Gender Theory 2
Freudian Psychoanalysis part II
How does the child under the sway of the 'pleasure principle' come to take on the 'reality principle', i.e., gender as a category of social roles? The Oedipus Complex is a crisis and its process by which the child takes on gender.
Oedipus Complex
Identification is defined as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. Presuming constitutional bisexuality prior to the process of gender formation, Freud obtains two solutions to this crisis: positive identification with same-sex parent, or negative identification with opposite-sex parent. (Q1) The identifications may involve two possibilities of object-cathexis: love of the father as object or love of the mother as object. Note that the first identification can take place earlier than any object choices.
Positive Oedipus Complex in the boy is like this: The boy's close involvement with its mother's body leads it to development of object-cathexis to the mother, while it may identify with the father simply by observing. (Q2) So, at its pre-Oedipal stage, identification and object choice proceed separately. However, as its object-cathexis to the mother grows intense, the father will come to figure as an obstacle, or rival, in its affection for the mother. Then, its identification with the father takes on a "hostile coloring", and thereby, ambivalence. The boy's incestuous desire to its mother is abandoned by its father's threat of castration. The boy, in perceiving that the girl is 'castrated', begins to imagine this as a punishment which might be visited upon itself. It thus represses its incestuous desire, detaches itself from the mother, and comforts itself with the unconscious consolation that it will be able to take up the father's place, a patriarch, and possess the mother in the future. Then, the boy ambivalently identifies with the father. However, even in the future, the object-cathexis to the mother must be abandoned with the incest taboo. But, in doing so, its unconscious is generated by this act of primary repression of the forbidden desire. Therefore, the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex for the boy is displacement, or filling the empty place its denial of the original object of libido (the mother) has left with other object (the female other), by which it is introduced into the role of masculinity. (Q3)
For the girl, the first object-cathexis, hence, always begins with homosexuality. The little girl, perceiving that it is inferior because 'castrated', turns in disillusionment from its similarly 'castrated' mother to the project of seducing its father (penis envy). (Q4) But, prohibited by the incest taboo, it must turn back to the mother, effect an identification with the mother, assume femininity. She finds the object "lost", i.e., the lost penis, in the baby. This implies the sense of motherhood results from the castration complex. (Q5)
The Ego, the Super-ego, and the Id
The effect of the identifications in the earliest childhood will be profound and lasting. (Q6) The relative intensity of the two identifications-positive and negative-in any individual will reflect the preponderance in the person of one or other of the two sexual dispositions. The forming of a precipitate in the ego consists of these two in some way combined together. Through this modification, it comes to stand in contrast to the other constituents of the ego in the form of the super-ego, the introjected father's power to dominate over the ego, that is, compulsive characteristic that manifests itself in the form of a categorical imperative or patriarchal law. It is the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex, and at the same time, the expression of the most important vicissitudes experienced by the libido in the id, or unconscious desires. The ego performs as their reconciler to preserve the self, or the psychological subject.
The ego, the super-ego, and the id are three part psychic apparatus needed for our psychological survival. By setting up the super-ego, the ego masters its Oedipal crisis but places itself in subjection to the id. Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the external world, of reality, the super-ego stands as the representative of the internal world, of the id. The conflicts between the ego and the super-ego ultimately reflect the contrasts between what is real and what is mental. Through the forming of the super-ego, all the traces left behind in the id are taken over by the ego and lived through again by it in each individual.
Note that the super-ego represents both the precept, "You ought to be like your father", and the prohibition, "You must not be like your father; that is, you may not do all that he does; many things are his prerogatives." (Q7)
Freud's narrative regarding negative Oedipus Complex-thought to be in the regime of the prohibition-is rather unclear. Next time, we will review a really smart gender theorist, Judith Butler's reformulation of explaining gender identifications, based upon Freud's notion of melancholia, and then, dream analysis and its linguistic connections to Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Questions
Q1. In Freud's usage, 'constitutional bisexuality' is a premise that all human beings are born bisexual. In other words, he presumes every newborn baby is naturally in a mixed state between masculine and feminine "dispositions". Do you agree with him upon the natural twoness of sexual dispositions? What do you think about the possibility of multiplicity of, or three or more, sexual dispositions?
Q2. Gayle Rubin, a feminist cultural anthropologist, in her 1975 essay The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex, attempts to discover socio-historical mechanisms artificially producing gender and heterosexuality by which women are consigned to a secondary position in human relations. Consider the cases in which the parents of both sexes are presently occupied with child care. Then, is the boy still supposed to love its mother as object better than its father? What do you think about the possiblity that the gender, or even sexual orientation, of the child will be changeable depending upon its surroundings?
Q3. Exchange of Women, and Masculine Alliance: The boy's negation of its original object-cathexis to the mother consolidates its identification with the father and leads to displacement of its libido to other women. Levi-Strauss argues there is a universal structure of kinship in which the object of exchange that consolidates kinship relations is women, given as gifts from one patrilineal clan to another through the institution of marriage. Can you find some analogs between Freud's and Levi-Stauss' metanarratives regarding women? It appears that Freud at individual level naturalizes and thus supports Levi-Strauss' anthropology about women's social role only as an object. How will you criticise them?
Q4. Castration Complex: Threat of castration and penis envy the boy and the girl experience by feeling, respectively, constitute, so-called, castration complex. With the incest taboo, this anatomy-is-destiny process plays a crucial role in positive Oedipus Complex, primarily distinguishing girl and boy. Hence, Freudian psychoanalysis presumes gender asymmetry from the beginning. Even though he appears to postulate constitutional bisexuality, Freud already presumes this anatomical difference to determine discrete binary gender differentiation. Do you agree or disagree with him? In what sense do you think it is a patriarchal ideology?
Q5. Negative Oedipus Complex: But, Freud still opens up the possibility of the other way. He clearly says, the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex for the boy must be its giving up of the object-cathexis to the mother, forced by the incest taboo, and then, its place is filled by either an intensified identification with the father, or an identification with the mother as subject, rather than, as object. The boy may behave like a girl and display an affectionate feminine attitude to the father and a corresponding hostility and jealosy towards the mother. According to Freud, this can lead to homosexuality. But, I see many more-rather exaggeratedly-masculine gays in Williamsburg in Brooklyn in NYC which is a famous district for its homosexual subculture. For the little girl, the outcome of the Oedipus Complex may be mostly an intensified identification with the mother. However, Freud also says, analysis shows a little girl, after it has had to relinquish the father as a love object, will bring its masculinity into predominance and identify with the father, that is, with the object lost, instead of the mother. But, again, it is hard to think that lesbians are mostly masculine. Actually, many lesbians are really feminine, and their lesbian lovers are also feminine. How would you explain the loves of femininity vs. femininity, and of masculinity vs. masculinity?
Q6. Freud asserts chronological priority on the events the child experiences. The first event is more influential than the second. Do you agree with him?
Q7. Reification of Sex and Gender by the Oedipal Calendar: Therefor, the law, i.e. taboo against incest or homosexuality structures the super-ego so that it may determine discrete gendered identities by both sanctioning and regulating the unconscious desire of the id. For Freud, sublimation is another form of displacement of an individual's desire, or libidinal energy, onto a socially productive goal: a higher artistic or scientific activity. In other words, onto cultural production as well as biological reproduction of labor force. Michel Foucault criticizes the repressive hypothesis for the presumption of an "original" (incestuous) desire that maintains temporal priority with respect to the repressive law. He argues the desire which is conceived as both original and repressed is actually the effect of the subjugating law itself. Since the law can not reproduce itself without such desire, it actually produces that "repressed desire" as something original or prediscursive. Thus, "sex", juridical categorization, and "bisexuality", psychoanalytic presumption, are actually both the products of the law intended for justifying gender roles, and concealing its artificiality through natrualization. What is your opinion? Did you ever cast a doubt if something seemingly natural would be an ideological apparatus?
Works Cited
Freud, S., Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego: Chapter VII. Identification, 1922, http://www.bartleby.com/290/7.html
Freud, S., The Ego and the Id, Pacific Publishing Studio 2010. See Chapter 3. The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego-Ideal)
Eagleton, Terry., Literary Theory, 2nd edition, Blackwell 1996, p134
ibid., p135
http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Oedipus.Notes.html
Freud, S., The Ego and the Id, pp38-42
ibid., pp33-34
Rubin, Gayle., "The Traffic in Women", Lewin Ellen, Feminist Anthropology, John Wiley & Sons 2006, pp92-95
Freud, S., The Ego and the Id, pp34-35
ibid., p37
ibid., p36
Freud, S., Civilization and its Discontents, Norton 1962, p44
Foucault, M., History of Sexuality, Volume I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, Vintage 1980, p81
I hope to see you all at the meeting,
Kyu Don
© 2011, Kyu-don Choi