<p>What is an “an orphan unconscious”? Not an orphan’s unconscious but an orphaned unconscious. Through a critical re-reading of Freud’s Oedipus complex this article attempts to set the unconscious free, that is, to de-oedipalise it, make it an orphan. An unconscious that gets to be restored to its orphaned state requires the becoming-child-orphan of psychoanalysis itself as a step forward towards a psychoanalytic thinking and practice that refuses to remain complicit to the violence of being hu/man.</p>