary psychoanalytical research that questions the psychic modalities that organize the relationship to time and the subjective inscription of temporality, within the framework of the processes that begin at the time of puberty. These processes operate, in fact, as fertile moments of reorganization and psychic organization of the relationship to time of individuals.

Objective

Based on the psychoanalytical works carried out since Freud as well as his own elaborations, the author underlines the importance of considering the Oedipus complex in its double valence, as a psychic organizer of the difference between the sexes and between the generations - this second valence having been very often left in the background compared to the first one. This psychoanalytic reading of the Oedipus complex, in its dual register, is set against other perspectives (gender studies and the historical study of myths).

Method

Starting from the fundamental texts in the Freudian corpus and completing them with contributions from contemporary psychoanalysis, and illustrating this with a clinical vignette, the author underlines the heuristic value of recourse to the Oedipal myth as a representation of subjective and inter-subjective temporal organization.

Results

In the wake of contemporary psychoanalytical research, the author's work demonstrates the interest of thinking about the place of the Oedipus complex as a psychic organizer of the relationship to time – the psychic modalities of investment in time appearing, in themselves, as organizers of psychic life. This is done from a complementarian perspective, which does not exclude other approaches to the problem.

Conclusions

This reflection invites us to think about the complexity of the Oedipal myth in order not to reduce it to its gendered dimension. If social and societal evolutions, as well as the anthropological context, must lead us to reexamine the value of our conceptual tools and their limits, the Oedipus complex as a nodal organizer must be grasped here in all its dimensions – sexual and temporal. As the author's reflections draw on clinical work with juvenile psychopathology, they deserve to be completed and discussed in the light of other complementary fields.