Chiesa, L. (2007). Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
For the sake of clarity, it may be convenient at this preliminary stage to list briefly the main tenets of Lacan’s reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex: (64)
(1) the Oedipus complex provides the individual subject with the necessary key to enter the symbolic order understood as the Law of culture;
(2) this is possible only if, in parallel, the subject is sexuated: if he or she assumes
his or her symbolic position as man or woman;
(3) the process through which the Oedipus complex is produced can be compared to a metaphor; by substituting itself for the signifier Desire-of-the-Mother, the signifier
Name-of-the-Father (the symbolic father as the bearer of the Law) initiates phallic signification in the child … Lacan rereads what is arguably the most well-known theory of psychoanalysis through linguistics;
(4) the child is introduced to the three logically sequential “stages” of the Oedipus complex through three different “crises.” Each crisis is based on the subject’s assumption of a distinctive lack of a distinctive object. Frustration, defined as an imaginary lack of a real object, first and foremost the mother’s breast, initiates the child to the first stage, that of the “pre-Oedipal” dual relation with the mother, which Lacan rethinks in terms of the triad child – mother – (imaginary) phallus. The child then accedes to the second stage as soon as he realizes that the mother is “deprived,” that she lacks (in the Real) a symbolic object, the (symbolic) phallus; at this stage, which could easily be related to Freud’s phallic phase, the child is involved in an aggressively imaginary rivalry with the (imaginary) father in order to control the mother. This stage corresponds to the doxastic idea of what the Oedipus complex is: “loving” the mother and “hating” the father (for Lacan, both boys
and girls love the mother).
Lastly, the third stage is initiated by the (real) father who shows the child that he is the one who has what the mother lacks: the child realizes that he cannot compete with him. This is the child’s castration proper, to be understood as a symbolic lack of an imaginary object, the imaginary phallus.
The Oedipus complex is completely resolved when the child, irrespective of sex, identifies symbolically with the father, and thus internalizes the Law.