a child is locked in a room. they grow up going mad with the scream of their own inner voice. the footsteps of their mother are sometimes near, sometimes distant. but the door is always closed.
because the darkest and most passionate tendency of modern thought is obsessed with one question: where desire is limited and where it spills over. freud trapped the answer to this question within a mythological triangle: mother, father, child. in this triangle, desire inevitably concentrates on the mother; the father, meanwhile, is both the one who is not the object of that desire and the figure of authority who prohibits it. psychoanalysis didn’t just define this structure; it turned it into a norm.
to talk about oedipus today is not just to speak of a myth or a theory—it’s to discuss the political economy of desire, the unconscious of the social, and how the subject is both formed and repressed.
because freud’s “family romance” is not just written into the unconscious of the individual, but into the unconscious of an entire order.
because modern desire is formed by defiling the sacred. and freud placed that defilement right at the center of theory. in his view, every child wants their mother from the very beginning—not just her love, but her body too. this desire emerges not as a direct impulse but as a displaced deviation; in other words, it is repressed, and therefore structured. and like everything repressed, it eventually returns. usually as neurosis. sometimes as poetry, law, morality, the state, or god.
freud’s insistence is not an obsession, but a diagnosis. desire cannot exist without repression; and repression is only possible through prohibition. the mother’s body is both the object of desire and the forbidden zone. oedipus’ tragedy begins with this contradiction, and continues with the thin but filthy veneer we call civilization.
in short: the very reason freud took the matter so seriously is why we still talk about it with either shame or mockery.
because a desire that isn’t repressed cannot produce a subject. and the modern subject is the child of repression—a subject is made of a little trauma, a bit of shame, and plenty of prohibition. that freud began with the mother is no accident; his theory is the anatomy of the most ancient conflict between desire and law. the first law, the first prohibition, the first crime… they all begin with the mother. the desire for the mother is both a structural necessity and a cultural taboo. so according to freud, one becomes human by desiring their mother; and then becomes “civilized” by trying to forget, deny, repress, or erase it. that’s why we still either blush or joke when we talk about it. because this desire stands right at the edge of language, on the threshold of repression.
but this is not only the beginning of psychoanalysis—it is also the ground of the modern political. because just as much as where desire is directed, where it is forbidden to go is also the foundation of power.
a child is locked in a room. they grow up going mad with the scream of their own inner voice. the footsteps of their mother are sometimes near, sometimes distant. but the door is always closed.
sometimes the mother enters the room. the child instinctively approaches; wants to touch her skin, reach for her breast, inhale her scent. but the woman pulls away. because now she is a “mother.” from that moment on, the mother’s body becomes an unreachable metaphor. sacred, untouchable, a moral ghost.
and here, the child is not merely rejected; they are disgusted at. this disgust is society’s reflex to protect itself: the subject must learn to fear their own desire. not that they cannot have it, but that it is wrong, evil, demonic. because desire for the mother is not only a personal matter, but a structural threat. it stands at the most fragile point of the laws that hold society together. the un-desirability of the mother is the founding principle of the entire order.
but here’s the irony: this repressed desire never dies. it merely shifts. it takes on new shapes: devotion to god, loyalty to the state, monogamous love, moral panic, lovers who resemble the mother… all of these are substitutes for the first and forbidden desire for the mother.
freud’s diagnosis—crudely reduced to “we want to fuck our mothers”—is actually the traumatic source of the modern subject. and this trauma is not just individual but historical. because repression operates not just within the family but through culture: god becomes a kind of mother, so does the nation, so does the flag. all sacred, all untouchable, all undesireable.
and this is why freud doesn’t just talk about sex. he talks about power, law, the subject—even history. he tells us who we are, why we believe what we believe, why we deny certain things, or why we label some desires as perverse.
a child’s desire for their mother is not just a scandal. it is a historical structure. and we are still inside it.
but why the mother? why this relentless, stubborn, theoretically precise obsession with the mother’s body, the mother’s absence, the mother’s “unreachability”? why does psychoanalysis place the mother at the center of the machinery of desire, rather than god, or land, or the state, or ideology?
because the desire for the mother is the allegory of both the most personal and the most collective crime. the desire of the mother is not to break the law—it is to invent it. therefore the oedipus complex is not merely a childhood fantasy, but a myth that institutes law. that’s why it is both repressed and sanctified. because to sleep with the mother, to kill the father, is not just a sin; it is also the birth of sovereignty. and what freud did with the oedipus myth is exactly this: to narrate the foundation of society through the universalization of crime.
but the question still remains: why do we care so much about this myth? and why is it so hard to think outside of it?
this is where freud’s narrative steps off the stage, and a different, more scattered but equally powerful counter-narrative steps in: deleuze and guattari’s anti-oedipus.
for them, desire is not a triangle—it’s a machine. not a straight line, but a multiple network. not a subject, but a process. not a repressed immanence shaped by law, but a form of production that overflows, builds as it overflows, and destroys as it builds. desiring-production. a revolutionary understanding that shatters oedipus’ “family romance.” and at this point, the issue is no longer a debate over psychoanalytic models; it becomes a political intervention aimed directly at cultural structures of power.
and now, we are on the threshold of rethinking all of these questions.
but maybe it’s not really about the mother’s body. maybe what we desire is precisely its undesirability. the un-desirability of the mother places her at the very core of desire. because the most repressed, the most burdened, the most unreachable is always the most powerful. the prohibition surrounding the mother turns her into something other than a real object—she becomes a void. and that void is powerful enough to draw everything into itself. maybe we don’t want to fuck our mothers—maybe we only want to violate the law, and the mother is its purest symbol.
freud’s inability to let go of the mother might actually reveal his inability to let go of the father. because every desire directed at the mother inevitably collides with the ghost of the father. maybe the oedipus complex isn’t really about the mother’s desire, but an obsession circling around the father’s law. in other words, it’s not that we want to fuck our mother… we want to kill our father, but we do it through the body of the mother. her body becomes the battlefield, the surface of representation.
and now let’s push it even further.
what if this whole “desire for the mother” fantasy is based entirely on her absence? what if this desire emerges not from her accessibility, but from her constant presence without ever really being there?
a mother’s love, attention, touch—these are never fully given to the child. because the mother is already a social figure. her body isn’t just biological; it’s cultural. for the child, the mother’s body is the first representation of society, of the state, of god. we desire her because we know we can never fully merge with her. and that very failure becomes desire itself.
maybe freud’s deepest repression lies in declaring the mother’s body an object of desire while never allowing her to be a subject. because mothers don’t desire. in psychoanalysis, the mother’s desire is either nonexistent or traumatic. the mother can be desired, but never desiring.
and this is exactly where things turn inside out.
maybe the issue isn’t that we want to fuck our mothers.
maybe the issue is that our mothers do not desire us.
and this is where deleuze and guattari come in. because their whole project is to break out of this triangle—mother, father, child. they say: desire isn’t that simple. desire isn’t a triangle—it’s a map. it doesn’t move in straight lines or stay repressed; it twists, multiplies, shifts. when they say “desire is a machine,” they’re not exaggerating. desire is literally a production process. it’s not directed toward fixed objects, but toward flows. and into these flows come not only mother and father, but the factory, the school, pornography, the state, and algorithms.
in freud’s view, the child desires the mother, and this desire is repressed by the father’s law. but deleuze and guattari say: this repression isn’t natural—it’s constructed. society’s structure traps desire inside the family, because that’s the easiest way to control it. the family becomes a laboratory for disciplining desire. and so the “mother” is no longer just a mother—she becomes a symbol of a system. her undesirability isn’t just a prohibition—it’s a design.
and here’s where it gets even more interesting: desire isn’t just repressed—it’s steered. you’re not pushed to want your mother, but to become obsessed with her impossibility. because society doesn’t want you to desire—it wants you to feel lacking. desire must remain unfulfilled. you must remain incomplete. because a subject who feels incomplete is a subject who can be controlled. freud’s oedipus is the myth of this incompleteness.
what deleuze and guattari call “anti-oedipus” is exactly this rebellion: don’t reduce desire to triangles. desire already connects to so many other things. there’s no real difference between the mother’s breast and a factory assembly line: both feed you, both direct you, both are parts of a system. that’s why desire doesn’t begin with the family—it begins with society. it begins with capitalism. it flows through history, technology, migration, sexuality, and countless other things.
oedipus freezes this flow. because it reduces everything to a single story: “you want your mother but your father won’t let you.” but no—maybe it’s not that simple. maybe i don’t even want my mother. maybe i don’t even have one. maybe that figure is just a projection of repressed desires imposed on me by the system. maybe i don’t want that body; maybe i just want to destroy the law it represents.
maybe it’s not about my mother at all, but about how she’s been used by society.
and maybe what i desire isn’t her body—but her freedom.
so contrary to what freud believed, maybe i don’t desire my mother.
maybe i only desire the fact that she never desired me.
because only then would i be free. only then would i be free from the family, from society, from the state, from god, from the father, from the mother—from everything.
only then would desire belong to me.
the reason we still take freud’s old myth so seriously today isn’t because it’s true—but because the system revolving around it is still very much in effect. maybe we no longer desire our mother, but the mother’s body remains a battlefield. in abortion debates, maternity leave laws, breast milk fetishes, milf porn, laws designed to “protect the family structure”… desire is still being orchestrated through the mother. her undesirability is still being turned into an instrument of discipline.
and here’s the truly bizarre part: desire still can’t escape the mother. all of society’s structures keep defining you within a family. your sexuality, your identity, your orientation, your guilt, your innocence… all measured by what you’ve done—or haven’t done—with your mother. because when the mother’s position shifts, it’s not just the family that wobbles—power itself begins to tremble.
every intervention into the mother’s body today—her womb, her clothes, her child, whether she gives birth or not, how “self-sacrificing” she’s expected to be—all of it continues the law freud helped inaugurate. and desire is still being repressed.
maybe we don’t want to fuck our mother anymore.
but someone still wants to decide when she gives birth, when she shuts up, and whose child she’ll carry.
so maybe we’re still in oedipus’ tragedy—
only now, the curtain rises by order of the state, and the audience is a courtroom.
has oedipus died?
no.
he just changed form.
he’s no longer a tragedy.
he’s a bill proposal.
further reading:
freud, s. the interpretation of dreams, 1900.
freud, s. totem and taboo, 1913.
deleuze, g. & guattari, f. anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, 1972.
kristeva, j. powers of horror: an essay on abjection, 1982.
irigaray, l. speculum of the other woman, 1974.
rudnytsky, p. l. “oedipus and anti-oedipus.” world literature today, 1982.
butler, j. bodies that matter, 1993.
shrage, l. abortion and social responsibility, 2003.
davis, a. women, race & class, 1981.
federici, s. caliban and the witch, 2004.
