An edited final paper. Any contemporary blight is due to the fact that this paper engages solely with Freud and nobody else. Papers at the institution I was at are to be written with the prompt of a self-designated guiding question, so:
How is the Oedipal Complex analogous to the Unconscious?
I. Mechanisms of the Unconscious
The Oedipal complex is a hardwired pattern that commits me to the world, it forces me to latch onto another object besides myself. It is a mechanism of the unconscious; that subliminal yet perpetually active region of the brain that instinctively, inherently drives me towards a particular way of operating and comporting myself within the world. As opposed to my conscious, ego-self, in which I feel a sense of will that opens to me the choice of objects I wish to urge myself towards with the expectation of opportunistically achieving satisfaction.[1] The Oedipal complex is the mechanism within the unconscious that commits me towards another, it is the bridge in which I cross in order to be able to love the other.
Everything for me, all of the time, is an interworking of my libido and how it projects itself out into the world; and if it does not project itself outwards, it casts itself inwards in order to finish the circuit of desire.[2] The libido, sexual energy, is the motivating force behind action, is the desire for pleasure and latches itself onto objects in order to find satisfactory completion.[3] Libido’s route is teleological; once desire is stimulated in the subject it demands a release and must find a suitable course of action.[4] As the libido requires completion of its aim, it signifies that this realm of the mind must be like an accumulation of pathways; that the function of my libido is to absolutely realize that which it sets out to do; it knows how to complete itself with the phenomenological stimulus that is given.
I am an energetic whole, both a germ-plasm in which I apportion energy, in turn garnering pleasure, and an agent of my sexuality to which an object-choice presents itself.[5] I am necessarily split in two, a consciousness that gazes and desires and thinks I strive towards my own aims, and an unconsciousness that fundamentally portions and regulates my being in the world. The unconscious is the syntax in which the data from consciousness is formatted.
The unconscious is a living realm within the mind containing an a priori framework that regulates the psychic economy of an individual’s wishes, desires, needs.[6] It is that which I am not actively aware of nor do I have any effective control over. The unconscious life intrudes on conscious life when the overflow of energy from the activity of desire is not able to cathect onto its goal, as the excess reformats itself towards another channel in order to simulate the capture of desire.[7]
Unconscious activity is particularly felt when libidinal frustration is encountered, when an aim cannot be met or is thwarted by means beyond control. Unconsciousness is an entity that cannot be directly known but unveils itself through dreams and can indicate signs of its activity through symptoms.[8] It has a sense of its own, directs the libidinal economy to contentment, be it in the internal manner of dreams or symptoms, or externally through the process of cathexis.[9]
Symptoms express themselves on the body, predominately fostering an inexpedient attitude towards life and are performative manifestations of something that did not occur.[10] The ego-act of repression is responsible for the formation of symptoms.[11] A symptom is the retaining of energy of a frustration or a trauma; it plays itself in a feedback loop as a simulation in way to fulfil the goal of its pleasure where the unconscious substitutes a new and generally maladaptive physical behavior or psychic rupture as a source of pleasure.[12] The ego does not allow the body to fully enact that which it desires and the unconscious creates a scenario or movement upon the body that fulfills the frustration; the symptom is the unconscious striving off-track towards pleasure as it cannot behave in the immediate or direct way it wishes as a result of the educated ego, or societal mores, that restrict the subject in acting in an unbridled way towards the pleasure-principle.[13] A symptom signifies the unconscious reeling and is a phenomenological fact; it is a fixation to trauma, which is another word for rupture. The origin of all symptoms is located in a past trauma and the present tense calls for the release of the energy stuck in a thwarted feedback loop. A symptom points to the ego in resistance as it is a function of the ego to reject the primitive carnality of desire.[14]
Dreams demonstrate a pre-lingual capacity for integrating the subject in the world in a way that strives towards the containment of pleasure for dreams are residues of an ancient language of the visual and more immediate economy our primal and earliest being. Through interpreting the manifest dream, I can arrive its latent content, the expression of a wish-fulfillment.[15] Dreams are wish-fulfillments that seek to soothe the external stimulus of waking life.[16] As it happens, dreams are impelled by evil and sexual wishes, or the spontaneous ideas towards immediately slaking pleasure.[17]
They are archaic forms of expression towards libidinal desire, duly performing a pseudo-satisfaction and making an me aware of my latent wishes. Symbology revolves around the means and modes of sexuality, as sexuality is the directive that subliminally motivates action. It is not to be reductive and commit to stating that the act of sex is the reason each and every person moves about in the world, but that sexual energy is the primary drive towards interacting with others, with external objects, dating back to the beginning of humankind. In the origins I went towards others as a way to fulfill my needs.
Verily, Freud stipulates that sound of speech has developed solely to attract a sexual partner, that the language beyond such sounds is devoted to the work that constitutes life towards reproduction.[18] This is to say that even in the beginning the utterance was a libidinal utterance towards the other, calling for the other, and the world has been furnished out in speech in a way that is orbital to libidinal desire As time has accumulated, this object-relationship with others has become more complex and less direct in the means of the subject simply satisfying their desire.. Symbols are steady characteristics that point to wishes of the libido, and dreams know, in their own way, how to coalesce the unconscious towards a conscious understanding, though this understanding only arises through interpretation.[19]
Once a dream is interpreted, it directs towards a positional comprehension of desire: its origin, its purpose, which leads back to the libido seeking to supplement and energize itself. Through the analysis, I am privy to a glimpse of self-understanding that begs the opportunity to address the frustration in another mode of operation, be it in talk-therapy with an analysist or de-cathecting and re-cathecting towards another object of desire.
My dream-life has complete access to my childhood memories, the infantile state of my being, at its disposal.[20] My childhood is my prehistory, prior to the formation of my ego-self; I existed in a state of unmitigated unconscious desire—briefly, but foundationally in a way that in my childhood, my unconscious, my prehistory, I was then initiated into how I was to operate in the world. Dreams transport me back to a place prior to ethical development; dreams are the infantile in full expression.[21] Dreams are intentions translated into infantile thought, they are effusions back towards that archaic mode of being in the world where all is immediate to my senses and therefore immediate to my understanding and therefore I had the insistent urgency to act in a way that way immediate.
II. The Oedipal Complex
The Oedipal complex is within the unconscious; it is its own syntax that directs me towards the world in the way in which I must interact and integrate with other beings. It appears to move in two phases from infancy with the transformation of puberty to adulthood. It cultivates interest in objects, people: the other, outside the self initially in a narcissist form of self-pleasure and self-nourishment—I see the other, particularly the mother, as sustenance. At the outset she is only for me a source of my own being, I use her, but as she endows on me the act of love by caring for my needs (not my particular mother but a theoretical mother) and I come to understand what it means to be directed towards another person; I am oriented in an object-relationship with the other that is not explicitly narcissistic, more so, I observe a pattern in which to love another that is not I.
Phylogenetically, the Oedipal complex arose in order for me to graft my nutritive needs to my body and seek protection from the mother. As all functions do, in the course of considerable time, they adapt or become vestigial, and the Oedipal complex seems to have accomplished both. It has retained its essential, primeval nature of purely seeking the gratification of needs, of pleasure, and has associated itself with my ego-consciousness as it behaves as a pattern through which the libido learns to channel its energies outwards and towards other objects in the world.[22] This is why I am split in two; there is an unregulated, ungovernable region within me that seeks the full intensity of pleasure and there is a parochial and educated portion that knows I must collaborate with other beings, and eventually finds a precious joy in doing so.
Every mental process begins in the unconscious.[23] Freud uses an analogy of developing photographs: the unconscious is the negative reel and only becomes a picture, an element of consciousness, if it is turned into a positive.[24] This comparison accentuates the fact that the negative is perpetually assembling and capturing stimuli from the external world beyond my mind, and because it is a photographic reel, it demonstrates that there is an intrinsic structure to which the data finds itself embossed upon. It’s not abundantly clear how or why a negative turns positive, but it is clear that in the beginning of humankind the negative form of being was the dominant influence over physical behavior; in the beginning I was an profuse, sensate open pore to the expression and manifestation of the a priori organization of my being; I was unregulated in the capturing of my desire.
For Freud, each desire and need filters down to the sexual, which is not primarily the activity of reproduction, but is foundational to the pleasure-principle.[25] Libidinal processes and applications work towards the supplication of pleasure as it can be recognized that pleasure is akin to the preservative and nutritive needs of the human body. In infancy, the child associates the suckling at the mother’s breast with nutritive-pleasure.[26] Beyond, the mother becomes an object of desire in the sense that she is the source of his care and his sustenance.[27] It is additionally obscure to how the unconscious mechanism has understood, in its own way, that an individual, fundamentally and in infancy, will seek out pleasure and in doing so will passively work towards the fortification of their body. Erogenous zones arise in conjunction with the demands of survival.[28] Yet, the development of erogenous zones establish independence, the child can pleasure themselves without the need of the mother, but it is from the mother that the child establishes a relationship with an object outside of themselves.[29] Once the child discovers this independence, they become narcissistic; they see their own body as a contiguous and expeditious source of pleasure.[30]
Within the family-dynamic I come to see the primality of using another in order to satisfy my own needs, but with maturation, I use my family-dynamic as mode in which to understand the social behaviors of others. The introductory assessment of every other person within the family-dynamic, besides the mother, is one of competition.[31]
The world is peopled. The issue of consciousness is obtaining satisfaction because the world is peopled and must be maneuvered instead of shot through; I cannot simply reach and devour my desire, but I am a captive of my ego who, through education, has restrained and repressed my carnal and primal impulses; there is competition for satisfaction in which the presence of other people becomes an issue.[32] It seems the unconscious would be granted full reign if there were not others, in fact, ego-consciousness is necessarily derived from the reality-principle as opposed to the pleasure-principle. In the pleasure-principle, all things I strive towards are to supplement and please my being, where the reality-principle is what supplants the pleasure-principle: I still am able to obtain pleasure, but must reroute, dis-track, the way in which I do so in order to complement the sociality of being amongst others; it is a question of immediacy, and the lack of immediacy either frustrates my goals into actions symptomatic or sublimates them.[33] Education seeks to tame sexual impulse and to harmonize beings amongst each other in the necessary productivity of living within a community; education appears to arise in conjunction with puberty, especially at the time in which I move from being solely within the family-complex to participating within the uproar of the social world.[34]
The Oedipal complex establishes me in the libidinal economy of other beings. Within the family-unit, towards the mother, it directs me to an object that is external to myself and forces me to rely on another individual for my pleasure-needs, my care. It is not just attachment but is a compulsion to an object outside myself, but it puts my consciousness in an external realm. The Oedipal complex does not require that I respect other human beings, but it does facilitate and propel me towards the reality that there are other living objects within the world.
The relationship to the mother can represent both aspects of the unconscious and conscious self, where the father figure is wholly representative of the ego-demands of authority and sociality. The father’s presence keeps me from solely placing reliance on the mother, from retreating into the realm of unconsciousness, as he obliges me to the fact that there are other individuals I am in competition with. His existence is necessary for me to comprehend that I must, in the course of maturation and entrance into the social world, de-cathect from the mother and cathect my libido towards another object of desire.
The mother’s presence is the connective tissue of the unconscious realm to the conscious one. In infancy, I am a primitive being that demands my desire be satisfied in its corporeal and visceral impulse. Unconsciously, I use her to supply my demands, then through maturity I see her as the first object towards which I direct love. The Oedipal complex states that it is love, eros, that is the underlying mode of all connection. For the relationship with the mother is the entrance I have towards other human beings. The inherent pull towards love comes from the symbolic relationship with the mother.
Love stimulates me into being towards the other; love awakens a cognitive function beyond instinct. There is something in the other person that I desire for myself, desire to have within myself. Love is activation.
The one energetic mechanism I am under is the effusion of the libido towards myself and towards other objects. Energy is eros; libido is sexual energy that drives me towards an object; every object I desire I saturate with a sense of capture. Object-cathexes signifies movement of the libido, all action is libidinally charged. The Oedipal complex is the psychic constellation that I find myself sidereal, and it attaches me to points within the external world. The libidinal constellation is movement. The unconscious projects its own organization as well as my ego, who projects its own ideal, societal organization.
We are in a programmed universe that obeys specific laws beyond our comprehension; the reason we are faulty beings is because we are endowed with consciousness, an ego, and have a simulated directive in our errands. Our human system follows a form and the deviations, which are inevitable, due to ego-consciousness, the rupture of the demands of the unconscious seeking pleasure and the way the ego chooses to go about it. This winding digression is to state that the Oedipal complex is a factor of the unconscious, if not the factor within the unconscious that directs me towards other objects in the world; that, it instigates me towards the world through love, and not primarily romantics, but desire, and assembles me in the immanent pattern all others are situated in and how all those beside myself regard others.
Works Cited: Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, 1966.
[1] Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Freud-Paraphrase
[5] F-Paraphrase
[6] Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
[7] F-Paraphrase
[8] Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] F-Paraphrase
[14] F-Paraphrase
[15] Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] F-Paraphrase
[20] Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
[21] Ibid.
[22] F-Paraphrase
[23] Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
[24] Ibid.
[25] F-Paraphrase
[26] Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] F-Paraphrase
[30] Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; but I believe I got the idea of primary-narcissism wrong on the first go-around.
[31] Ibid.
[32] F-Paraphrase
[33] F-Paraphrase
[34] Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
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