This paper focuses on Episode 7.17, "Lies My Parents Told Me," and argues that "The First," from whose deadly control Spike liberates himself in this episode is, in essence, a consummately controlling parent, and that his action culminates the liberation Buffy and Spike initiated with their violent sexual encounters.

The Oedipal narrative is the central cliche of popular Freudianism. It dictates that appropriate sexual development involves separation from original parental objects and eventual heterosexual bonding with an appropriate adult other. From the outset, BtVS is founded in Oedipal instability: parental figures (with the exception of Giles) are notoriously unreliable, absent or dangerous, and sexual love is invariably destructive. Near the end of the season, when Joyce dies, Giles goes off to England, Buffy deals with the aftermath of her own death by taking up with Spike in a rough sex extravaganza. While many fans interpreted their liasion as symptomatic of Buffy's postresurrection depression, it was also her first experience with the complexities of adult passion--and as such, a move toward individuation, the truth of her Slayer nature--represented by the dangerous, sometimes murderous First Slayer.

As Buffy incorporates the First Slayer into herself, she must necessarily pit herself against the equally murderous First Evil--the shapechanging entity who masquerades as a trusted dead figure (often a parent) in order to exert psychological control over its victim. She cannot overcome the First without Spike's assistance, and he cannot assist until he has freed himself of its influence. Buffy's confrontation with Giles--formerly the only consistently reliable parent figure in her life--with his own lies and authoritarian betrayals, marks her full acceptance of Spike, her adulthood, and her full powers as a Slayer, whose gift is death/jouissance.