**Abstract**

The position within the Oedipal phantasy has become a basic organizer in social conflicts of XXI century society. This development is particularly apparent in the current confrontation between the Catholic clergy and anticlerical activists. Consistently with Sigmund Freud's conceptualization of the negative oedipal constellation, the two institutionalized groups share a basic unconscious feature: an incomplete cleavage of the pre-Oedipal relationship to the mother object. At puberty, a persistent regressive tie to the mother hinders the investment of age-appropriate female partners and maintains the adolescent within the mother's embrace. Two options are available than in order to keep at bay father's control and interpersonal power. The submission to Super-ego values and the repression of sexual drives warrants the father's complacency and makes room for an ascetic life. On the other hand, a more eroticized identification with mother may bestow the adolescent a seductive interpersonal power over father's representatives. Material from an analytic case allows the author to illuminate the severely traumatic primal scene experiences often underlying a passive Oedipal constellation. In this perspective, the current heated confrontation between the Church and anticlerical activists may be understood in terms of an unconscious fantasy where primal scene anxieties are reciprocally projected onto the political opponents.

**Keywords:** psychoanalysis and politics, passive oedipal complex, primal scene anxieties, LGBT discrimination, anticlericalism
