THE LANGUAGE OF
THE FAMILY
 

THE WORK OF the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan[1] and his school in reconstructing Freudian theory in relation to linguistic and anthropological structuralism claims to have enormous significance for the theory of the family.  Lacan has indeed accomplished the most extensive rethinking to date of the basic concepts of psychoanalysis.  If his positions are correct, a critical theory of the family would be impossible.  For Lacan claims to have discovered the primordial psychic experiences through which an infant passes from the realm of nature to the realm of culture.  Psychoanalysis, according to him, speaks to a universal process which cannot be historicized and which has deep implications for fundamental questions of philosophy.  In Lacan's reading, Freud is a philosopher concerned with the question of the nature of truth, not a mere social scientist.  In France, Lacan's writings are debated not only in the limited context of professional psychoanalysis but among students of culture in general.

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From his earliest writings, Lacan's polemical thrust was to oppose the main directions of psychoanalytic thinking.  In particular he rejected American ego psychology with its emphasis on social adjustment and ego strength.  Under the sway of the Americans, psychoanalysis had given up, in Lacan's words, "the most living terms of its experience: the unconscious and sexuality."[2]  But the call to return to the unconscious and sexuality was not for him, as it was for the Freudo-Marxists, a reemphasis of instinct theory.  Lacan rejected the biologism of instinct theory just as did the ego psychologists.  Instead, the key to reviving the original genius of Freud was found in the Word.  The project of Lacanian psychoanalysis was to explore in depth the notion of the "talking cure." Lacan's famous return to Freud was an elaborate reconceptualization of psychoanalysis from the axiom that it begins and ends with the words spoken between the analyst and the patient.

Very selectively Lacan accepted certain trends in recent psychoanalysis.  He applauded the emphasis being placed on counter-transference on the active role of the analyst in the process of therapy.  The analyst represented to him, as we shall see, a certain function of language with which the patient had not adequately come to terms during childhood.  Also he accepted the new concept of libidinal object relations, since this allowed psychoanalysis to benefit from the insights of "existential phenomenology." Above all Lacan viewed as helpful to his own effort the work of Melanie Klein and her group in England on the analysis of children and the pre-Oedipal relation of child and mother.[3]  Here precisely was an advance in psychoanalysis that could be integrated into Lacan's own understanding of the formation of the psyche through language.

Behind Lacan's use of language theory in psychoanalysis stands the tradition of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson.  In order to understand Lacan's terminology, only a few basic principles of structural linguistics need be summarized.  Saussure and Jakobson analyzed language as a system, not as a tool for individual expression.  To  Jakobson language  is possible only  by a combination

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of elements based on the difference between the elements.  Parts of words (phonemes) are combined unconsciously in the language system.  The speaker is not aware of language at the level of phonemes, but this level is essential nonetheless.  A similar shift away from the conscious individual to the language system was earlier developed by Saussure in his concept of the sign.[4] Nineteenth -century linguistics was concerned with the mental image (the signified) which the speaker sought to represent, and with its relations to the referent (the thing).  Saussure placed a new emphasis on the intelligibility of the word itself (the signifier) and how language is composed of relations between signifiers in which the speaker becomes an object of the system.  Thus the speaker's use of the pronoun "I" refers to the speaker not as a subject but as an object for the implied other object "you." Primacy falls on the difference between the two signifiers.  In this way language is understood as a theory of signifiers which are completely relational.  Meaning is not a product of the speaking subject using language as a tool of expression: instead meaning is a result of the structure of differences between signifiers.  The structuralists shift the level of understanding language away from that of the subject with his intentional meaning to the objective system of signifiers.  Hence the signifiers structure the subject and language forms the individual, not the reverse.

Here exactly was the theory that Lacan needed to remove psychoanalysis from its dependence on biologism and on the hydraulic metaphor of the instincts which derived from the physics of Freud's day.  Through language theory, that is, through a theory of the constitution of a specifically human nature, psychoanalysis could be established on firm scientific grounds.  The way the child enters the system of language, the world of the symbolic, was the key for Lacan to the formation of the psyche.  Language would be understood not in the Chomskyan fashion as an innate capacity for learning rules of speech but as the insertion of the subject into a system which was in contradiction with the emotional nexus of the mother-child relation.

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The application of structural linguistics to psychoanalysis made by Lacan is extremely complex; indeed one suspects it is almost incomprehensible except to the initiated.[5]  Nevertheless some aspects of the project are clear enough and important enough to mention briefly.  In the first place, Lacan redefined the unconscious in terms of language: his notorious basic rule is "The unconscious is structured like a language." The principles of dream work uncovered by Freud--displacement and condensation-were to Lacan homologous to the language rules of metaphor and metonymy.  Far from a "seething cauldron" of instinctual energies, the unconscious, according to Lacan, was a realm of linguistic mechanisms, a text requiring deciphering.  Henceforth therapy sessions became a text as well, in which the unconscious made its appearance and was subject to analysis through linguistic principles.  The patient spoke "empty words," words whose absences were indications of the unconscious.  The role of therapy was to restore the "full word" to the patient, which meant that the patient would recognize himself in his unconscious without eliminating the unconscious or making it conscious.  This was impossible, since the individual was always decentered in the unconscious.

The analyst was to make a "symptomatic reading" of the words or text of the patient, looking for absences, words not there, and analyzing them as repressed metaphors.  The unconscious of the patient, working through metaphors and metonymies, was continually deflecting him from his true desires.  Lacan interpreted Freud's motto "Where id was there ego shall be" to mean that the result of therapy was not to absorb the id into the ego of the patient, to make the patient fully conscious or fully centered as the ego psychologists claimed, but to bring the patient to an understanding, reconciliation or acceptance of his lack of unity.  It is the ego of the analyst which takes the linguistic place of the patient's id, Lacan asserted.  The end of therapy is an acceptance by the patient of the discontinuity between his ego and his unconscious desires.  In this sense the "empty word" has become the "full word," the word restored to

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the expression of unconscious desire.

The preceding description of Lacan's position remains incomplete without some consideration of his concept of the symbolic.  According to Lacan the subject is simultaneously within three different levels or functions: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.  He used these terms in so many different ways that I make no pretense to a complete account of them.  It is fairly clear, however, that "the symbolic" means the world of language, of culture, of discourse.  "The imaginary" is the realm of the ego, of the subject's false self-consciousness, of his biographical unity.  What ego psychologists call identity, Lacan calls the imaginary.  It is just that illusory sense of the self-centeredness of desire in the ego which he tries to work against at all points.  The third notion, that of "the real," is very weakly defined and erratically used.[6]  We can say, with some oversimplification, that the real is the world of material objects and relations.

The strong concept in the triad is the symbolic.  For Lacan, every human being must enter into the symbolic, the world of language, through a circuitous path which leaves one scarred for life.  If men were creatures of the symbolic all along there would be no need for psychoanalysis.  But this is impossible to Lacan, not only because of one's individual history, which is always damaging, and not only because of one's incapacity for the symbolic during early, pre-linguistic years as infants, but finally because even language itself posits the individual and shapes the individual in unconscious ways.  The subject does not form the symbolic, Lacan warns, but the reverse, the symbolic structures the subject.  In order to comprehend how the subject enters the symbolic, we must turn to Lacan's notion of the mirror stage.[7]

At birth the individual is not a complete human being.  Physiologically the nervous system is not fully formed and socially language has not yet been acquired.  Above all, Lacan asserts with Freud that the psyche has not yet been structured.  In the early months and years of life, the individual lives in a symbiotic relationship with the mother.  Even after the severing of the umbilical cord, the child has not yet separated it-

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self from the mother psychologically: it is not yet able to differentiate itself consciously from its maternal environment.  Yet right from the start language has begun to work.8 The child is spoken to and named, and therefore it has a place in the discourse of the other, the words of its mother.  As the child begins to become aware of itself as separate from its mother, as a distinct psychic entity, it does so only by taking itself to be its mother.  There is a mirror effect, Lacan  argues, in which the image the child has of itself is in fact the image of its mother.  Hence the child's early ego, or pre-ego--Lacan calls it the ideal ego--takes shape as a misrecognition: the child understands itself not as itself but as the other, as its mother.  From the beginning the ego is constituted as an illusory incorporation of the other; when it names itself it is only naming the other, or, in linguistic terms, its place is defined by the discourse of the other.

Lacan also conceptualized the mirror stage in relation to Hegel's concept of recognition and desire.[9]  The infant has a sensuous relation with its mother.  Its needs are fulfilled by her and she is in tactile relation with it.  In addition to needs, and quite distinct from them, the child has desires (libido) and, as Hegel says, the prime desire is to be recognized by the other's desire.  The desire of the mother and the desire of the child thus enter into a complex, confused relation.  The mother's desire concerning the child has formed even before it was born.  When the child arrives it is incorporated by the mother's desire for it before its own desire is really distinct.  The child's desire is thus structured by the mother's desire for it.  The mirror image that is incorporated by the child as itself is the mother's desire for it.  The realm through which the unconscious desire of the child becomes structured is what Lacan terms the imaginary.[10]

The significance of the mirror stage is profound.  It means in the first place, that there is a necessary, an inherent condition of human maturation, in which the child's ego will be set  in an  illusory  misrecognition of itself.  There  is an inherent  alienation, one could

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say, in the structure of human life.  In addition to this, Lacan shows that the structuring of desire in the mirror stage also points beyond itself to the symbolic.  The path out of the imaginary is provided by the symbolic.  In the fullness of the mother-infant relation something is missing, something profoundly important to the psychic formation of the child--and this is the phallus, the symbol of the absent "law of the father." Both mother and child are sexual beings.  Sexuality for Lacan as for Freud is crucial to the libido of the child, whose desire must take shape either as male or female.  In the mother's discourse the child is labeled sexually, and hence the mother's sexuality determines in important ways the formation of the child.  But the mother is the one who does not have a phallus.  Hence an absence is inserted into the mother-child relation.  This absence is the essence of the symbolic to Lacan.[11]

In order for the child to attain the function of the symbolic it must be able to deal with absence.  What is not there causes the child to discover and handle a new sort of phenomenon.  In this way the phallus which is absent is above all a symbolic, not a real phallus.  It is the mother, according to Lacan, who names the father in her discourse as the one with the phallus.  The name of the father is equated with the phallus in the child's experience.  The absence of these signs compels the child to integrate them into his experience in a way not required by his relation with his mother, that is, through the symbolic.  The name of the father is the first symbol the child learns which is not associated with sensuality and which is beyond the structure of the mirror stage.

Lacan explains, however, that the name of the father involves something else which is crucial for the symbolic, that is, castration.  In Lacanian psychoanalysis castration plays a role quite different from that in Freud.  As we have seen, Freud spoke of castration in terms of a ubiquitous threat that middle-class parents carried out against their children during the genital phase of libidinal formation.  Lacan, on the contrary, views castration in  relation to language.  Castration  is not so much a  physical or  emotional threat to the

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sexual organ as much a physical or emotional threat to the sexual organ as it is a confirmation that something is not there.  He uses castration in an extremely metaphorical sense to mean that any inhibition of the child's desire is like the absence of the phallus in the mother.

The mother as a being without a phallus or as a speaker who names the father introduces an absence which "castrates" the desire of the child.  In order to cope with this situation the child must restructure its desire to account for absence and this can be done only through the symbolic order.  The child then is able to speak language in a full sense.  But there is another twist.  The loss, so to speak, for the child is that its desire will always be a desire for something absent, or, in Lacan's term, the child's desire will always be a lack.  Desire itself can never be fulfilled, since desire is structured primordially around an absence.  The initiation of the child into the human world of language has thus required two forms of alienation: first, that the ego is fixed in the imaginary, forever naming itself but actually referring to another; second, that desire is structured in a continuous but futile effort to satisfy a lack, and hence it goes from one object to another without ever being capable of satisfaction.

The importance for family theory of Lacan's use of linguistics is that it appears to shift the center of psychoanalysis away from the study of intra-psychic instincts toward the spoken patterns of interaction between family members.[12]  Since Lacanian psychoanalysis views the unconscious as constituted by the linguistic play between parents and child, the individualistic character of Freud's categories has perhaps been transcended.  The failure of Lacan to provide case studies compels one to turn to his followers to examine this question.

Françoise Dolto and Maud Mannoni, both child psychologists of the Lacan school, provide lucid examples of Lacan's theory which we can use to test its value for family theory.  Studying children who have been labeled mentally retarded and institutionalized accordingly, Mannoni demonstrates how the child must be understood through the linguistic operations of the entire family. In cases of retardedness she writes:

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"What misleads us is the influence of the family that is also determined to preserve the place which it has assigned to the child.  This is why the study of the retarded, like that of the psychotic, is not confined to the subject but begins with the family."[13]  The desire of the mother, her unconscious attitude toward the child, operates as a signifier which the child's desire incorporates.  This dialectic establishes a family pattern in which the child takes a place that it cannot alter.  As Mannoni explains, "The Oedipus complex (the introduction of a Symbolic Order) is above all the expression of an unsolved problem of the parents in regard to their own parents, of which the child, by his symptom, has become the representative signifier."[14]  In Dominique, a masterfully presented case study, Dolto analyzes a boy's unconscious through the reciprocal structure of the family's desire.  She writes, "Children are canceled out as individuals to become part of the carefully balanced system of unconscious libidinal dynamics in the family group, whose love requires the child to respect authority and submit to it."[15]

The developing child requires spoken words from its mother in order to allow it to express and communicate its own desires.  Mannoni shows how the desire of the child depends on the relation with the mother:

When the child cannot gain recognition by the Other in his status as subject who desires, he becomes alienated in a part of his body.  The child's relationship with his mother remains in a field from which he has no outlet but the perpetual renewal of demands, without ever acquiring the right to assume desire.  In effect, he enters his mother's dialectics as a partial object.[16]

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fate.  Within the mother's discourse with the child, the father is introduced as a castrating figure.  The burden is placed on the mother, according to them, to present the child with the castrating name of the father, and by dealing with castration the child will enter the symbolic realm, in their words become "humanized." In the case of Dominique, Dolto concludes "What traumatized Dominique as the result of the birth of his little sister was not the frustration of tenderness, it was the fact that he was put back to the breast and deprived of the fatherly educative demands that would have preserved and supported his human identity."[17] Similarly, Mannoni, speaking of a case of feeblemindedness, writes:

The feebleminded or psychotic child responds to the threat of the Other with his body.  His body is inhabited by panic; he lacks the Symbolic dimension that would enable him to confront the desire of the Other without being in danger of being ensnared by him. Because the paternal signifier has never come into confrontation with the maternal unconscious, the subject finds himself deprived of the meaning of his own life, and in danger of not feeling himself to be the master of his own impulses.[18]

In the first place, Lacan only reinforces Freud s masculine bias, albeit at the level of language and not that of anatomy.  Luce Irigaray, a critic of Lacan asks if the Freudian reliance on the phallus as a symbolic law is not the result of patriarchal culture rather than an inherent necessity of language or biology.  She questions why the phallus alone is a "guarantor of meaning," why there cannot be "vagina envy."[19]  If the devaluation of the female sexual organ is simply the result its relative invisibility in comparison with the  male, Irigaray  suggests that this  may be the  consequence of the long Western meta-

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physical tradition, which is trapped in the valuation of the visible.  It is more likely, she contends, that the culture blinds us to the value of the female organ.  In another criticism along these lines, Cathérine Baliteau complains that the Lacanians are always blaming the mother for the child's problems, even to the point of insisting that it is the mother's task to introduce the father and the principle of the symbolic phallus.  But where is the father while the mother tends the child, seducing it to her desire at the level of the imaginary?  Is it a biological or a linguistic necessity that the father not speak to the child or care for it during the first years of life?  Or is he busy somewhere else, in the business world?  Against the Freud-Lacan phallocentrism, Baliteau asks, "How is it that the woman really lacks a penis, while the man does not really lack a clitoris?  Is it true that the clitoris presents, in relation to the penis, a 'real morphological inferiority' (Dolto)?  But since when is the Symbolic evaluated in centimeters?"20 Irigaray also questions Lacan's phallocentric law.  Is it really the universal law of mankind that the phallus alone can represent the symbolic, or is this the law merely of men?  She continues:

If under the cover of the Law current practice resolves the seduction, it would appear just as urgent to investigate the seductive function of the law itself, and its role in the production of fantasies.  The law, by suspending the realization of a seductive desire, organizes, arranges the imaginary universe as much as it prescribes it, interprets it, symbolizes it.[21]

The feminist critique of Lacan calls in question, beyond the specific charge of phallocentrism, the entire conceptualization of the symbolic.  Lacan's use of the symbolic is opaque and riddled with difficulties.  At some points, he seems to define it as simply the realm of discursive language, while at other points he uses it in a more Freudian way (perhaps even Jungian) as the organization of the unconscious.  In the latter case, certain

symbols become privileged over others: the phallus, the name of the father, the law---all these become key terms with significance well beyond the mundane world of communication.  There does not seem to be any convincing reason why these signifiers in particular should play such a large role in defining and organizing the human psyche.

Furthermore, in Lacan's effort to point to the importance of language, his theory takes on the cast of idealism.  In a totally undialectical manner , Lacan introduces surreptitiously a metaphysics of the Word.  He proclaims, "It is the world of words which creates the world of things---things originally confused in the hic et nunc of the all-in-the-process-of-becoming---by giving its concrete being to their essence, and its ubiquity to what has been from everlasting."[22]  Lacan's axiom---words create things---is fundamental to his thought, since it gives primacy to language over social structure.  While language certainly has a determining as well as mediating role in the formation of consciousness of the world, the social system also determines and limits linguistic possibility.  To speak to a child as if one lives in a matriarchal society is probably impossible, for example.  Language is not totally malleable but shaped by a social and natural system which in good measure precedes it. Lacan's metaphysic of language becomes damaging from our perspective in that it precludes an analysis of family structure.  It would be difficult to use Lacanian psychoanalysis to register the criteria for differentiating family patterns and their relation to social systems, except in the weakest manner through variations in language.

These inadequacies in Lacan's thought become especially prominent when one analyzes his reliance on the incest taboo in relation to the Oedipus complex, which is for him the point of entry into the symbolic order.  Since the prohibition of incest, a form of castration, is found in numerous societies, Lacan employs it as an argument for the universality of the Oedipus complex.  In doing so he relies heavily on the concept of the prohibition of incest developed by Lévi-Strauss in Elementary Structures of Kinship.  Lacan writes:

This is precisely where the Oedipus complex-insofar as we continue to recognize it as covering the whole field of our experience with its signification---may be said, in this connection, to mark the limits that our discipline assigns to subjectivity: that is to say, what the subject can know of his unconscious participation in the movement of the complex structures of marriage ties, by verifying the symbolic effects in his individual existence of the tangential movement towards incest which has manifested itself ever since the coming of a universal community. The primordial Law is therefore that which in regulating marriage ties superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of nature abandoned to the law of copulation.[23]

It is true that the general problematic of the two thinkers is parallel: both want to apply the insights of structural linguistics to their respective fields of psychoanalysis and anthropology.  In other words, they search for the structural universals in the formation of the psyche and society and they understand this formation as parallel with or analogous to the universal of learning language in childhood.  Lévi-Strauss has redefined the field of anthropology as the study of the systems of exchange which constitute society.  He claims that exchanges of goods and women must be analyzed like exchanges of language in communications.[24]  Society is constituted and held together, according to him, precisely by its system of reciprocal exchanges.  The essence of society is the flow of signs, back and forth between sections of the community, creating a continuous sense of mutual obligation among the members and reinforcing the bonds of solidarity.  Anthropology, in the vision of Lévi-Strauss, should not be concerned primarily with institutions understood as functions satisfying needs in the tradition of Malinowski, but with the unconscious structure of exchange.  Lévi-Strauss writes,

The primitive and irreducible character of the basic unit of kinship, as we have defined it, is  actually a  direct result  of the  universal  presence  of  an incest taboo. This is really saying that

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in human society a man must obtain a woman from another man who gives him a daughter or a sister.  Thus we do not need to explain how the maternal uncle emerged in the kinship structure: He does not emerge ---he is present initially.  Indeed, the presence of the maternal uncle is a necessary precondition for the structure to exist.  The error of traditional anthropology, like that of traditional linguistics was to consider the terms, and not the relations between the terms.[25]

In the prohibition of incest Lévi-Strauss believes he has found the primordial rule which transforms a group of biological creatures into a human society.  The incest taboo can reveal the essence of society since it is responsible for constituting society.  The mystery of the incest taboo that has for so long puzzled anthropologists is unraveled when it is seen as establishing a structure of exchanges between separate groups.  Since it is virtually universal---some restriction on marriage is found in every society---the incest taboo has the spontaneity of a natural impulse.  But since it is not a biological necessity (and Lévi-Strauss demonstrates this very convincingly through the case of cross-cousin marriage, which is desired, whereas parallel-cousin marriage, no closer biologically, is often proscribed) it partakes of a rule, of a cultural imposition.  Part nature and part culture, the incest taboo serves as the transition to human society.  In the words of Lévi-Strauss,

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the prohibition of incest is in origin neither purely cultural nor purely natural, nor is it a composite mixture of elements from both nature and culture.  It is the fundamental step because of which, by which, but above all in which, the transition from nature to culture is accomplished? The prohibition of incest is where nature transcends itself.  It sparks the formation of a new and more complex type of structure and is superimposed upon the simpler structures of physical life through integration? It brings about and is in itself the advent of a new order.[27]

The incest taboo is not so much a negative restriction on the pool of marriage partners as a guarantee that one group will send its daughters to another, providing that the other group does likewise.  For Lévi-Strauss---and this is most important for family theory---the incest taboo prevents the conjugal family from closing in on itself and insures that the wider society will take precedence over the family by marrying outward to non-family groups.  The direction of impact of the incest taboo in primitive society is not inward toward relations between the immediate family, but outward to the larger society.  It refers not to the sexual interests of the individual but to the requirements of the society at large.  The restriction of sexual activity and marriage partners establishes society at large as the prime field of sexual objects and undercuts the autonomy and the authority of the immediate family.  For Lacan and for psychoanalysis in general, on the contrary, the incest taboo sets the emotional relationships within the family in their final structure.

One could argue that the result of the castration threat and the denial of the parents as sexual objects for the children is to direct the children beyond the family for sexual partners.  The little boy gives up his mother but comes to understand that some day he will be a man like his father and be able to possess a woman of his own.  In this way, the passing of the Oedipus complex appears to function like the incest taboo in Lévi-Strauss.  Such an interpretation, which is that of Jacques Lacan, would effectively prevent an historical understanding  of family  structure and personality, engulfing all family struc-

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tures under the same universal law with the same psychological consequences.  We must therefore analyze carefully the alleged identity of the incest taboo and Oedipus.

The first major difference which calls the identity of the concepts into question is the locus of authority for the prohibition.  In the case of Lévi-Strauss it is clear that the social system in general institutes the prohibition of incest; it is an agreement, conscious or unconscious, between families or clans.  For Lacan and Freud, on the contrary, the place of authority is the immediate parents, real or symbolic.  Their action in relation to their children institutes the law.  This difference is crucial because it is the key to the wide disparity, covered up by Lacan, between the two situations.  The Oedipus complex, which begins with the prohibition of the child's sexual activity, falls within the emotionally charged context of parent-child relations in the privatized, nuclear family.  Isolated in the nuclear family, the child's entire emotional life is centered on its parents, on their affection and hostility, on their autonomous power to set the rules for the child, on the depth of the identifications the child makes with them.  In such a context, the inhibition of the child's new-found genital play only serves to intensify its emotional ties with its parents.  Castration, a highly traumatic event arousing deep anger in the child which it can only internalize, sets in motion a deep and permanent alteration of personality structure: the child internalizes the authority of the parents in the form of a super-ego.  The superego, in turn, assures that the child will forever be a member of the family, will forever carry within the dictates and emotional representations of the father.  It assures that even when the child goes outside the family to seek a mate the emotional meaning of the choice will echo heavily the parent of the opposite sex.  It makes certain that the bourgeoisie, a group without strong kinship ties, will be able to transmit property through generations.  One could say that the nuclear -family insures that the psychic meaning of marriage is only to repeat to reduplicate the original family relations: the boy finds only his mother in his wife.

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Things proceed quite the opposite in the context of the incest taboo in Lévi-Strauss; there the weight of the prohibition falls not on imploding the experience within the conjugal family.  If this were true the whole purpose of the prohibition would be lost.  In Lévi-Strauss' primitive societies it is crucial that the prohibition of incest lead to an alliance between separate groups, that it extend the family outside itself, destroying its social and emotional autonomy.  The exchange of women in primitive society establishes the priority of the society over the family.  Any suggestion that the daughter is doing no more than seeking a substitute father would vitiate the whole game.  The rules of exchange and reciprocity would become a sham and the groups would dissolve into conflicting factions.  Societies can be instituted for Lévi-Strauss only by destroying the conjugal family.

This argument is reinforced by understanding the differences between primitive and modern societies and their family structures, differences which Lévi-Strauss minimizes because of his concern with discovering universal laws.  The anthropologist wants to argue that the kinship system of primitive society, exchanging women between sub-groups, constitutes the bonds of solidarity which congeal diverse individuals into a society.  Hence the individual takes his social position through the system of exchange.  But in modern society, capitalist and socialist alike, social position is not established automatically through kinship.  With the destruction of the European aristocracy, kinship no longer was the primary means of establishing the social status and relative positions of individuals.  Property took the place of blood ties.  Bonds of solidarity were shifted from kinship to relations of labor and capital or to national identity.  Marriage rules no longer served the heavy purpose of instituting reciprocal obligations between subgroups of society.  Lévi-Strauss recognizes the difference:

In our opinion, the source of all the uncertainties surrounding the problem of incest and the study of marriage prohibitions is none other than our tendency to think of marriage in terms of  our own  institutions, as  a unilateral  act of  transfer  and as  an  asymmetrical  institutions,

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when in fact (and even among ourselves) it is a bilateral act and a symmetrical institution.  The only difference is that preponderantly in primitive societies the symmetrical structure of the institution involves two groups, while in modern societies the symmetrical elements are on the one hand a class tending to be reduced solely to the individual, and on the other a class which extends so far as to be confused with the social group as a whole.[28]

If this argument has sown seeds of doubt about the wisdom of equating the incest prohibition in primitive society with the Oedipus complex uncovered by Freud in the context of late nineteenth-century Europe, efforts by Lacan's followers to find the same Oedipus in Africa, contrary to their intentions, only reinforce the doubt.  Echoing the debate between Ernest Jones and Bronislaw Malinowski of the 1920S, and later between Géza Roheim and Erich Fromm, Marie-Cecile and Edmond Ortigues, Lacanian psychoanalysts, claim (in Oedipe Africain) to have discovered in Senegal the universal complex of Oedipus.  Four years of therapeutic practice there converted the Ortigues to the notion of the universality of Oedipus.  The problem of the father, they contend, is present with the same urgency and force in Africa as in Europe.  "The child enters inevitably into a game of seduction and defense against this seduction which, in different forms, lasts throughout his life."[29]  The ground for the universality of the Oedipus complex, in their view is fashioned through a synthesis of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan: the transition from nature to society through the prohibition of incest works its effects on the structure of desire.  Operating through language, the law against incest lo-

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cates the name of the father as the mediator which displaces fantasy life toward an absent other.  The Ortigues reason that

the prohibition of incest is a corollary of the logic of alterations imposed by the rule of language; in a system of names it is necessary that the choice of certain combinations prohibits that of others . . . [30]

At this extremely general level of argument, the Ortigues can show that Malinowski was wrong to proclaim the absence of Oedipus where the maternal uncle substitutes for the father as the authority figure.  Malinowski states: "In the Oedipus complex, there is the repressed desire of killing the father and marrying the mother, whereas in the matrilinear society of the Trobriands, the desire is to marry the sister and kill the maternal uncle."[31]  Malinowski's alleged mistake was to deny the function of the Oedipus complex simply because the personages had changed.  Thus the maternal uncle can take the place of the father as the symbolic phallus.  Without arguing in favor of Malinowski, it can still be claimed that the position of the Ortigues, while containing an element of truth, prevents analysis of important differences in psychic structure and family structure.

The Ortigues themselves provide the evidence for this argument.  They show that in Senegal the father is often not even known by his children, that rivalry is displaced from

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the father onto the child's peer group or brothers, and that the authority figures who insure the maintenance of customs are the de ceased male ancestors.  Faced with these differences in the structural positioning of the father, the Ortigues still argue in favor of the existence of the Oedipus complex.  They argue that the image of the dead

has been the guarantee for thousands of years of laws, institutions and social rules.  But, the Oedipus complex is achieved by an identification with the lost object, that is, by a mechanism analogous with mourning.  Through mourning a normative instance is formed in us which we call moral conscience.  Far from depending on a particular institution, the nuclear complex of childhood must be placed parallel with the mythic manner by which the authority of institutions is justified, the ground of law.[32]

The conclusion reached by the Ortigues is that the Oedipus complex is "unavailable" to therapy in Africa and that "the conditions of its repression are not present in the same way is in Europe."[35]  They should have gone one step further and admitted that the Oedipus complex, defined by Freud as the severe internalization of the father due to highly ambivalent emotional patterns, is also absent in Senegal.  While it is true that there is an incest prohibition and that the ancestors play a phallic" role, these are not grounds for equating the psychic and family structures of Europe and Africa.  There may

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be indeed universal principles of prohibition and language formation, but an adequate theory of the family must be able to account for the concrete differences these universal forms take.  Marx showed the universality of the mode of production, but his theory would remain empty and ideological unless he provided the means to account for differences in varying modes of production and how one mode of production is transformed into another.  Just this historical quality of social structures is foreclosed by Lacan and Ortigues.[36]

In opposition to Lacan, Gilles Deleuze (a philosopher) and Félix Guattari (a psychoanalyst) have written their controversial book L'Anti-oedipe: capitalisme et schizophrénie.  Against Lacan's concept of the unconscious as a language, Anti-Oedipus views it as a place of libidinal production (la production désirante).[37]  The unconscious, to Deleuze and Guattari, neither expresses nor represents, but produces a flux of desire.  Far from a lack, as desire is for Lacan, in Anti-Oedipus desire is full and complete.  Deleuze and Guattari go back to the notion of pre-Oedipal, partial objects to locate the pure pulse of desire, whose nature, they assert, can never be represented in the personages of the family.  Instead of being familial, the unconscious production of desire is at bottom social.  Deleuze and Guattari view desire as part of the Marxist infrastructure, since it is always social, since its impulses are always "territorialized" or cathected onto a thing.

In their effort to delineate a radical psychology (schizo-analysis), Deleuze and Guattari oppose the "Oedipanization" of the unconscious by Freud and Lacan.  They turn the Oedipus complex inside out and throw it back at Freud, insisting on its reactionary function.  Since desires are immediately social, the Oedipus complex, which in Freud's thought structures the psyche at the level of individual fantasy, becomes the way in which capitalism represses desire.  Capitalism for them is an abstract system of production which does not allow desire to become territorialized; it is totally impersonal and not subject to libidinal cathexis at any point in its structure.  In fact it encourages schizophrenia---pure  individual  flux  of desire  with  no  social  connection---to  emerge

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among the workers.  Hence the family is utilized by the capitalist system as the only place where desire can become coded and territorialized.

When the Oedipus complex is viewed from this perspective Freud's categories are turned upside down.  Oedipus is not a law, as Lacan thought, imposed on the unconscious to prevent the realization of incestuous wishes.  Instead those wishes themselves, Deleuze and Guattari argue convincingly, are elicited by the law.  The parents attempt to repress a desire that was never there in the child in order to code the child's libidinal production:

For it happens that the law interdicts something perfectly fictional in the order of desire or "instincts," so that it can persuade its subjects that they had the intention corresponding to this fiction.  This is the only way for the law to bite at the intention and to render the unconscious culpable.[38]

Nor should it be thought, Deleuze and Guattari argue, that the parents are independent agents in the play of Oedipus; that is only another aspect of the familism of psychoanalysis.  Instead they view Papa-Mama (the emotional configuration that is given to parents and elicited by them in the nuclear family) more as products of capital-

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lism than as autonomous agents.  Starting from society as a whole, they see the family and its psychic drama only as a segment of the whole and in relation to the whole.  In pre-capitalist societies Oedipus exists only as a potentiality, as a space not filled.  After capitalism has deterritorialized or reduced the libidinal value of kinship structures, of relations of alliance and descent, Oedipus emerges as a repressing and potent form:

In order that Oedipus be occupied, a certain number of conditions are indispensable: it is necessary that the field of social production and reproduction be made independent of familial reproduction, that is, from the territorial machine which declines alliances and filiations; it is necessary that, for the aid of this independence, fragments of detachable chains are converted into a detached transcendent object which crushes their polyvocity; it is necessary that the detached object (phallus) operates a sort of folding, application or flattening, a flattening of the defined social field as a collection of discriminations on the familial field, now defined as an accomplished collection, and institutes a network of bi-univocal relations between the two . . . It is necessary that [a limit] migrate to the heart of the system, and that it come itself to occupy the place of the representative of desire.[40]

Psychoanalysis takes the perspective of the individual and his symptom, working back to the family.  It presents the Oedipus complex as the eternal order of the law of desire, whereas, Deleuze and Guattari show, Oedipus is a socially imposed repression against the free flux of the unconscious.  Freud had discovered the realm of libidinal desire, but he went on to mask it by the "idealism" of Oedipus.  Reich had gone further toward preserving  Freud's discovery, but  he failed to conceive of desire as fundamental

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to social existence, limiting it to the realm of ideology.  By viewing desire as a social production, Deleuze and Guattari are able to demonstrate just how the family nexus and the Oedipus complex are social solutions to the threat of the unconscious.  They indicate how Freud again and again misconceived his discoveries by reducing them to individual fantasy.  They insist rather upon always viewing the fate that desire undergoes in a society as the means by which it is integrated into group life.[42]  Such a perspective they call schizo-analysis as distinct from psychoanalysis.

If the argument of Anti-Oedipus is sustained, the study of the family takes an entirely secondary place in social analysis.  In their haste to criticize the Oedipus complex, Deleuze and Guattari reject even a mediating role for the family.  Even the nuclear family, they assert, is not an autonomous world or a microcosm:

The family is by nature ex-centered, decentered.  One tells us about fused, divided, tubular, repressing families.  But from where come the breaks and their distribution which prevent precisely the family from being an "interior"?  There is always an uncle in America, a brother gone astray, an aunt who took off with an officer ...[43]

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which are the meaning of the nuclear family and the meaning of how the working class was integrated into this family form.  It is not possible to view the family as determined by the social system and at the same time to preserve a relative autonomy for it that would allow for the analysis of discontinuities between the family and society.

In sum, the French reading of Freud is important for the light it throws on the unconscious as a structure, whether viewed by Lacan in linguistic terms or by Deleuze and Guattari in libidinal terms.  Cast by Lacan in structural terms, the theory of the family will not get lost in individualism, nor in a notion of an illusory autonomy of the ego.