Afterward

And it is the Oedipus complex that is virtual, either inasmuch as it must be actualized in a neurotic formation as a derived effect of the actual factor, or inasmuch as it is dismembered and dissolved in a psychotic formation as the direct effect of this same factor. It is indeed in this sense tha tthe idea of the afterward seemed to us to be a final paralogism in psychoanalytic theory and practice; active desiring-production, in its very process, invests from the beginning a constellation of somatic, social, and metaphysical relations that do not follow after Oedipal psychological relations, but that on the contrary will be applied to the underlying Oedipal constellation defined by reaction, or else will exclude this constellation from the field of investment constituting their activity. Undecidable, virtual, reactive or reactional (réactionnel), such is Oedipus. It is only a reactional formation, a formation that results from a reaction to desiring-production. It is a serious mistake to consider this formation in isolation, abstractly, independently of the actual factor that coexists with it and to which it reacts.

AO129:0