Freud and a bit of Lacan
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on Freud explain to us the Oedipus Complex, a subject I find very fascinating. Freud relates every child’s latent desires to the tragedy of King Oedipus, in which through the act of destiny, he slays his father and weds his mother. The story’s appeal transcends even to our time because of how us, the audience, are able to relate to Oedipus. Freud theorizes that men all have sexual impulses towards their mothers beginning in childhood, and have murderous desires towards their father. Oedipus meets a tragic end, in which he blinds himself after realizing his horrendous acts. His demise serves as a repulsive force for us to refrain from committing similar acts, which explains why most people have their desires repressed.
I believe most people with a healthy mind would find Freud’s theory absurd, given the morals and traditions we’ve followed up to today. Freud takes our desires to a completely radical level, but still, we can’t deny that Freud’s ideas are logical in some sense. Admittedly, I had a strong attachment to my mother and many instances of hatred for my father when I was a child. If we assume that it is our morals that prevent us from going in the same path as Oedipus, would the desires Freud believes us to have still be repressed if our morals are altered? I don’t suppose that question can be answered unless we look into a parallel universe.
I would like to challenge Freud’s theory by talking about some of things he fails to address, that is: homosexuality and pedophilia. The Oedipus Complex explains our latent desires for the opposite sex parent, but in the case of those who are homosexual, the theory falls apart. Likewise, how would Freud explain the desires of pedophiles? Freud’s theory falls under the premise that people are inherently heterosexual and are attracted to people of similar or older age, but as we know it, many cases stray from that norm. Given the time in which Freud came up with the theory, topics such as homosexuality and pedophilia were probably not so prevalent in society, but certainly not absent. I would love to see how Freud would respond to such topics, even if it requires a separate theory.
Freud continues by talking about our dreams, in which he says that the latent content we perceive are only a part of a not-yet-deciphered transcript. He believes that dreams are conveyed in another language, in which we must interpret its meaning through a intricate series of steps to find the underlying meaning.
After reflecting on one of my recent dreams, I don’t believe that all dreams have as much of the underlying, manifest content, that Freud thinks they might have. The dream I reflected on, and am a little too embarrassed to share, was quite straight-forward in the sense that it didn’t require the complex process of condensation, displacement and translating the means of representation. This process would be more useful for dreams I find completely random, confusing, or seemingly irrelevant to my life. I never indulge too much on those dreams, so I cannot confirm that there is, in fact, a true underlying meaning.
In a previous lecture, we talked about Lacan’s theory of how we (as people) project idealized versions of ourselves in mirrors and how we desire to become this idealized version. A thought that came across my mind were how patients with anorexia nervosa correspond with the process of the “mirror stage”. Those with anorexia nervosa project a negative image of themselves, namely, an overweight/fattened version. This leads me to thinking of how this may correlate to their initial viewing of themselves as a baby/toddler, and how that may somehow have a lasting effect later in their life. Rather than what Lacan implies, that we strive for this projection, those with anorexia nervosa strives against their mirrored projection.
