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→The Two Fathers
This vicious cycle of transgressiona nd punishment operates in the social domain through Zizek’s anlaysis of racism and anti-semitism.
===More===
===Imaginary Father===
The second 'time' of the Oedipus complex is characterised by the intervention of the imaginary father.
The father imposes the [[law]] on the mother's desire by denying her access to the phallic object and forbidding the subject access to the mother.
Lacan often refers to this intervention as the '[[castration]]' of the mother, even though he states that, properly speaking, the operation is not one of castration but of [[privation]].
This intervention is mediated by the [[discourse]] of the mother; in other words, what is important is not that the real father step in and impose the law, but that this law be respected by the mother herself in both her words and her actions.
The subject now sees the father as a rival for the mother's desire.
===Real Father===
The third 'time' of the Oedipus complex is marked by the intervention of the real father.
By showing that he has the phallus, and neither exchanges it nor gives it,<ref>S3, 319</ref> the real father castrates the child, in the sense of making it impossible for the child to persist in trying to be the phallus for the mother; it is no use competing with the real father, because he always wins.<
ref>S4, 208-9, 227</ref>
The subject is freed from the impossible and anxiety-provoking task of having to be the phallus by realising that the father has it.
This allows the subject to identify with the father.
In this secondary (symbolic) identification the subject transcends the aggressivity inherent in primary (imaginary) identification.
Lacan follows Freud in arguing that the [[superego]] is formed out of this Oedipal [[identification]] with the father.<
ref>S4, 415</ref>
Since the symbolic is the realm of the [[law]], and since the Oedipus complex is the conquest of the symbolic order, it has a normative and normalising function: "the Oedipus complex is essential for the human being to be able to accede to a humanized structure of the real."
<ref>S3, 198</ref>
This normative function is to be understood in reference to both clinical structures and the question of sexuality.
=Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Imperative to Enjoyment!=
