This paper has been accepted for the IPSO 2015 international congress in Boston.
The Freudian
view of the Oedipus complex results from a cultural flaw, provoked by
circumcision, that misrepresents and weakens Sophocles's myth.
Roheim was the first to point out that the
separation-of-the-mother / submission-to-the-father rituals of primitives distort
the Oedipus complex:
"...
the superabundance of ritual dealing with this theme (orality) is a camouflage
of the Oedipus complex."[1]
That remark very obviously applies to circumcision.
But Freud interprets Oedipus's blinding as a castration:
This is wrong. With Sophocles, the father's punishment
is death through abandonment in nature, which is all other thing than
castration. Freud projected upon Sophocles's myth the threat of castration of
circumcision, extremely vivid since consisting in a beginning of realization. Besides,
not the father but Oedipus himself operates the blinding that symbolizes his
ignorance, his "blindness", his unconsciousness when he killed his
father and married his mother, a double blindness thus (one eye for dad, one
eye for mum). The fact that Freud transformed that metaphor into a matter of
castration is the height of... his own blindness, stemming from the anguish and
castration fantasies of a circumcised man. In Sophocles's scenario, the
paternal punishment through death is the normal unconscious fantasy: desire to
kill the father in order to marry one's mother / fear of being killed by him. Therefore,
Freud projected the very Judaic idea of punishment (by anticipation) by sham
and threat of castration, rather than through death, upon the Hellenistic myth.
A victim of the trauma of his own circumcision, he misrepresented, warped,
Sophocles's Oedipus. Therefore, Sophocles, not Freud, invented the unconscious
and the Oedipus complex. Freud only invented the
science of deciphering the unconscious.
The
consequence of this cultural bias is a grave theoretical mistake that flaws
psychoanalytical theory and practice: Freud substitutes an inexistent
"castration complex" that he improperly integrates into the Oedipus
complex for the common fantasies of castration.
For
those who have not been traumatized by a sexual mutilation, at the age of
sexual impulse for the parent of the opposite sex and jealousy towards the
other, the threat imagined by the child facing her or his desires concerning the
parental couple, is not castration but death through exclusion of the family.
Freud very sensibly formulated this for girls but not for boys!
In
cultures practising circumcision, the Oedipus complex, the time of integration
into society, is altered. A real castration threat is substituted for the
imaginary fear of death resulting from the unconscious desire to kill the
parent of the same sex. But the correct resolution of the Oedipus complex
cannot result from physical injury (or threat of injury) by others. Quite the
opposite, a positive or negative emphasis on whatever part of the body, by real
or verbal violence from the social group, is unacceptable meddling of the
lawmaker into family life and into the development of the individual, a source of mass psychopathology. This affirmation
was shockingly illustrated in Israel where a court decision, happily quashed in
appeal, condemned a mother to a high penalty on daily basis as long as she
would not have had her son circumcised.
The
circumcised, or those who have been threatened by castration, may find a way
out and may believe in a lessening in their favour of the universal Law. There
is nothing like circumcision or an actual threat of castration to pervert a
child. Doubting the acts or words of their progenitors is hard for them. They
are naturally led to boast, with a wealth of arguments, about their deeds or
misdeeds, including those against themselves. Once adults, things that seem to
have always existed look natural to them, they will reproduce them.
The
circumcised thus risk making an absurd alibi of their disability. A partial castration
brings them the comfort of a sign of "identification" that not only
places them above women but also above the common herd. As if a mutilation could enable to
leave (or... not to leave) infancy behind! No only other men, "foreigners",
are intimately considered to be despicable, dirty and untouchable without one
being contaminated, but above all, it would be unthinkable that they would
marry their daughters or sisters. Racist endogamy and possession of women thus certainly
are one of the aims of the operation. Circumcision is also an exterior sign of
belonging to a violent – and therefore assumed powerful – community. Allegedly
more reliable than identity documents, the collective
so-called identity of a simple
particular sign becomes the paradigm of the narcissism of groups that exclude themselves
from of the universal community through discriminating it. This feature of
identification forever puts its holders in a caste: "the elected",
which may think that everything is allowed (stoning, excision, forcing into
marriage, polygamy,... etc.) or owed (the Promised Land) to it. Therefore, through
a violent action into the unconscious and the powerful affective world, it is a
perverse technique of enrolment of the individual. It reinforces divisions of
the world into rival groups indulging in merciless wars.
