444f2a1c5bdffc749ec7da22d8ef33a8 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Format: epub

In this early account of what became the organizing myth of psychoanalysis, which came out of Freud’s attempt to be entirely honest with himself, he is not at all explicit about the fact that the myth involves a desire to marry – to have sex with – the mother and kill the father. Love of the mother and jealousy of the father seems innocuous, almost euphemistic, when you compare it with the way the Oedipus complex would come to be defined: ‘a group of largely unconscious ideas and feelings centring around the wish to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate that of the same sex’, as Charles Rycroft put it in his Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.

Freud was talking about what he called, with no apparent irony, the ‘positive’ Oedipus complex. But this implies that there is also a ‘negative’ Oedipus complex, in which, Freud writes, ‘a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father, and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude towards his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother’. The equivalent is true for the girl. The child wants to kill both parents, and love both parents. In the wish to kill, to eliminate the parent of the same sex and ‘possess’ the parent of the opposite sex, and to kill the parent of the opposite sex and ‘possess’ the parent of the same sex, the child’s project is to put an end, once and for all, to being left out.

Freud never puts it quite like this. But we may well devote our lives to mitigating the effects of being left out, and of anticipating being left out. What we fear about loss is that it excludes us from someone’s presence: when people leave us, and more exactingly when people die, we are forever left out of their company. Mourning is supposedly the best thing we can do about being terminally left out, or perhaps it is the most culturally sanctioned thing we can do. But what else can we do if and when we are left out in this way? Mourning may seem the most forlorn – even the most absurd, least promising – of self-cures if being and feeling left out is the problem.

There is also the ordinary Oedipus complex of everyday life. As the French psychoanalyst Nicole Oury writes, ‘the destiny of the child is also weighed down by the unrepresentable place of his origins, the desire between a father and a mother’. The child can never really know the nature of the desire through which he was conceived: he is left out of his own conception. If the male child can ‘possess’ the mother he will never be excluded from her presence, and if he can kill the father she will have no other object of desire and he will have no rival. In a more benign and in some

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