I don't know how familiar you are with Freud, but it's not something that can be made piecemeal. The Oedipal complex is not "true" or "false," it describes the

I don't know how familiar you are with Freud, but it's not something that can be made piecemeal. The Oedipal complex is not "true" or "false," it describes the universal process of socialization that children enter into (even Aristotle said somewhere, that children begin by calling all men "dad" and all women "mom," until they learn to differentiate via naming). But the various conditions of the Oedipal complex are diverse: it boils down to, in the end, not the simple conventional "mommy, daddy, me," but a triadic formulation: the child only understands themselves as individual, insofar as they have lost the mother's affection (i.e. they're being weaned), and thereby gains an object of desire (originally, the love of the mother) which is always already lost, and a process whereby they can return to a state of pre-subjectivity i.e. where their desires would have always already been fulfilled; a return to a position whereby that affection (of the mother) can be returned, by assuming the role of whatever it is that took the object of desire away, in order to get it back, thereby gaining subjectivity in seeing themselves as that which they desire to replace. This is termed identification, which is a repression of that drive towards pre-subjectivity, a drive which Freud entitles the "death drive." For Freud, there is always something that precedes all theorizing or origination, some excess towards which desire aims--towards, precisely, a state before desiring itself--but which it never fulfills. The Oedipal triad, therefore, is the first and most basic articulation of this drive towards death in its social function, even if it is made particular for the time and place where Freud lived, it is necessary as a part within the larger system: a part which relies on the regular function of others, like the death drive, like repression, like the unconscious. Each part of the system is defined in relation to all the others, and defined in relation to its appearance in a symbolic system and its authorization at the level of discourse; that is, at the level at which one speaks, since it is only within symbolic exchange that one first enters into a social world. One gains language through the word "mama," not because mama, the most basic, repetitive sound that any child can make, has any significance, but because the very appearance of a word that has come in place of the "actual" object of desire implies an infinite separation already from that object in its full sensuous reality: the object, once announced, is already lost, on account of the fact that it can be announced as separate from the very thing it supposedly describes. And from then on, the child is "castrated," i.e. cut off from the source of pleasure through their very entrance into the world of symbolic structures; through, more simply put, their entrance into language. This implicates all other systems of thought, giving to all other discourses a biological, material explanation for the formation of language itself, but one which is always permanently separated from the very biological origin by that very excess towards which it aims--the drive towards death, which, for Freud, always points to a pre-animated, pre-vivified world. A world before language and the psyche that would come to describe it. So that the materiality, and the relation to the material world of every discourse, is always established as a permanent site of loss, to which (very fortunately for itself) psychoanalysis always has a method to prepare a way forward despite this loss, through the rigorous analysis of its own development.