The Oedipus Complex

so what ago I was asked to do a video lecture on the Oedipus complex so I'm gonna try to do that today I'm going to be validating Freud's view that the Oedipus complex is a universal complex with great significance for the psychology and the development of human beings in all times places ages I'm going to defend that view but I'm going to mainly be speaking about the Oedipus in a very broad sense because more detailed versions of the Oedipus complex which spell out its implications for a sexual object choice and for gender identity are not only very complex but also very controversial I think we really do not understand very much about the development of heterosexuality let alone the development of homosexuality or bisexuality or other orientations I think we've pretended to knowledge on that detailed level which we don't really possess but in a very broad in general sense I think that the Oedipus is a universal trauma that all human beings undergo and that they defend themselves against the pain of this in very different ways and a person's way of living his or her Oedipus complex of dealing with it of suffering it of attempting to transcend it all of this is central to the formation of character and personality so I think Freud had his finger on something very important and quite universal here it's absurd to engage in the kind of psychological the deccan ism that says of course Royd himself had an intense Oedipus complex old father young mother this is a form of reductionism I mean the facts of his biography certainly did give him an intense Oedipus complex which enabled him to discover the Oedipus complex and realize that it wasn't just a problem of his but a problem of every human being so that psychological reductionism does not in my view invalidate for its claim that the Oedipus is universal and important in human development certainly sociological reductionist who try to reduce Freud's theories in this area his theories of sexuality in general to being a product of a Victorian kind of era again really avoid the recognition of the fundamental importance and universality of what Freud has to say in this area on the other hand Freudian theory did a very one-sided reading of the Oedipus myth mark cancer I believe was one of the first to elaborate on this one-sidedness in the actual myth it is the parents who initiate the hostility not the child liest here's the prophecy told by Therese yes that his son will slay him and and take his wife the boy's mother as his wife and together liason you cast to try to prevent this from coming true by piercing the boy's ankles and leaving him out in the woods to die of course he's picked up by woodcutter who takes him to another land where he's adopted by the king and queen of Thebes and he grows up thinking he's their son and so when he hears the prophecy he leaves Thebes in order to not have it fulfilled and on the road he meets an arrogant man who tries to drive him off the road and they fight and he slays that man who turns out to be his father and then he enters the city and he successfully solves the little and they make him King and with the throne comes this woman yo Kosta and now he's sleeping with his mother and she sort of begins to suspect this and when she realizes it's true she hangs herself when he realizes it's true he puts out his eyes the prototype of castration okay the Freudian template put put the blame on the child the child's incestuous and aggressive longings are identified as central not the stimulation of that aggression and that sexuality by the parents a lot of boys have very castrating fathers fathers who who out of their own oedipal jealousy in the triangle father child mother or wife they're jealous of their sons they're jealous of the love and the attention that is being displayed towards the Sun they resent the time and the attention diverted from themselves towards this little male rival or female riedel for that matter and they're hostile and the oedipal hostility may well be initiated and grounded in that but I would argue that what is still right that even with the least castrating father in the world the little boy will feel rivalry towards the father the father will feel rivalry with the little boy too of course but if the father is relatively sane he will smile at that and he will handle that lovingly and appropriately he won't traumatize his son but even with the nicest father the boy is going to have these rival wrists envious and jealous feelings and he will wish to possess his mother and have her exclusively to be the exclusive object of her desire as Lacan would say to be the phallus for the mother the phallus being the thing that she desires he wishes to be the thing she desires he wishes to monopolize her love and attention and of course as time goes on this wish to monopolize love and attention becomes much more overtly sexual he is interested in her body the way she looks the way she smells the way she dresses and he inquires into all of this and this desire to be sensual takes on a quality of lust as well there's no denying that but on the other hand another criticism of a Freudians is that they tended to reverse this they made raw sexuality the core and these broader feelings of desire to be central they made that secondary as a kind of somewhat of a sublimation of the raw lust which they saw as the center of the Oedipus I'm going to go on in a way quite compatible with Lacanian theory I think which argues the reverse that the central oedipal desire is the desire to be at the center to monopolize love and attention and secondarily it can become sexualized it usually does become sexualized but at its core is narcissism narcissism in this view is not a transformation of edible problems edible problems are manifestations of narcissism narcissism being the desire to be the center and therefore the edible trauma is that we all suffer is the recognition that we cannot be central that we are not central all we can be central for moments here and there at times but the project of being absolutely central which in a sense you could call the project of being God is impossible and we all learn this and if we refuse to learn this we have serious pathology pathology of denial pathology of omnipotence we have a severe narcissistic problem if we fail to get over to some extent no one gets over it entirely but unless we to some extent get over our narcissism by realizing that in many situations in life we are far from the center and cannot really hold that central position I mean in a good marriage a good loving marriage the two partners are relatively successful at giving each other a feeling of centrality of fidelity but we know how rocky that is it's balance its tenuous at best okay so the one-sided reading of the Oedipus which puts all of the blame on the child's hostility towards the rival parent and incestuous desire overlooks the way that these feelings are intensified stimulated by activities inappropriate activities by the parents it's often pointed out that old men send young men to die in wars the young men are going to take over and are going to be living and deploying their powers when the old men are weak and dying and dead so there is this generational conflict an old teacher of mine Louis flora wrote a great book called the conflict of generations and he routed this in the oedipal dynamic so at the best of times the parents will moderate and modulate and help the child overcome his inevitable oedipal longings but sometimes parents make it worse rather than helping the child begin to overcome his Envy and his jealousy and his hostility in the face of this triangle it's not a dyad it's a triad one day I make the discovery that I think she's looking and smiling at me and then I realized wait a minute she's smiling at someone at him not at me what am I chopped liver and of course sometimes it's not him sometimes it's her or it's one of my siblings or it's her PhD thesis that she's writing that she seems far more interested in than me one of the great contributions of Lacan is the metaphors ation of Freudian concepts so that we're no longer thinking only about the actual mother the actual father sometimes I meet my father and I meet the paternal know when I want to be in the bathroom with mother while she goes and she says no one closes the door and the bathroom door is my father symbolically speaking the paternal know the boundary the barrier the oedipal boundary or barrier is able to be placed by a woman by the mother the paternal function can be performed by the mother helps to have another around but it can be performed by a woman and now we're starting to get into those areas of the theory of the Oedipus complex in which I think not only do I have to become uncertain but I think all psychoanalysts need to become quite uncertain the whole idea that the boy wants the mother and hates the father and ultimately in the oedipal resolution submits to the father says uncle gives up lets mother be father's resolving to get a woman of his own one day and in the meantime not only submits the father but he identifies with father and he internalizes the paternal law and forms this masculine identity occasion with the father and of course the idea that was around for many years that with the girl it's just the reverse her desire is for the mother she surrenders sorry her desire it was thought her desire it was for the father mother is the rival acceptor etc if Freud ever thought that it was very very briefly because throughout the nineteen twenties he struggled to understand how the Oedipus complex works out in women because of course their first object choice is the same as the boys it is the mother in their case that is a homosexual object choice and so Freud is trying to puzzle how is it that the girl if she does gets free of this homosexual oedipal formation and how does she switch over to taking the father and then ultimately men as her sexual object and of course we knew she didn't have too many women do not society prefers women to switch to the most feminine position of desiring the male but some women do not make that switch they continue to desire the female originally the mother and some girls when they do remain desiring the mother feel considerable injury if mother desires a male and some mothers do not but if she does desire a male the mother then the girl feels deficient because she can't deliver what a male can deliver a penis we get into the whole controversy of penis envy which by the way Freud did not generalize to all women he talked about penis envy as a problem of this type of woman who instead of switching to taking the male as her desire desired object continues to desire email but comes to recognize that she can't be what the woman wants and of course that entirely leaves aside the question as to whether that really is what the mother wants the mother may have unconscious homosexuality bisexuality the girl will be reading that and all of these other factors complicate this theory so when we get into this kind of detail the boy identifying with the father girl identifying with the mother it's far more complicated then then we thought we know far less in this area than we thought we did we don't understand how a person becomes heterosexual let alone how they become homosexual we have hypotheses we have ideas but I wouldn't say we have knowledge in this complicated field but I think we do have knowledge that the universal of the universality of the Oedipus complex it's a universal trauma because in all times all places in all cultures little boys and girls want to be central they want to be the center originally of their mothers over the mothering one the primary carer which could be a man could be father could be another man most usually it's the mother but there is a universal desire to be to monopolize the love and attention of the primary carer and to feel rival risks jealous competitive and aggressive towards rivals whoever the raw whoever the rivals happened to be now malinovski the anthropologist got trapped in the Trobriand islands with the outbreak of the first war and made a study of trobriand culture which is natural local and natural not matriarchy mattre lineal lineage is traced through the mother mattre local when you marry go to live in your wife's village where you are merely a husband who sleeps with her but the big man in her life is her brother the maternal the mother's brother for the little boy or the little girl the maternal uncle is the real rival with the child for a mother's love and little boys in that culture our hostile not so much towards their fathers who sleep with their mother as to their uncles who raise them and have responsibility and authority over them so a bunch of Marxist jumped on this and said you see Freud was wrong it's not about sex it's about power and authority and Parsons Talcott Parsons daughter and anthropologist went back look through Malinowski's data and discovered that trigger and culture is filled with brother-sister incest themes jokes etc because the culture makes the brother-sister relationship crucial and so essentially what Parsons is saying is that the Freudians are not literally correct but the Marxists are certainly not correct in their idea that it's all about Authority and power it is a jealousy complex it's a triangle and the jealousy in our culture generally goes towards one of the parents in Trobriand culture goes to the maternal uncle but it's still a triangle and it's still a jealousy rivalry complex and it's still a traumatic insult to our narcissism Freud unfortunately instinctual eyes the conflict saw it as a rising from the libidinal Levin will drive her sexual instinct which for Freud bubbled up from the body and in that sense he biologies is it I think Lacan helps us understand that it is rooted in narcissism that it is rooted in this desire to be central it becomes sexualized we are animals we have bodies we have sensuality the little boys desire to be the center for mother and his idealization of her takes on a sexual dimension her looks her smells her clothing lust comes in but it doesn't arise fundamentally from lust the lust I think is inevitable it's an inevitable component of of edible desire but the real core of oedipal desire is my narcissistic desire to be number one for the primary carer and of course the primary carer need not be a woman can be a man could be father could so things get very complex in that way but the existence of this triangle and this the existence of this narcissistic trauma of discovering that I think she's looking at me and smiling at me and then I realized wait a minute she's looking at over my shoulder at him or her or one of my siblings what am I chopped liver I want to monopolize that look and that attention and I can't and that's a castration not a literal but symbolically that's a castration that's that's a defeat my project my narcissistic project of the being number one is is defeated it's it's now it's not entirely impossible in a good marriage the partners give each other a good deal of the feeling that they are central for one another I'm faithful to one another but that's a good marriage that manages this narcissistic quest fairly well but but even there when children come onto the scene it's modified it's not just the child who asks mommy who do you love best me or daddy daddy's probably asking the same question and at times it will be mommy also who's asking that question the triangle is this very unstable social form giving rise to feelings of jealousy and envy inevitably I recently became a grandfather and my wife's devotion to this little boy at times sparked some jealousy in me now I'm mature enough to not act out on that but I certainly I'm honest enough to recognize it she adores him well periodically she will remind me that she adores me too which is good so these feelings can be handled in a way that makes them livable but they're universal this is part of what we have to struggle with as human beings this is a central part of the universal human psychology feelings of jealousy rivalry the recognition that we can't always be number one people who don't want to come to terms with this people who don't want to learn how to bear it people who go on fighting it our suffering from narcissistic personality I mean that is what narcissistic disorders are about they're grounded in trauma the trauma of the universal Oedipus complex I mean a lot of the self and relational analysts also think that narcissism is rooted in trauma the only problem is that they're focused on on other forms of trauma a depressed mother death of a mother an excessively harsh and rival wrists and authoritarian father this kind of thing they don't want to talk very often about this Universal trauma which of course is added to and and and exacerbated by these other forms of trauma arising from inadequate deficient parenting or other events but even without any of that extra stuff the Oedipus is traumatic in and of itself so it's enough to make us a little drive us a little mad human malaise Freud talked about human malaise that is a level of frustration and suffering that is nobody's fault he didn't use the word existential but I think that's what he meant the human condition human malaise intrinsic frustration the pain of being human we know we have to die we know we can't always be number one we can't always be the center this is painful we have to live with this we have to somehow find a way to bear it the trouble with a lot of self in relational theory is that it avoids this existential dimension of narcissistic suffering and it focuses on other sources of narcissistic suffering which are important but the universal must must be recalled now here the great Erich Fromm who is one of my heroes and to whom in a way I owe my career as a psychoanalyst I read beyond the chains of illusion my encounter with Marx and Freud which was in a little paperback I found on my father's bedside table my father was a frustrated intellectual and was always reading late into the night and I wanted to be able to connect with him so I tried to read a lot of the books he was reading many of which I couldn't make any sense of at all but when he was reading Freud I could make sense of that and I read from and from pretty much defined my ambition and my career really as a sociologist who was also a psychoanalyst so I'm very admiring of Erich Fromm in many ways but I'm also critical and one of my criticisms of Fromm is his sociological relative ization of the Oedipus complex he rejects its universality he sees it as particularly formed by patriarchal culture and by the conflictual relationship between fathers and sons under patriarchy I think he's quite wrong about this I'm sure that patriarchal culture makes it worse in many ways but all cultures will have a core oedipal complex and oedipal trauma that have to be coped with from once something of an existentialist but here his existentialism gave way to sociological relativism okay we need to distinguish the Oedipus complex in PS from the Oedipus complex in D just as in my lectures on God and spirituality mysticism I'm distinguishing between religion PS religion and D religion of Symington calls this primitive religion PS religion versus D or what he calls mature religion same thing applies to spirituality primitive spirituality PS mature of spirituality D or mysticism so we need to see everything in terms of these categories even on the socio-political dimension a society organized the long paranoid schizoid lying's to it any great extent is a failed democracy or democracy has not arisen in that culture democracy becomes possible when a society is operating more on the level of D and so regressions occur and what once was a democratic society has regressed into a non democratic form which sadly is what we see in the United States of America these days once democratic society is now a failed democracy bought and paid for politicians by Wall Street okay so we make this distinction between PS and G all over the place and so we must do so visa V the Oedipus complex there is a triangular formation in the paranoid schizoid position but in that position splitting predominates there's no ambivalence and so the triangle is the child and an Allgood object and an all bad object if the mother is the all good object desired by the little boy then father is the all bad rival there's no ambivalence towards the rival he is simply hated mother is simply love father was simply hated you want to get rid of your rival if you were powerful enough to do so you might actually kill him or her in this triangle beginning therapists who are not theoretically sophisticated quickly see triangular material in their patients discourse and they might think oh this is edible no or it's often merely the PS form of the Oedipus complex what Freud had in mind was the Oedipus complex in the depressive position which is a different kettle of fish we have the triangle and we have the all good mother but even she is not all good all of the time because now the child has achieved them bivolo and he sees that he's got one mother who sometimes he loves and sometimes he's angry at because she frustrates him and because he can't monopolize her love and attention and then there's this rival father from the little boy's point of view and he's ambivalent towards him yes he blocks my project of having mother all to myself but he also frees me from from my engulfment with and by this mother he takes me out to the outside world he teaches me to ride a bike and so yeah he's a pain but he's also a nice guy and now I'm a neurotic full of ambivalence towards him loving and hating him at the same time and feeling guilty for hating someone I love and okay so I've reached the neurotic level I'm in the depressive position and the Oedipus complex is more complex because it involves ambivalence in the paranoid schizoid position there is no ambivalence there is a triangle but a pre ambivalent trying it's very important clinically to distinguish these two different triangular formations I've said that I believe the Oedipus is universal so and so is the jealousy and the rivalry and the anger and all of the rest of it what then do we make of today's fad the popularity of so-called polyamory well I think it's absurd I think these are people who are engaged in massive self-deception nothing new about self-deception people get committed to an ideology and they repress or deny or evade everything that contradicts their ideology they get rid of their own feelings if they contradict their ideology so there's nothing new in this so I know of a a young man who has a girlfriend who is really into polyamory and he claims to her unto himself to subscribe to this but every time she's with another man his heart is breaking and he's doing his best to not know this to deny it he's busy repressing all of the quotes inappropriate jealousy and possessiveness and rivalry and he's driving himself to a breakdown because of the self-denial that his commitment to her and his attempt to commit himself to her ideology and make it his now of course she may well be doing the same thing I don't know that's a whole other kettle of fish but I'm simply saying that envy jealousy rivalry are a part of the human condition and wherever you love with any degree of intensity you wish to possess now of course there are degrees of possession I deeply love my wife and I'm quite possessive of her I want her having nothing to do with other lovers but I make an exception for my grandson she can love him all she wants and I make exception for her children and I make an exception for her parents and her close friends because I'm not a lunatic I'm not that narcissistic I don't always have to have her all to myself but in certain ways I do have to have her all to myself and that's my oedipal desire and my rivalry and my wish to set a boundary and have her maintain that boundary as I maintain the boundary polyamory being free transcending such feelings as jealousy and possessiveness it's a myth it's a myth and these people are headed for trouble emotionally okay that's my view about that perversion well the best book that I've read in years about perversion is by the Italian analyst Sergio benvenuto called what is perversion he synthesizes the earlier work by Roberts taller Masood Khan and luck oh and he puts together a really fine understanding of perversion which for benvenuto and for us today should not be a negative term he points out that most successful perverts regard their perversion as a masterpiece like an artistic masterpiece why because if it's a successful perversion it leads to tremendous sexual excitement and fulfillment but in a way that hurts nobody that is not imposed aggressively on anyone that does not lead to physical or social pain that is it's a perversion that has been sublimated to a considerable extent while at the same time still containing some of the raw intensity and risk and danger and therefore excitement to make it sexually fulfilling I recall Robert Staller coming to Toronto in the mid 70s and the first time he was talking about his book on perversion perversion the erotic form of hatred still I would say one of the best books on perversion that you can find anywhere perversion the erotic form of hatred we all seemed quite willing to accept his ideas about perversion the hostility intrinsic to perversion but we were dismayed many of us when a year or two later he brought out his book called sexual excitement and he came back and argued that hostility and aggression are not simply central to perversion they're central to any kind of sexual excitement and that sex without aggression and hostility and sex without risk and danger is boring it's like a long drink of water it's not worth having so Staller was arguing that transgression in some sense is central to good sex benvenuto would certainly agree but it's how the transgression is lived out it could be lived out entirely in fantasy there are two people married having a normal normal sexuality normal sex but what's going on in their minds what kinds of fantasies are exciting them whether they're talking about their fantasies together or not is another matter someone was it benvenuto while he was originally Freud who pointed out that when two people are in bed there are at least four people in bed if not eight in our minds were always being watched I'm in bed with her and she is her but she's also my mother on some level of fantasy Who am I I'm me but who else am i in fantasy for her well this just becomes more and more elaborated we have sex in the bedroom with the door closed why who are we shutting out who who are we imagining might be excited by seeing or outraged by seeing when you include conscious and unconscious fantasy human sexuality is incredibly complex what is perversion basically it has to do with the Oedipus complex it's a way of trying to survive and manage the pain of my failure to be the center for the desired object I'm dealing with oedipal pain I'm feeling I'm dealing with feelings of exclusion jealousy rivalry rage stimulated lust how do I cope with this well people cope with it in very different ways some of the ways that people cope with the oedipal trauma and pain is by forming a perversion which is for some a successful quasi quasi artistic masterpiece it's a way of organizing their sex life first of all if they're lucky they will find an accomplice a willing accomplice who will enter the drama and enjoy it and facilitate it and be a part of it that's a good marriage where the perverse elements in him meet similarly perverse or complimentary perverse responses and interests in her and they become each other's accomplices in working out a drama which is exciting and fulfilling for both of them and doesn't get them into trouble okay so well there's so much more to be said about perversion this talk is about the Oedipus complex I highly recommend benvenuto book for those who are interested in pursuing the subject of perversion in greater detail well the idea of the resolution of the Oedipus complex Freud and the Freudians tended to think of it I'm gonna speak of it from the boys point of view as basically saying uncle and giving up in the face of the Guild's I feel towards Father who in the depressive position I love as well as hate in the face of my fear of his retaliation my castration anxiety I throw in the towel I say uncle I give up I let I let him have her Michael under to him and I identify with him and I internalized his law i internalized the paternal law I identify with the father this supports my masculinity I think this is a mistake I think this identifies masculinity with submissiveness to male Authority and I think you could paint a pretty accurate picture of mainstream Freudian psychoanalysis the IPA for example as a kind of Club formed for many years predominantly my men submitting to Freud's Authority I mean if you didn't like young or odd ler or you got thrown out if you did submit you were accepted but held in contempt by Freud for submitting generations of Freudian men submitted to the paternal law and by accepting this kind of castration and submission to Authority they were admitted to the club and if they played their cards right they maybe eventually got to play the father having submitted to him for enough decades so this is a patriarchal hierarchical essentially sadomasochistic structure it's a master-slave dialectic and this to me has always been an offensive notion of masculinity as submission I think it's unhealthy with Hounslow Auld and eli sagan i have always advocated a very different model of mental health in this area it's not submission to the father and identification with him in this submissive way it's finding away symbolically to kill him because men mostly outlive their fathers it's a matter of finding a sublimated way to kill him now this will involve guilt because we also love him but we don't submit to him we choose our own way we find our own path this is not literally killing him he may not feel killed at all he may feel proud my father did not feel killed when I opted out of medical school and got a PhD and became a tenured professor he was proud as punch I felt I was killing him but I wasn't on some level of my unconscious I was a parricide and I chose my own path and I'm glad I did I became an independent male I've never been happy with the IPA I'm critical of it in many ways I'm critical of this whole notion of masculinity has formed through submission to the Father through renunciation Boyd was big on renunciation of oedipal desire Wow I've talked about the father aspect how about the mother aspect do we overcome the Oedipus by renouncing our desire for the mother renouncing our incestuous desire no we find a way of having her symbolically my wife happens to look very much like my mother I found a way fulfilling my incestuous desire not literally not with my literal mother but with a woman who unconsciously represents for me the desired mother I think it's a good idea to desire your wife and your first desire was for your mother there are these sad cases of guys who can't deal with their ancestress desire except by negating it so they they choose not a woman like their mother they choose a woman who in some ways is the opposite of their mother and they will seldom ever be happy with her because deep down they want their mothers even though on some other level they made very much hate their mother but that's the Oedipus complex we have to find some way of coping with it in some ways work out better than others what do we do in psychoanalysis we review the ways we've tried to cope with this narcissistic trauma and are these ways that we chose are they working for us do they need to be altered can we improve them are we paying too high a price for the attempted solution that we worked out okay well there's so much more to be said about the Oedipus complex oedipal dynamics quotes perverse attempts at solutions of the oedipal dilemma but I think I've covered the main points that I wanted to address today

Channel: Don Carveth

Views: 9,347

Rating: 4.8538814 out of 5

Keywords: Freud, Fromm, Oedipus, Perversion

Id: 9VRUghEGW9Y

Length: 52min 29sec (3149 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 05 2019