The conflict between culturalists and orthodox psychoanalysts has often been reduced to these evaluations of the respective roles of the mother and the father, or of the pre-oedipal and the Oedipal, without allowing either side to leave the family or even Oedipus, always oscillating between the famous two poles, the pre-oedipal maternal pole of the Imaginary, and the Oedipal paternal pole of the structural, both on the same axis, both speaking the same language of a familialized social realm where one pole designates the customary maternal dialects, while the other designates the imperative law of the language of the father. [AO: 174]
But more often it is solely a question of the familial organization in itself, which is thought to be lived first by the child as a microcosm, then projected into the adult and social development (devenir). [AO: 174]
Not that Oedipus counts for nothing in our society: we have said repeatedly that Oedipus is demanded, and demanded again and again; and even an attempt as profound as Lacan's at shaking loose from the yoke of Oedipus has been interpreted as an unhoped-for means of making it heavier still and of resecuring it on the baby and the schizo. [AO: 175]