Desire and Its Metamorphoses

The Oedipal phase, half taboo against incest and half desire for it, is seen as the time when the child structures and organizes his desire as a function of triangulation which leads him to differentiate his relationship to the Same from his relationship to the Other; in other words, between endogamous and exogamous libido. The adult can overcome the dualism of the two forms of libido by placing them in dialectic opposition to one another. It is thus permissible for him to overcome his ambivalences, to intuit the paradoxical third.