I've posted about the phallus as
perfection and perfection as a negative quality or the not-mother many times
before. Someone has asked for more support in this claim after I told them about my interpretation of the primal horde myth. The interpretation is that the original procreator deity is formed after a negation of the mother at the proto-phallic stage in which language, jealousy, and reputation exists when the community recognizes the skills, strength, or "knowledge" of the totem animal in its survival in the wild. The creation of the procreator of the tribe is the prototype for the oedipal father and not the other way around and the creation of his imago (i.e. the not-mother = father) from the negation of the mother is internal. Here's what I shared with them.
The phallus or perfection has to be
understood as a negative quality. By this I mean that the most important
relationship a child has is to its mother or primary caregiver and that a
single mother can raise a child that isn’t psychotic or neurotic and this
illustrates that the phallus exists for the child through the mother. Philosophically, Freud’s point about
striving for perfection is simple here. We are finite beings and
can’t grasp the infinite or perfection and therefore it is best understood to
be a negation of the finite. If we understand that the infant wants the
mother’s breast, her hugs and caresses, and desires her finite material body in its
sexuality, then perfection arises as the not-mother. The phallus, as a symbol
of the not mother or not-finite, represents a transitional space where the
child can escape from the strong emotional relationship it has to the mother.
Freud writes:
“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).
Freud’s claim here is a simple one:
the finite mind couldn’t possibly grasp something infinite or perfect even
though philosophers have often claimed the opposite. He ‘naturalistically’
proposes that concepts like perfection have an existence as a negative quality.
This no doubt sounds very philosophical and abstract but yet we all use the
word perfect in common language and therefore it must have a meaning. The
problem is that a thing or person one person describes as perfect may not be so
to another. So instead of looking at these objects as if they possess objective
perfection we can say that that a man describing a woman as perfect might have
idealized her in an ego ideal. Similarly, a person might regard attaining a
certain job or title as representing part of the perfect life and work very
hard to become partner in his firm. However, the instincts ‘persisting tension’
means that even when he does attain it the feeling of triumph will only last
for so long before the ideal will have to find a new object. The real question
in all of this is whether we want to ignore meaning and talk about
neuroscience, ignore science and talk about God, or whether we can follow Freud
and the more difficult and subtle, dialectical approach he takes to
meaning.
An early analyst makes it clear that
the phallus is symbolic of perfection: “the symbol of
the phallus has simultaneously been accepted unconsciously, by both
men and women, as an outstanding mark of fertility, of potency, and
of superiority. (Bousfield, The Castration Complex in Women, p. 121-2)[1].
Freud is also clear in many places that perfection is identified with the
father and an individual’s “helplessness remains and along with it
his longing for his father” (Future of An Illusion, p. 18):
To begin with, we know that God is
a father-substitute; or, more correctly, that he is an exalted father; or,
yet again, that he is a copy of a father as he is seen and
experienced in childhood—by individuals in their own childhood and
by mankind in its prehistory as the father of the primitive
and primal horde. Later on in life the individual sees
his father as something different and lesser. But the ideational
image belonging to his childhood is preserved and becomes merged with
the inherited memory-traces of the primal father to form the
individual's idea of God. (A Seventeenth-Century Demonological
Neurosis, p. 85; Civilization, p. 82).
Not for a moment are we in
the dark as to why a great man ever becomes important. We know that in the mass
of mankind there is a powerful need for an authority who can be
admired, before whom one bows down, by whom one is ruled and perhaps even
ill-treated. We have learnt from the psychology of individual men what the origin
is of this need of the masses. It is a longing for the
father felt by everyone from his childhood onwards, for the same father whom the hero of legend
boasts he has overcome. And now it may begin to dawn on us that all the characteristics with which we equipped the great man
are paternal characteristics, and that the essence of great men for which we
vainly searched lies in this conformity. The decisiveness of thought, the
strength of will, the energy of action tare part of the picture of
a father—but above all the autonomy and independence of the great
man, his divine unconcern which may grow into ruthlessness. One must admire
him, one may trust him, but one cannot avoid being afraid of him too.
We should have been led to realize this from the word itself: who but the father can
have been the ‘great man’ in childhood? (Moses and Monotheism, p. 109-10).
Klein shows that father or his penis is
a symbol of perfection, is the successor to the mother or her breast, and
retains a ‘symbolic equation’ with her.
As we know, and as Abraham especially
has pointed out, the nature of the child's object-relations
and character-formation is very strongly determined by whether its
predominant fixations are situated in the oral-sucking stage or in
the oral-sadistic one. In my opinion this factor is decisive for the formation
of the super-ego as well. The introjection of a
kindly mother leads to the setting up of a
friendly father-imago, owing to
the equation of breast with penis. In
the construction of the super-ego, too, fixations in the
oral-sucking stage will counteract the terrifying identifications which are made under the supremacy of
oral-sadistic impulses (Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, p. 213-4,
emphasis mine)
When the girl turns to
her father's penis as the wished-for object, several factors
concur to make her desire for it very intense. The demands of her
oral-sucking impulses, heightened by the frustration she has suffered
from her mother's breast, create in her an imaginary picture of
her father's penis as an organ which, unlike
the breast, can provide her with a tremendous and
never-ending oral gratification (ibid. p.271, emphasis mine).
[1] The phallus is not just the symbol of perfection, a part-object
symbol of the father-substitute- in the oral, anal, phallic, etc. stages. It is
also the symbol of the father-substitute who is supposed to protect and foster
in regards to the altruistic pole of the personality, or what Bousfield is
pointing to as fertility and what Klein identifies as the life drives. The link
of the not-finite to death instead of perfection is discussed in earlier posts.
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