  Freud's theories of sexuality and the unconscious implicate not only individual psychology but also the constitution of social life. Formed in ambivalent relation to others, sexuality and sexual identity permeate the bonds of civilization and ramify throughout all social relations. In turning his attention to broader cultural questions, Freud offers a story or myth of the origin of political structures that parallels and echoes his understanding of the individual psyche. To understand the political import of the Oedipal Complex, it will be helpful to place it more generally within the scope of Freud's understanding of group psychology. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud contests any clear-cut opposition between group and individual psychology and alleges that human infancy is from the beginning immersed in a world of others. Even in ostensibly individual psychology, there is always another involved, as model or object, as site of identification or as object of love. Identification and love, which form the core of identity, are already “social phenomena” and, inversely social relations are themselves premised on developments that occur in the family. It is thus mistaken to sever individual from group psychology as though they were not by nature intermingled or to suppose that there is some kind of special social instinct separate from the drives that energize the individual. Put another way, the individual subject is neither formed wholly independently in a kind of solitary interiority nor formed as merely an effect of exterior social forces.