Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Goodbye Sigmund.

Freud described a child’s erotic awakening as a series of distinct phases, ingestion and excretion, an intermediary stage and the final genital fixation. This process completely ignored the sensuality of the rest of the body, the epidermis. But, at that time in Europe, babies were swaddled and had few opportunities of being stroked, and the dress conventions of later life left a minimum of skin uncovered. As a mirror of his epoch, Freud considered that the body’s surface was erotically numb. He also took for granted the claustrophobic family unit of father, mother and child, associating it to the legend of Oedipus (which was probably about the steps taken by king Laius to transmit his throne to his son in a matrilineal society where the king was the queen’s consort, and his succession was decided by mortal combat with a foreign contender [1]). Carried away by this doubtful analogy, Freud imagined that infants wished to murder their fathers and ravage their mothers. And, as baby girls could not fit this fantasy, Freud had them discover themselves as incomplete boys and left it at that. Here again he reflected a particular historic reality. The family triangle was an urban construction. The rural exodus had broken the extended ties of village life. It had also closeted the wife in her home with her children, while her husband went out as the bred-winner. In the rural economy both had a role and, particularly during summer harvests when everyone was employed, children would mingle with non family members of all ages. The new urban context imprisoned children within the confines of parents and siblings who were all sensually taboo. For the better off, a nurse or a maid servant may have alleviated this isolation, but in such a clandestine way that it could not help much. Then came school where boys and girls did not mix, so that heterosexual relationships had to wait adulthood. The closed family circle and the sexually segregated education generalised erotic inhibitions and led to mass psychosis.

Freud grew up at a time when Europeans thought of themselves as the civilised beacon of the world. Western society appeared exemplary by its culture, its wealth and its power. Freud seems to have accepted that it was not the best but the only possible world, that his patients were simply unadapted and that their symptoms were the signs of the non-resolution of an archaic past. Considering that the Oedipean triangle was unavoidable (i.e. it was inherent to the human psyche and not a social construct), Freud tried to heal its disturbing consequences. He professed to have succeeded some dubious cures and went on to develop a new theoretical domain, and to found a sectarian group who called themselves psychoanalysts. Having tried and abandoned hypnosis and cocaine, Freud proceeded to the couch where patients would detail their dreams and their childhood memories, which he would then interpret. This led him to a new conjectural triangle, id, ego and superego, representing the primitive childish impulses on one side and the authoritarian paternalistic imperative on the other, with a conciliatory maternal entity in between. A conceptualisation of the triangle inside each individual psyche that made it a part of the human condition, like the three cerebral evolutions, thalamus, cortex and neocortex.

Freud managed to conjure away infantile sensuality and to avoid social opprobrium, allowing psychoanalysis to become mainstream and ineffectual. Those of his disciples who rejected this moral conformity were excommunicated. Jung fell in love with one of his patients and went on to explore the esoteric and the mystic sides of the human mind, searching for a collective unconscious. Reich was preoccupied by working-class living conditions that excluded youth (and adults) from normal sexual experiences. He linked sexuality and politics and, on the margins of the German communist party, founded SexPol. He went on to imagine a universal energy he called orgone. Both did much more than this, but neither threatened the Freudian vision of the human psyche. Ageing and ill, and with the rise of Nazi Germany, a depressed Freud conceived the idea of a death wish that provoked murder, massacres and the mass suicide of war. That humans are actors in the continual battle between life and death is obvious enough, but Freud imagined them anchored in the dark side of Thanatos, without linking this positioning to the sensual deprivations of childhood. Reich did, however, describing the psycho-rigid adept of totalitarianism to no avail. So psychoanalysis became a household word, a source for jokes and comfortable incomes.

The popular revolts of the 1960s were cultural as well as political. The social codes of appearance, language, music, intoxicants, sexual and parental relationships, et cetera, were replaced by alternative experiments. The movement was generally chaotic, and was more a refusal than an overthrow of the system, wilderness and urban communes of counter-culture to wait out the collapse of straight bourgeois predatory capitalism, turn on, tune in, drop out. But the fatal age of 30 passed and the empire was still standing, with open arms to welcome its prodigal sons and daughters. The post-1970s restoration adopted the unavoidable elements of the revolt. The new social model looked and sounded different. It announced it was liberated and that women and minorities were no longer excluded from wielding political and economic power. Change was in the air, but the sensuality of childhood remained a forbidden territory.

The normalisation of the working woman and, notwithstanding ingrained prejudice, her proven competence in all professions are generating profound social and ideological changes. They have completely modified “Family Life” [2] and its authoritarian triangle. Nurseries and kindergartens allow children to establish relationships with non family members from the earliest age. The taboo covering siblings and parents is no longer the sole infantile reality. Children can experience possessive affection and sensual attraction outside of the incestuous family nest. The straight-jacket of inhibitions described by Reich is slowly loosening, and the compulsive violence that results from repressed emotional impulses is declining, but not everywhere and not for everyone. Repressive regimes based on archaic ideas are still doing all they can to stop this process, and the reactionary right of parliamentary systems is constantly bewailing the end of patriarchal morality. They are all anachronisms because women have left the gynaecium to become citizens, and their example is irresistible.

1. Emile Mireaux developed this interpretation with erudition in, “Les poèmes homériques et l’histoire grecque”. Vol. II, ch.6, Albin Michel (1949).
2. A film by Ken Loach. Also books by Alice Miller, “For your own good”, “The drama of the gifted child”, etc.