During the 50's, it prevails in Lacan's work a structuralist interpretation of psychoanalysis which inverts the approaching of the unconscious, assigning effectiveness to something that was formerly disqualified as "inert and unthinkable". In this context, it gains relief a re-reading of the Oedipus complex whose terms are clearly inspired in Lévi-Strauss. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light upon the function fulfilled by the signifiers "Name-of-the-Father" and "phallus" as "zero symbols" of the structure of desire. The way such kind of symbols were described by the anthropologist reveals why this function was requested by the psychoanalyst.
Structuralism; Lacanian Psychoanalysis; Oedipus; Lévi-Strauss; Zero symbol