This paper is an attempt to approach and interpret the parents’ changed relation to their children in terms of “reversed Oedipus complex,” which is also called Laius complex. According to Freud’s classical Oedipus complex, the children experience loving and hostile wishes towards their parents: their emotion of love and hate is directed upwardly to their parents. But in Laius complex the relation is reversed: parents are placed in childlike situation in which their love and hate is directed downwardly to their children. If children in the midst of Oedipus complex envy and imitate the parent of the opposite sex, now it is parents who envy and imitate the child of the opposite sex. This paper argues that the transformation from one to the other is the consequence of the descent of parental authority(or of Lacan’s Name of the Father) and the corresponding ascent of the youth culture in the so-called “somatic society.” The decline of the parental authority makes aging parents’ body visible, which previously remained invisible due to its symbolic status. Parents have two bodies: one is symbolic, and the other,imaginary. In the symbolic order children tend to see their parents (and older generations) not as body, but as authorities or meanings. But the collapse of the symbolic order rendered the relation between parents and children imaginary. Consequently parents now begin to experience themselves as bodies. That explains why parents in the somatic society try to be and look younger, imitating the youthful and handsome body of the younger generations. The term “reversed Oedipus complex” is suggested to explain such a reversal in the relationship between the parents and the children.
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