Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard

Author:Rene Girard [Girard, Rene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780801822186
Amazon: 0801822181
Barnesnoble: 0801822181
Goodreads: 337521
Published: 2018-09-17T01:25:30+00:00

7

Freud and the Oedipus Complex

We can observe both similarities and differences between the mimetic desire described in the previous chapter and Freud’s Oedipus complex.

Mimetism is a source of continual conflict. By making one man’s desire into a replica of another man’s desire, it invariably leads to rivalry; and rivalry in turn transforms desire into violence. Although Freud may appear on first glance to have ignored this mechanism, he in fact came very close to apprehending it. A rigorous examination of this text will make it clear why he ultimately failed to do so.

The mimetic nature of desire plays an important role in Freud’s work—not important enough, however, to dominate and revolutionize his thinking. His mimetic intuitions are incompletely formulated; they constitute a dimension of his text that is only half visible and tends to disappear in transmission. There is nothing surprising about the refusal of present-day psychoanalysts to turn their attention to this subject.

Factions of psychoanalytic thought, bitterly opposed in other respects, are here at one. The mimetic aspect of desire has been ignored at once by those whose main concern is the elimination of inconsistencies in Freud’s work in favor of a unified whole and by that other group who, while orthodox Freudians in name, quietly reject some of the most lucid and cogent of Freud’s analyses on the grounds that they are tainted with

“psychologism.”

Although traces of the mimetic conception are scattered through Freud’s work, this conception never assumes a dominant role. It runs counter to the Freudian insistence on a desire that is fundamentally directed toward an object; that is, sexual desire for the mother. When the 179

VIOLENCE AND THE SACRED

tension between these opposing tendencies becomes too great, both Freud and his disciples seem to resolve it in favor of the object-desire.

The mimetic intuition of Freud gives rise to a series of concepts ambiguous in definition, obscure in status, and vague in function. Among the offshoots of this ill-defined mimetic desire are certain concepts that come under the heading identification. Among the categories of Freudian identification, one that nowadays receives little attention is the first one discussed in the chapter entitled “Identification,” in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. This category has to do with the father: “A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like and be like him, and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes his father as his ideal. This behavior has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude towards his father (and towards males in general); it is on the contrary typically masculine. It fits in very well with the Oedipus complex, for which it helps to prepare the way.”1

There is a clear resemblance between identification with the father and mimetic desire; both involve the choice of a model. The choice is not really determined by parentage, for the child can select as model any man who happens to fill the role that our society normally assigns to the natural father.

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