The Nuclear Complexes- Antigone

revision:

Previously I said that the Polydectys myth in Perseus was the nuclear complex for the subject altruist (SA). In some ways I still see it as so, but it represents the behaviour of the subject altruist with the good father transference or seeking to establish it so the SA can have her ego ideal of independence and self-assertion. I think the myth of Antigone is better to illustrate the actual complex or repetition once the father transference is lost. Although, as my analysis shows, the story is not about the repetition itself so much as the inability to set it up. This results in either taking a perverse solution or a regression (Antigone wanting to lie with the body of her dead brother and ultimately committing suicide).

By looking at Antigone alone it’s similar to only doing a single case study with a patient when what is theoretically valuable is finding the commonality between multiple cases.

I’ve had a patient who has shared her Elektra complex with me, and have read of a couple instances in others, so I know what it looks like. A woman is in love with a man, and that man chooses another woman who the initial woman feels quite superior to and she wants to murder both the man and the chosen woman because she can’t bear her satisfaction of being chosen. In the Elektra myth the way that this situation would correspond to the myth while still representing the original family triangle would be that Agamemnon represents the initial ‘good father’ who chose Elektra and Clytementstra’s lover represents the ‘bad father’ who is the same person but now seen as the betrayer. Additionally, in the myth Orestes commits the murder so we must read him as representing Elektra (maybe her masculine part) or someone who is merely carrying out her intention.

In psychoanalysis it is well established that drives take active and passive forms (eat-be eaten, exhibition-scopophilia, sadism-masochism, etc.). So the first important thing about reading this myth again is that while Elektra has active destruction towards her mother and her new lover, in Anitgone’s case it is she and Haemon as the new lovers who aren’t yet married who have destruction turned upon themselves (they both commit suicide). If we also read the brother as a part of Antigone then we have a cause for her unhappiness in the unfairness that Polyneices faced. He agreed with his brother to take turns ruling the city but when it came to his turn his brother wouldn’t step down and Creon, the father in this situation, chose to see him as in the wrong.

-So Elektra begins as a girl who is feeling sexually accepted by the man and in revenge for not being chosen she murders him and his chosen lover.

-she begins as an object egoist who wants to cause desire in the man and then her ‘masculine’ side rises up when she feels wronged.

-Antigone begins with a girl trying out her sexuality and when it is treated as unfeminine or not acceptable she then turns her aggression inward upon herself

-she begins as a subject altruist who love her father and masculine sexuality or enactment of masculine sexual roles toward the father (i.e. being active in approach the sexual object) are met with disapproval if not censor and lead to a retraction of this activity in self- destructive pull to death.

So the good father is the one who chooses the object egoist over her rivals and the good father is the one who treats the subject altruist's sexual assertion as acceptable . These will continue to take place with father substitutes.

Freud used to refer to his daughter at Antigone or Anna Antigone which gives a further reading to this myth.  Freud has detailed,  “Analysis very often shows that a little girl, after she has had to relinquish her father as a love-object, will bring her masculinity into prominence and identify herself with her father (that is, with the object which has been lost), instead of with her mother” (The Ego and the Id, p.32). In this sense, her brother wouldn't stand for her but for father Oedipus who is also her brother. He has died and she wants to see to it that his name and honour live on. It's clear that Anna remained unmarried and a virgin and fought for orthodox Freudianism to remain. It's possible the myth can be read this way but, as I've suggested, there's more strength in reading several myths together. Moreover, if such is the case then Antigone would be a myth about perversion

Chasseguet-Smirgel recognizes that the Oedipus complex represents the crucial experience of the difference between the sexes and the generations. She, along with McDougall, holds that this can be a turning point for a regressive ideal of perversion, that denies these differences. She uses the work of the Marquis de Sade to illustrate this effacement of difference:

men and women, children and old people, virgins and whores, nuns and bawds, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, uncles and nephews, noblemen and rabble: 'All will be higgledy-piggledy, all will wallow, on the flagstones, on the earth, and, like animals, will interchange, will mix, will commit incest, adultery and sodomy'… (Chasseguet-Smirgel, J.  Perversion and the Universal Law, p. 294).

Having elders and children and men and women engaged in homosexual acts, incest, or sodomy is clearly a effacement of these differences. However, for all intensive purposes for a girl to identify with her father and live out her life in imitation of him and with continuing the glory of his name (or to take care of him when he’s alive) is to get rid of the difference between the sexes and the generations as far as she is concerned. She doesn’t have a child or husband and establish herself as an adult and by staying a virgin she doesn’t recognize the difference of the sexes. Similarly, the perversion of the object egoist is narcissism in the sexual sense. She becomes in love with her own beauty, particularly her face since perversion involves a displacement upwards from below as Ferenczi indicates. The sexual narcissist, like the Queen in Snow White who is forever looking into the mirror and imagining herself to be the most beautiful and remains unmarried, also gets past the difference between the sexes and generations by sexualizing herself.

To strengthen my interpretation I think that the failure of Polyneices to be given his turn to rule would fit even better with the ego ideal aspect of the complexes. So far I have been dealing with the private or sexual aspect of these complexes but there is also the public or social aspects to. For the object egoist it isn’t just causing desire or love in the man in regards to herself, on the social level she can seek to do the same with her command of education, art, and refinements. She can seek to take pride in bringing refinement to others and the art world and the church have never been short on women patronesses who wish to elevate others. This isn't from altruism but from having others accept their superior refinement. In regards to the subject altruist the same satisfaction that is found in the sexual assertion is found in social assertion in which she will try to be independent and work. As on female analyst writes:

the hysteric seeks sustained interest, excitement, and especially approval… while all interacting persons manipulate others to fulfil personal needs, the hysteric achieves his particular goal by seeming relatively helpless and dependent… To the extent that I’m hysterical I care more that you like me than that you agree with me or even understand me… hysterical approval seeking is a search for emotional holding, though phrased as if help is what is needed. The hysteric can behave quite independently as long as a fantasy is maintained that another presides over that activity as a parent, authority, seat of power, and fount of love (Lionells, ‘A Reevaluation of Hysterical Relatedness, p. 571-3).

Without the good father fantasy in a subject altruist will regress to a place in which she feels that she can't do things on her own. Antigone approaching her sister to help with the burial, may be a triangulation of the "castrated girl" approaching the castrated mother for help but it not being enough. All other people are happy with their jobs, marriages, or children but this is not a possibility for the subject altruist, aggression is directed inward at her "inner" married couple or "inner" hope for happiness in independent work. Chasseguet-Smirgel has made a hugely important contribution which still seems to be ignored. In Feminine Guilt and the Oedipus Complex Chasseguet-Smirgel takes a sober look at the place of women in society.

I would readily see this as the source of one of woman’s main conflicts, that of being relative to men, just as nearly all of woman’s cultural or social achievements are. Women are said to produce few original works; they are often the brilliant disciple of a man or of a masculine theory. They are rarely leaders of movements. This is surely the effect of a conflict specific to women… [they] are cured of their symptoms only in order to make publicity for their analyst; they feel they are a successful product, and experience their analysis as though the future and the reputation of the analyst depended on it (131).

She relates this to

  

“A girl’s guilt toward her father does not interfere merely with her sexual life but extends to her achievements in other fields if they take on an unconscious phallic significance. Inhibition related to this guilt seems to me chiefly responsible for women’s place in culture and society today… I found that in patients suffering from chronic headaches their guilt over surpassing their parents on an intellectual level (… as though reproducing an autocastration of the intellectual faculties) was usually linked to the father, in both male and female patients. For both sexes successful intellectual activity is the unconscious equivalent of possessing the penis. For women this means they have the father’s penis and have thus dispossessed the mother, the Oedipal drama. In addition they have also castrated the father. 106

She again points out what is obvious in society and what she continually finds with her patients

Far from being autonomous with regard to the object, she is closely dependent on it and is also its complement. She is the right hand, the assistant, the colleague, the secretary, the auxiliary, the inspiration for an employer, a lover, a husband, a father. She may also be a companion for old age, guide, or nurse. One sees the basic conflicts underlying such relationships in clinical practice. 124…During her analysis, she thinks of taking up some professional activity. At the beginning of his career  her husband had written some commercial songs to earn money. She had contributed the main ideas for these, so he now suggested that she write her own songs. But she says she is incapable of doing that- she could never be inspired unless the song could be considered his creation. 127

Reading Antigone as only living for the glory of her brother-father doesn't help us understand why the mother commits suicide later. However, in this interpretation, the daughter feels unable to surpass mother or father. At best she gets herself a subordinate position under a man but even then she must be self-effacing regarding co-employees and worried of her own selfishness or presumptuousness. Where before she had the sense she could find her own independence although with modesty in what she could accomplish (she would never presume to take the father's place), now she might not even deserve a very subordinate place.   

Thus, the suicide of the mother creates a necessary triangle of self-effacement and putting the happiness or pleasure of others before one's own or not feeling entitled to have what they don't have. After the suicide of Antigone and Haemon as those who would have the future happiness of family and love- again, this reading would require the parallel between (active) death of the parental couple in Elektra and a displacement of the (passive) death of the inner parental couple-  the mother (Creon's wife) would represent the place of Antigone. She can't enjoy her life because they can't enjoy their lives. Reich's writing on the 'masochist' complaining to authority figures also seems to capture Antigone's relationship to Creon in that she challenges his laws in relation to the unhappiness of another (i.e. her complaining is a triangle). The masochist doesn't complain about her unhappiness but about things on behalf of others.

If I'm right, maybe Antigone complex should be reserved for the reference to the triangular repetition
of needing to find a friend or intimate who can "help" one to be independent or do things that require self-assertion and the self-effacement of not having more than others- maybe even pushing potential love interests towards friends and others.    

psychoanalysis is dead- ministry of souls

“I don't know whether you have guessed the hidden link between 'Lay Analysis' and Illusion'. In the former I want to protect analysis from physicians, and in the latter from priests. I want to entrust it to a profession that doesn't yet exist, a profession of secular ministers of souls, who don't have to be physicians and must not be priests."

S. Freud (1928) in his letter to O. Pfister

I remember seeing this statement of Freud's, or something similar that captured the beauty of psychoanalysis, maybe 10 years ago. Shortly after I went to the public library and saw Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious displayed cover first in the psychology section and I took it out. I was very excited to read it. I didn't like it- save for the witticism 'famillionaire' which I thought was pretty good and stole for myself. I saw nothing of the secular ministry of souls in it. It took me 5 years before I came back to psychoanalysis and it wasn't through Freud but through Wilhelm Reich and Lacan.

Obviously Freud's hope was never realized. The physicians after him turned psychoanalysis into a dogma, and those not beholden to a religious outlook went on to worship the soul of culture or 'discourse' without any interest in the individual.

Now that psychoanalysis is dead the hope is reborn that a Newton of depth psychology might arise to synthesize the work of all the schools in both theory and praxis. My worry is that the rare people who can pave the way for such a person either want to be Newton themselves or can't endure the isolation of studying something dead (or only care for it to the extent that they can use it to be clever).

  

masochistic character: foreclosure of active-egoistic development

In an earlier post I drew attention to Reich's finding that the masochist character structure besides its fixations, potential deutero stages, failure to instinctually renounce impulses to form an ego ideal, its superego conscience reactions, etc. in its altruistic track of development, it is essential to this structure to see that it is marked by failing to develop a proto-phallic ego ideal on its egoistic track.

http://psychoanalysis-tcp.blogspot.com/2012/06/further-factor-in-economics-of-libido.html

In my recent research I found that Klein seconds this finding (albeit without the precision of Reich).

Klein, M. (1928). Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict

In the girl identification with the mother results directly from the Oedipus impulses: the whole struggle caused in the boy by his castration-anxiety is absent in her. In girls as well as boys this identification coincides with the anal-sadistic tendencies to rob and destroy the mother. If identification with the mother takes place at a stage at which the oral- and anal-sadistic tendencies predominate, dread of a primitive maternal super-ego will lead to the repression and fixation of this phase and interfere with further genital development. Dread of the mother, too, impels the little girl to give up identification with her, and identification with the father begins (p. 174)

Movie Interpretation: Thelma and Louise

updated

I have several interpretations to offer for Thelma and Louise but will only focus on two in any detail. The first is the superego/paranoia reading. This reading requires two theoretical apparati . The first is Freud’s construction of the stage of primary narcissism in its ontogenetic form. It is constructed through looking at the behaviour of people suffering from psychosis as well as people who are bed-ridden and physically ill and how both seem to not care about finding success or love.  Freud writes that “libido and ego-interest share the same fate and are once more indistinguishable from each other” and have been withdrawn from objects in the outside world (On Narcissism 82-3). While Freud claims that the child initially makes itself its own ideal Jacobson, Klein, and others dispute this and see megalomania as a defensive process (Freeman, Some Aspects of Pathological Narcissism, p. 553; Hendrick, Early Development of the Ego, p. 57; Klein, Envy and Gratitude, p. 76) and arising later in development (Jacobson, ‘The Self and the Object World’, p.102). Instead, Jacobson believes the primary narcissistic stage can be:

the genetic origin of the opposing, active-aggressive and passive-submissive attitudes to different phases in the child's earliest experiences of oral gratification. The desires either to make the mother part of himself or to become part of her appear, indeed, to be derived from fantasies of either devouring the love object or being devoured by it (Jacobson, Self and Object World, p.101).

While the sick person withdraws his ego interest from the world temporarily, so his energy can focussed on getting better, the psychotic has ‘foreclosed’ his ego ideals and remains at the primary narcissistic stage of being able to satisfy the phantasy of possessing the mother or being a part of her without action. Many writers criticize Freud for his idea of primary narcissism from a misunderstanding. The ego, in Freud’s view, has been developing since birth and the child has been interacting with sense perceptions of the mother and there have been interactions between the two. By the time of the stage of primary narcissism the ego has gone through significant developments already. It has left the realm of 2-d vision and autistic sensations of objects and brightness for the realm of 3-d mnemic traces and recognition of things in its environment. However, the child doesn’t have an ego ideal to force it or drive it to ego-competitive or object-loving interactions with others.  “The development of the ego [ideal] consists in a departure from primary narcissism and gives rise to a vigorous attempt to recover that state” Freud writes, “[t]his departure is brought about by means of the displacement of  libido on to an ego ideal imposed from without; and satisfaction is brought about from fulfilling this ideal” (On Narcissism, p.100).

Roughly there are 5 stages that Freud mentions 1. The ocular, auto-erotic, or autistic 2. The oral, primary narcissism 3. The anal 4. The phallic 5. Latency.  The ego, qua whole self-representation, begins at the oral and in the following stages the child can no longer simply fantasize that it will control or possess. or merge or resonate with the mother in the future without living up to its ideals. Roughly, at the anal stage the child encounters the father imago of absolute perfection (God) and identifies with him to form an ego ideal in which he strives to possess the sole phallus that exists for all people by being the strongest or the smartest. At the phallic stage the child encounters the father imago as worldly perfection (cultural hero) and identifies with him to form an ego ideal in which he strives to posses the phallus that exists in the reputation of his community by being the first in his field (occupation) or in having social power. In latency the child encounters the father as group perfection and identifies with him to form an ego ideal in which he strives for his group to be the most powerful in relation to other groups.

The encounter with the father imago leads not just to the ego ideal but also to a conflict with him that creates signal anxiety at the ocular, anal, phallic, etc. stages and an important issue of whether or not the child fully internalizes the father or not[1]. The relation to the partially internalized father who forms the basis for the Oedipus and every other triangular complex at the anal, oral, etc. stages gives rise to the defences of paranoia and melancholia. The child represses an attack on an object it is making a father imago transference upon and the consequences for having destroyed the father imago means that the impulse is either projected (paranoia) or the badness of the attacked object is introjected (melancholia) so the father imago can be kept alive in some way[2].  At the phallic stage paranoia concerns the ‘interest ego’ and someone who wants to ruin one’s reputation or success or humiliate one. At the anal stage paranoia concerns the ‘body ego’ and someone who wants to kill or destroy one. At the oral stage paranoia concerns the ‘skin ego’ and the boundary of inside and outside being overcome by a bad outside. Lastly, at the ocular stage, in which separation from the mother is only based upon her as a part object (i.e breast) paranoia is total annihilation and often not just of oneself but a huge disaster or catastrophe that takes the world along with it.

Melanie Klein gives the phantasy equivalents to these things a specific shape, so that even though we don’t have the explicit discussion of these ontogenetic levels of functioning we can tell by the phantasy images that they are taking place. It must be remembered that Klein isn’t talking about the child imagining such complex images as if from a host of possible choices. Criticism of her work often portrays the child as having cogitation that is too complex for such early development but it misses the point. Rather the images of the father imago or persecutors would come from its own organ or bodily sensations: feelings hunger and an empty belly; feeling its early uncoordinated musculature only manifesting in little knots here and there in its body, (etc.). My interpretation of Thelma and Louise is that in terms of images we have a steady decline from the phallic level down to the auto-erotic or ocular stage in which Thelma and Louise lose all ego ideals and father images and even the final separation of part self and part-object representation. I believe the logical conclusion in this order or sequence is that the  final regression from the early ocular-auto-erotic stage to a point before part self-representation exists, is likely not rejoining with the mother in a return to the womb, but to post-natal stage that doesn’t possess a part-self-representation[3].      

Each stage of regression must involve 1. Initial signal anxiety in relation to the partially internalized father imago. 2. An attack on the partially internalized father (phallus) imago 3. Paranoia or persecutory anxiety.

The first signal anxiety in the movie is when Harlan tries to rape Thelma outside of the bar. Helen Deutsch writes: "It is interesting to note that, when the father is blamed for the little girl's lack of a penis, castration by him has already acquired the libidinal significance attaching to this idea in the form of the rape-phantasy (Deutsch, The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women, p. 50). Although Deutsch calls this a phantasy she later mentions the anxiety associated with it (ibid., 54).
Louise killing Harlan after he tried to rape Thelma would be the first attack on the father imago and results in the paranoid vengeance figure of Hal the detective trying to bring them to justice. At first Hal just wants to bring them in for questioning and seems well disposed and sympathetic but viewing the persecutor this way is not incompatible with the potential harm he represents[4]. We can conjecture that they might be charged and have their names associated with a crime (i.e. their good name or reputation brought down) even though Hal’s sympathy implies they won’t do serious time. However, after they commit robbery and put a patrolman into the trunk of his car he changes his position and the persecutory aspect rises to the fore:

      HAL   Then I'm sorry.  We're gonna have to charge you with murder.  Now, do you  want to come out of this alive?.... LOUISE    You know, certain words and phrases  just keep floating through my mind,  things like incarceration, cavity  search, life imprisonment, death by  electrocution, that sort of thing.  So, come out alive?  I don't know.  Let us think about that.

This situation would be a blending of phallic and anal positions because the patrolman they 'locked in the trunk' represents anal signal anxiety. In terms of social ontology the phallic father imago is a cultural hero or someone who is famous and the first in his field or occupation while the anal father is god-like or a ruler over a whole people. This difference can be seen in Star Wars, for example, in which Darth Vader is in high command of the army but the emperor is the ruler of the empire. Although, here we are dealing with images/phantasy alone and don't have the presented social ontology, there is a similarity between the patrolman and the emperor in that they both have their eyes hidden[5]. The emperor has his cowl or hood covering his eyes and the patrolman has his sunglasses. This is part of the anal Oedipus complex in that it’s not possible to look at the primal father’s face or in his eyes like mythology holds that one can’t look upon God[6].

Although Thelma and Louise put the patrolman in the trunk of his car, they don’t kill him or do something that could lead to his death (they even shoot air holes in the trunk for him). This means that the next murder of the father imago occurs when Thelma and Louise blow up the tanker trunk. Compared to their car the enormous cylindrical tanker truck represents the “unique and gigantic” properties of the anal phallus or father. Now, instead of Hal the detective as the image of the figure after them, the girls are next chased by police cars. The anal phallus by image is uncastrateable. When one castrates it another comes to take its place. In the car chase we watch as one police car crashes, only to show another police car closing the distance, to crash again, and then another… [7].

The next instance of signal anxiety is clearly when Thelma and Louise escape the regenerating police cars but then see 3 patrol cars approaching on the other lane of the highway. I can’t say much about what makes these 3 cars represent oral signal anxiety but I can say that the number 3 in analytic literature is associated with penis (1 penis and 2 testicles). Additionally, compared to the giant explosion of the anal phallus the next act of violence seems much reduced. The only noticeable thing is that during the chase “Louise and Thelma blow through a stand of buildings left from when the train went through here” (script).  Although this blow through the stand of buildings didn’t kill anyone, going through the fence in an area in which there were people (there was laundry hung out to dry) could have killed someone. However, I take Winnicot’s transitional object of the oral stage to be an instance of the father imago (i.e. the infant in instinctual renunciation turns from the mother to the not-mother object). Thus, it is a deeper interpretation here to take the violence to be against things (property) than against humans.  Anyway, after this destruction of property or things occurs the police cars are no longer following in single file but appear as a swarm: “They are now being pursued by at least fifteen cars…police cars are swarming across the desert” (script).  Compared to the multiple and regenerating anal phallus, the oral persecutory is represented as a swarm of penises inside the mother which can be externalized defensively[8].

Lastly, in escape from the oral swarm of police persecutors the girls almost go off the cliff into the grand canyon. A single helicopter appeared just before this happens and I take this to be ocular signal anxiety in relation to the single penis found in the mother’s breast (part-object)[9]. This leads to the attack on the father imago which is even more subtle than the oral one. A massive amount of police cars and FBI agents surround Thelma and Louise and an officer announces:  

      POLICE (O.S.)  (over loudspeaker) This is the Arizona Highway Patrol. You are under arrest.  You are considered armed and dangerous.  Any failure to obey any command will be considered an act of aggression against us (script, emphasis mine).

  

Thelma likens the gathered police and agents to an “army” and there is an extreme sense of overkill about the scene reminiscent of cartoons in which a character has guns, bombs, missiles, etc. (all the weapons of the army) directed against another. This ‘overkill’ obviously has a function of turning the violence into something so unreal that parents won’t object to their children enjoying something so absurd, but, at the same time it firmly captures the annihilation paranoia at work in this stage[10]. The parents are so much bigger than the infant and it has next to no coordination of its musculature and this disparity might give a sense of how the persecution might feel even though the child doesn’t have the cognitive capacity of grasping any of this. Rather, the subjective sense of the infant’s plight comes from the its part self-representation being tenuously separated from the breast as part-object. Because it has the smallest amount of ego differentiation it lacks defense except for the most primitive and brutal scotomatization or projection of the cognitive apparatus itself which leads, as Bion points out, into bizarre objects (i.e. the phonograph that listens to the child) (Bion, Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic Personalities).

After their non-compliance that becomes an act of aggression, the annihilation paranoia or persecution is felt by Thelma and Louise but, as with the other stages, they foreclose the father imago and choose to regress. They choose psychic death in union with the mother in which even the part-self representation doesn’t exist. It is possible to take this ocular foreclosure to mean a return to the birth stage but I have the sense that there is ego development prior to the part object (just as there is in the womb) that doesn’t yield even part-object representations ‘for consciousness’ although the ego must follow the same procedure of being built from internalization. This is important because melancholic reactions that occur at the ocular or oral level will have depressive reactions that show up as lack of energy and disposition to illness, but I believe cancer can be conceived of as a pre-self-representation biological melancholic reaction to the father imago[11].

---

[1] The process which normally serves as the final solution of these successive anxiety situations is comprehensible to us through the phenomena by which we recognize identification. Those identifications resulting from each successive type of aggression contribute functions to the ego which, on the one hand, are essential to the permanent mastery of the corresponding anxiety, and, on the other hand, to the full development of the functions which constitute the ego.

The failure to complete any of these identifications results in a defect in ego-organization which is manifest in adult life by one or another type of defect in the management of instinctual impulses in a mature way without an excess of inhibition (Hendrick, Ego Development and Certain Character Problems, p. 338).

[2] Joyce McDougall also brings out this partial internalization state. Working with homosexual women she writes that the phallic father is internalized but not fully: “the daughter appears to have abandoned him as an object of libidinal wishes at the height of the classical Oedipal period (McDougall, Homosexuality in Women, p.191). This partially internalized father is “zealously guarded” Joyce writes, because he “is a bulwark against psychotic dissolution” (ibid. p. 191). Klein mentions the genetic connection between paranoia and melancholia in A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States (p. 148).

[3]  Freud’s concept of oceanic oneness with the earth is experienced before the ego puts up inside and outside barriers (i.e. the skin ego of oral-primary narcissism, Civilization, p.66-8). It clearly needs to exist after birth so that the oneness with the earth can have content. I understand this oneness as the proto-ocular stage and the part-self representation occurs at partial identification with the father imago. However, it is likely that development in the ego occurs post-natally before this point is reached although it is not ‘for-consciousness’. 

[4] “The central thrust of her paper is to make the contrast before and after this change in the relation with objects - in effect, from what she calls paranoia to a relationship of sad concern for the object. That emphasis stands out in the material that ‘Rt’ gave her - such as his ‘amazing’ suspicion whilst admiring his analyst” (Hinshelwood, R.D, Melanie Klein and Repression: An Examination of Some Unpublished Notes of 1934, p. 19).

[5] Imagistically Darth Vader is clearly a phallic deutero combined parent figure. The helmet resembles a woman’s profile (long hair) and his cassock resembles a woman’s dress as most priestly garb does.

[6] The hypnotist asserts that he is in possession of a mysterious power that robs the subject of his own will; or, which is the same thing, the subject believes it of him. This mysterious power (which is even now often described popularly as ‘animal magnetism’) must be the same power that is looked upon by primitive people as the source of taboo, the same that emanates from kings and chieftains and makes it dangerous to approach them (mana). The hypnotist, then, is supposed to be in possession of this power; and how does he manifest it? By telling the subject to look him in the eyes; his most typical method of hypnotizing is by his look. But it is precisely the sight of the chieftain that is dangerous and unbearable for primitive people, just as later that of the Godhead is for mortals. Even Moses had to act as an intermediary between his people and Jehovah, since the people could not support the sight of God; and when he returned from the presence of God his face shone—some of the mana had been transferred on to him, just as happens with the intermediary among primitive people. (Group psych, p. 125)

[7]  Klein talks of anal paranoia as being multiple:

He…felt as though they were his enemies and were hemming him in and weighing him down by clinging so closely to his body. They represented his internalized objects and excrements which were persecuting him from within. In virtue of the displacement of his fears of internal dangers into the external world, his enemies inside him had been transformed into enemies outside him. (Psychoanalysis of Children, p. 353). Chasseguet-Smirgel talks of the uncastrateable anal phallus in Perversion, Idealization and Sublimation (p. 356).

[8] When I described the fight which in phantasy John had inside the mother's body with his father's penises (crabs)—actually with a swarm of them—I pointed out that the meat-house, which had apparently not been broken into and which John was trying to prevent them from getting into, represented not only the inside of his mother's body but his own inside (A Contribution to the Theory of Intellectual Inhibtion, p. 212).

[9] Besides the swarm of penises and multiple excrements Klein speaks of an earlier single penis inside the mother’s body “her destructive impulses against her mother's body and her father's penis imagined to be inside it (Psychoanalysis of Children, p. 91). Later she refines this to say the single penis is found in relation to the breast: “Phantasies of the penis inside the mother, or inside her breast, turn the father into a hostile intruder. This phantasy is particularly strong when the infant has not had the full enjoyment and happiness that the early relation to the mother can afford him and has not taken in the first good object with some security” (Envy and Gratitude, p.197, emphasis mine). Additionally, the autistic signal anxiety has been related as ‘falling anxiety’ (Reich) and a black hole (Grotstein) that is well symbolized by falling into the Grand Canyon. This falling is felt to be endless and shows the encounter with the father as the ego function of space (2-d to 3-d vision) and mythically is shown in Uranus embracing Gaia (ocular), just as the skin ego, representing the self-representation over time, is shown in Cronos (oral). Zeus is clearly the emergence of the object as perfection (anal) and Heracles enters as the cultural hero (phallic).    

[10] We are, I think, justified in assuming that some of the functions which we know from the later ego are there in the beginning. Prominent amongst these functions is that of dealing with anxiety. I hold that anxiety arises from the operation of the Death Instinct within the organism, is felt as fear of annihilation (death) and takes the form of fear of persecution. (Some Schizoid Mechanisms, p. 100, emphasis mine).

[11] Klein maintains that there are phantasies related to these pre-self-representation identifications and internalizations: Other important sources of primary anxiety are the trauma of birth (separation anxiety) and frustration of bodily needs; and these experiences too are from the beginning felt to be caused by bad objects. Even if these objects are felt to be external, they become through introjection internal persecutors and thus reinforce the fear of the destructive impulse within (Some Schizoid Mechanisms, p. 100). The self and object representations in pre-ocular instances still find their basis in bodily sensations and even though they aren’t ‘for consciousness’ it’s clear that consciousness, and the following self-consciousness, are preceded by cogitation or mind. For example, we don’t have to think about or be aware of our hear-beat, breathing, and many other simple bodily processes although we can be and that is because of an awareness more primitive than consciousness that can be tapped into.   

   

psychoanalytic basics: the superego; guilt; topographical anxiety

Although my primary focus is on the ego ideal I believe it’s important to examine the superego both to contrast it to the ideal and get a sense for the cognitive development at a given stage. I’d like to begin my evaluation of Milrod’s interpretation by first looking at one of his clinical examples of superego guilt. Milrod gives the case of a married man who had an affair. He reported feelings of envy and lust regarding the actors he worked with as well as inferiority about his own appearance. He found a mature mistress who would understand that it was just a fling and his wife wouldn’t know, so it wouldn’t hurt anyone in his estimation. He felt elated by the experience but when he got home his wife wasn’t there and he was “thrust into morbid self-condemnation, and certain his wife had learned of his adventure” (ibid. 144). He called his wife’s friends and family in desperation and he went to the bedroom in tears to escape in sleep. However, he found his wife and child asleep in the bed “like angels”. Milrod writes that not finding his wife and imagining that she knew and had left him was a “punitive function of his superego indicating that he felt he deserved to be abandoned for his sin” and that his elation on the way home was “caused by denial of guilt feelings” (ibid., 144).

Turning to Freud, I believe Milrod’s example highlights one of many misinterpretations of the superego in his work. Freud is explicit about how the post-oedipal superego functions and Milrod seems to ignore his most sustained investigation of the superego in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud writes:

To begin with, if we ask how a person comes to have a sense of guilt, we arrive at an answer which cannot be disputed: a person feels guilty (devout people would say ‘sinful’) when he has done something which he knows to be ‘bad’… we shall add that even when a person has not actually done the bad thing but has only recognized in himself an intention to do it, he may regard himself as guilty; and the question then arises of why the intention is regarded as equal to the deed. Both cases, however, presuppose that one had already recognized that what is bad is reprehensible, is something that must not be carried out (Civilization, p.124)

It seems strange that Milrod regards his patient as possessing guilt when he never brought up reservations about his affair before he had it- when it was just an intention. Furthermore, there is no discussion about coming clean to his wife afterwards. We all know people who do something wrong, and aren’t found out, but yet have to confess to their spouses or whoever they wrong in order to come clean. A full superego conscience means that someone will seeks to make amends for what they’ve done or face potential punishment or the bad consequences of his actions. What Milrod has described has much more in common with what Freud calls social anxiety:

This state of mind is called a ‘bad conscience’; but actually it does not deserve this name, for at this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, ‘social’ anxiety. In small children it can never be anything else, but in many adults, too, it has only changed to the extent that the place of the father or the two parents is taken by the larger human community. Consequently, such people habitually allow themselves to do any bad thing which promises them enjoyment, so long as they are sure that the authority will not know anything about it or cannot blame them for it; they are afraid only of being found out  (ibid., p.124-5)

 

For Milrod’s patient to not have had any reservations before the deed, to not seek to come clean after, and for him to impute knowledge of the event to his wife though he was no doubt very careful to conceal things from her shows that he childlike overestimation or transference to her that would be expected in social anxiety. It is clear that he feared loss of love from her and, in contrast, Milrod has to claim several defenses before and after the fact to explain it as guilt. Moreover, it is ridiculous to think that the patient felt like he had to tell his wife and come clean with his conscience but that Milrod just left that part out.

Now that we have a concept of what guilt is, how the guilty person acts, and Milrod’s lack of sensitivity to these distinctions, I’d like to approach his general theoretical claim that the superego is suddenly formed after the Oedipus complex. It is true that Freud has several statements in which it appears that he claims that the superego doesn’t exist until after the Oedipus complex however, he has statements to the opposite effect and these suggest the former statements are hyperbolic and that they are made to stress the fact that many people lack guilt in the way just described. In Civilization Freud formulates this explicitly:

A great change takes place only when the authority is internalized through the establishment of a super-ego. The phenomena of conscience then reach a higher stage. Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of conscience or a sense of guilt… [However, in the footnote to this Freud writes:] [e]veryone of discernment will understand and take into account the fact that in this summary description we have sharply delimited events which in reality occur by gradual transitions, and that it is not merely a question of the existence of a super-ego but of its relative strength and sphere of influence (Civilization, p. 125)

Freud, in admitting that there are gradual transitions and that it is a question of relative strength and influence, reveals that he stresses the sphere of influence and strength of the post-oedipal conscience for didactic reasons. And, as we saw with Milrod’s case study, Freud’s efforts have been wasted on many of his interpreters. When I later turn to an assessment of Freud’s account of the superego I’ll examine more closely what pre-oedipal conscience might look like by following some of his remarks about remorse and the anal superego or ‘sphincter morality’.

....

I will have more to say about this in the next section, but for now I want to finish off my examination of Milrod’s interpretation. It is clear that he wants to grant the ego self-observation in order to claim that when the superego is formed after the Oedipus complex that a new relation of autonomy exists that is fundamentally different from the ego’s self-observation. In other words, Milrod wants to keep alive a sense of agency and freedom in what he calls the moral and ethical content of the post-oedipal ego ideal. However, in contrast to Milrod’s view that the post-oedipal ego ideal is both beyond identification and not dependent on external objects is an important passage in ‘The Ego and the Id’ that he neglects to mention in any of his work. Freud writes:

It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved. The self-judgement which declares that the ego falls short of its ideal produces the religious sense of humility to which the believer appeals in his longing. As a child grows up, the role of father is carried on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship. The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt. Social feelings rest on identifications with other people, on the basis of having the same ego ideal.

Religion, morality, and a social sense—the chief elements in the higher side of man—were originally one and the same thing. According to the hypothesis which I put forward in Totem and Taboo they were acquired phylogenetically out of the father-complex: religion and moral restraint through the process of mastering the Oedipus complex itself, and social feeling through the necessity for overcoming the rivalry that then remained between the members of the younger generation. (The Ego and The Id, p.37, emphasis mine).

 Although Milrod in ‘The Ego Ideal’ notes Freud’s claim that homosexual impulses play a role in the formation of the ego ideal in ‘On Narcissism’ he doesn’t mention the father complex. He also doesn’t address the direct statement “ the role of father is carried on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship”. This, of course, contradicts his claim that the post-oedipal ego ideal is beyond identification and not dependent on external objects. Furthermore, the extra step of the father complex that removes the formation of the ego ideal and puts it on an instinctual basis (the renunciation of homosexual impulses towards the father) distances the ego ideal from the Oedipal event in which Milrod can imagine that the soul suddenly flies into the body and with it a sense of freedom[1].  To be fair, even though Milrod neglects to provide his readers with Freud’s whole picture he does acknowledge that

admired love objects other than parents may be the source of elements that are internalized into the superego. Society's standards, to the degree that they are known, will also participate (Freud, 1914). The steady detachment of superego functions and substructures from the original objects leads to the autonomy of superego functions, both from objects and from the drives (The Superego, p.140).

The problem with this view is that Milrod seems to imply that identification can only occur with someone in relation to their job or hobby (his wished for self image) but that when it comes to following the injunctions and prohibitions of father-substitutes the identifications are only the source of elements. The implication is that the child will choose what is moral wholly on his own, and parental views and society’s standards can participate but also, if they are not known, won’t participate in his ‘superego identifications’. When I try to understand Milrod’s view here the picture that comes to mind is that of a contemporary bourgeois consumer who is deciding if he will buy a yoga membership and get into eastern religion, or if he feels closer to something more pagan, or if he’d prefer a traditional Christian church. However, clearly Chrisitianity was the only game in town for long stretches of time in Western society and it would have been the only tradition, and it seems absurd to imagine a child who wouldn’t have heard of it. But, Milrod is right in one sense. Freud’s post-oedipal superego guilt conscience is independent of both societal and parental standards, although he is wrong to think that child chooses it in any way. The discrepancy is that Milrod has mixed up post oedipal superego with the superego of later latency.

The superego conscience that is formed in the father complex Freud compares to the categorical imperative[2]. This conscience isn’t determined by traditions or what the child decides himself, but by the ‘golden rule’ of considering how what one does to others would feel like if done to oneself[3]. Also, the ego ideal injunctions and prohibitions in the father complex isn’t about specific religious values, but the general attitude towards religion and social feelings developed with others and can more accurately be seen as an ideal to be a ‘grownup’. This should become clearer when I explore it in the next section in post-Freudian thought, but for now I will  point to what we see today as secular values in being a good voting, tax-paying, parent to one’s children that are treated as normative. The group identities of nation, race, and class won’t become known to the child until later on in latency, and the father complex ego ideal of wanting to be a ‘grownup’ just provides the foundation for which latency development can continue from.

The superego in its form of providing topographical anxiety related to the superego, as opposed to the categorical imperative that derives its strength from castration signal anxiety, finds its content in tradition. “But the same figures who continue to operate in the super-ego as the agency we know as conscience” Freud writes [i]t is from there… their power, behind which lie hidden all the influences of the past and of tradition” (Economic Problem, p. 167). He goes on to call the influences of tradition “a representative of the real external world as well and thus also becomes a model for the endeavours of the ego” (ibid., p.167). Even after tradition supplies content for the superego’s topographical anxiety, by identification that may now go beyond the parents and come from a societal father (a teacher or someone invested with authority in society), the individual, if he actually develops this far, isn’t free to pick and choose his ethics and morality. In Group Psychology Freud points out the wisdom of religion for having festivals:  

It is quite conceivable that the separation of the ego ideal from the ego cannot be borne for long either, and has to be temporarily undone. In all renunciations and limitations imposed upon the ego a periodical infringement of the prohibition is the rule; this indeed is shown by the institution of festivals, which in origin are nothing less nor more than excesses provided by law and which owe their cheerful character to the release which they bring. The Saturnalia of the Romans and our modern carnival agree in this essential feature with the festivals of primitive people, which usually end in debaucheries of every kind and the transgression of what are at other times the most sacred commandments (Group Psychology, p.131).

Freud’s suggestion is that the religion itself (embodied in its institutions and leaders) must undo the prohibition and that it is “temporarily undone” and thus comparable to group psychology in which a lynch mob takes over one’s conscience prohibitions on destructive acts temporarily. If the individual is not preoedipal, perverse, or a psycho-neurotic who hasn’t developed past the father complex, and therefore develops to the point of identifying with an ethical tradition prohibitions against sex, for example, can hold fast in the superego. Again, I don’t think that the child is evaluating the different ethical systems and thinks “I’ll choose the one that tells me I’ll go blind for masturbating because the other religion doesn’t allow me to drink soda”. Clearly, parents or teachers pass on the prohibitions of a tradition to the children and Milrod’s post-oedipal autonomy would need some good concrete examples to save it.

With the difference between conscience as categorical imperative and conscience based upon specific traditions in mind, I’d like to stress that Freud indicates this separation himself in some places “[T]he sense of guilt,” Freud writes, “is at bottom nothing else but a topographical variety of anxiety; in its later phases it coincides completely with fear of the super-ego.” (Civilization, p.135, emphasis mine). He attaches signal anxiety to birth, oral, anal, and phallic stages and clearly says that fear of the superego is in latency (Inhibitions, p. 142). It seems utterly strange to me that the castration signal anxiety that was just encountered at the Oedipal phase is instantly followed by superego anxiety. Again, instead I understand that the castration anxiety is transferred over to the categorical imperative in the father complex and is part of the phallic phase although it sets the foundation for latency. Then “in its later phases,” in latency, the superego becomes heir to the content of religious traditions. This is a crucial distinction and leads to important ideas like Marcuse’s basic vs. surplus repression in which different historical moral systems may instill a sex-positive or sex-negative latency superego conscience.

There is no doubt that the conscience in which intentions can be the cause of guilt shows a tremendous growth of self-consciousness. However, just because this operation is ‘for consciousness’ doesn’t mean that there is a fundamental change in how our motivational/self-esteem system functions. This idea, taken along with the ego ideal beginning in early childhood with a primary identification with the father shows that Freud is looking at the superego as an organizing principle of development and a motivational/self-esteem system all the way along. If one looks closely at his texts, Freud uses the Oedipus complex as an example because it is the most clear to him but he mentions that there are identifications the precede it that follow the same form[4].

While Freud is attacked today for the centrality of the phallus and the father in his account of development, analysts would do better not to apologize for it or defend it as curious but true hallmark of the Oedipus complex. Rather they should see that primary identification and the formation of the ego ideal based upon the father in the individual’s personal prehistory is to see the father as an organizing principle. There are single mothers who raise children, who aren’t psychotic or neurotic and therefore the actual father, or a being with a penis, isn’t necessary. The father is necessary as a negative quality or as the not-mother.  For example, in the fort-da game Freud claims that it is ‘instinctual renunciation’ of the relationship with the mother that grants the ‘great cultural achievement’ of setting up the binary relation of ‘here’ and ‘gone’ in relation to objects and things[5]. Similarly, the claims that perfection, another cultural trait identified with the father and with the ego ideal, is first created by instinctual renunciation as a negative quality[6]. This suggests all developmental phases consist of an instinctual renunciations of id object selection of the mother, the creation of not-mother images of perfection, and that perfection being taken over by the father imago which is then internalized after triangular conflict with him and signal anxiety. Again, post-oedipal internalization, because of development of cognition, just happens to have more content that can become conscious. However, this doesn’t mean that prohibition of certain impulses towards others can’t exist before the Oedipal internalization and result in a bad conscience if they are acted upon. Freud refers to this form of conscience as giving rise to remorse[7][8].

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[1] The ego psychologist Hans Loewald gives a better sense for what Milrod tries to hide behind words like autonomy, and no dependence on external objects. He writes “the submission to the castration threat [is] the decisive step in the establishment of the ego as based on the reality principle” (Ego and Reality, p. 12). However, it is clear that moving from individual self-absorption in concern about one’s own success or love, the move is to that of having an interest in being seen as mature and responsible and being concerned with traditions and institutions (church, political parties, (etc.). It isn’t that the individual suddenly becomes a rational being, it’s that the individual is born into social reality. I’ll discuss this in more detail when I examine the phallic stage in its entirety.  

[2] Only in this way was it possible for the Oedipus complex to be surmounted. The super-ego retained essential features of the introjected persons—their strength, their severity, their inclination to supervise and to punish. As I have said elsewhere, it is easily conceivable that, thanks to the defusion of instinct which occurs along with this introduction into the ego, the severity was increased. The super-ego—the conscience at work in the ego—may then become harsh, cruel and inexorable against the ego which is in its charge. Kant’s Categorical Imperative is thus the direct heir of the Oedipus complex (Economic Problem, p.167, emphasis mine).

[3] Freud gives an example of how the punishment meted out by the categorical imperative follows the same procedure of judging the self representation by how the object representation is treated (and now vice versa).

Let us disentangle identification as it occurs in the structure of a neurotic symptom from its rather complicated connections. Supposing that a little girl (and we will keep to her for the present) develops the same painful symptom as her mother—for instance, the same tormenting cough. This may come about in various ways. The identificationmay come from the Oedipus complex; in that case it signifies a hostile desire on the girl's part to take her mother's place, and the symptom expresses her object-love towards her father, and brings about a realization, under the influence of a sense of guilt, of her desire to take her mother's place: ‘You wanted to be your mother, and now you are—anyhow so far as your sufferings are concerned.’ This is the complete mechanism of the structure of a hysterical symptom  (group psychology, p. 106)

[4] The super-ego arises, as we know, from an identification with the father taken as a model. Every such identification is in the nature of a desexualization or even of a sublimation. (The Ego and the Id, p. 54, emphasis mine).

[5] The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p.15).

[6] It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization. The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction. No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct's persisting tension; and it is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poet's words, [‘Presses ever forward unsubdued.’]. The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in which growth is still free—though with no prospect of bringing the process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal (Freud, BPP, p. 42).

[7] Remorse is a general term for the ego's reaction in a case of sense of guilt. It contains, in little altered form, the sensory material of the anxiety which is operating behind the sense of guilt; it is itself a punishment and can include the need for punishment. Thus remorse, too, can be older than conscience [qua guilt regarding intentions] (Civilization, p. 136, emphasis mine).

[8] Alex Holder in ‘Preoedipal Contributions to the Formation of the Superego’ holds a similar view that “to restrict the [superego’s] contents to the aftermath of the killing of the primal father is to take too narrow a view” of the superego (p. 255).