Oedipus Complex: Before the Myth

The present article proposes a shift in the classical psychoanalytic reading of the Oedipus complex, toward its repositioning within a deeper, prior psychosomatic and proto-relational field. While Freudian theory conceptualized the Oedipal as a universal structure of psychic life organized around desire, prohibition, and symbolization, and later object-relations approaches relocated the center of gravity to the domain of relationship, the present work illuminates the underlying ground upon which these very processes become possible. A central position in this analysis is occupied by the concept of primary biological, psychic, and social narcissism, defined as a fundamental creative principle of life. It constitutes a primary drive toward organization, preservation, and the formation of structure, which develops within the relation to the other. The encounter between the narcissisms of the infant and the caregiver constitutes the initial field within which a rudimentary unconscious ego is organized, through processes such as projective identification and the mediating other. Projective identification is approached here as a primary, embodied, and unconscious process of projecting unformed psychic states. It constitutes the first language of the relationship, prior to speech and prior to the stabilization of the ego, through which unformed psychic states are transmitted and seek form. The shaping of these states determines the stability or vulnerability of early psychic organization. From this theoretical perspective, the myth of Oedipus is approached as a tragedy of the formation of the subject within its encounter with the other. The exposure of the infant, the ignorance of origin, the confrontation with Laius, the encounter with the Sphinx, and the subsequent fall function as successive manifestations of a primary difficulty in the formation of relational structure. The act of killing acquires the meaning of a failure to encounter the other as other, while the Sphinx appears as a figure of unprocessed psychosomatic material that demands meaning.