Oedipus Warped
This article is Part II of a five-part series on Freud’s Oedipus Complex. Though Part I Getting the ‘Psycho’ Out of Psychoanalysis is found here, the articles can be read separately.
1. The Warped Translation of Freud’s Oedipus Complex
People talk a lot about psychoanalysis. In fact, it has become so ingrained in the culture today that even a twelve-year-old thinks s/he knows what the Oedipus Complex is: ‘You want to sleep with your mother and kill your father!’.
Without stopping here to question the obscenity of such a statement, it may come as a surprise to some that the major works of Freud describing the Oedipus Complex have not been adequately translated, even though many today claim that either modern psychoanalysis has gone beyond Freud or that it is no longer a useful model of human development.
In either case, what is more to the point is that the English speaking student of psychoanalysis today cannot claim to have gone beyond or reject the Oedipus Complex if the translation of its tradition is still lacking. This short Medium publication will serve to situate what is at stake.
In 1922 James Strachey translated Freud’s 1921 Massenpsychologie Und Ich–Analyse¹ with the title of Group Psychology and the Ego².
Despite the phenomenal care put into the official Strachey translation, the 1922 version of Group Psychology and the Ego still poses a difficulty to the reader of English since it does not refer to the significant changes that were made by Freud to the Oedipus Complex in a revision of the original German in Freud’s Gesammelte Werke 1940.
This lapsus by Strachey (see Part III §1.3.) is somewhat surprising since the revisions that Freud made to the German texts from 1921 to 1940 were substantial.
To be fair, the first 1922 translation, Group Psychology and the Ego, was modified again in 1940 in what Strachey calls a “considerably altered version”. Nevertheless, the final English version republished by Norton in Vol. XVIII in the Standard Edition, as we will see, still leaves out a major correction made by Freud in 1940.
I want to show how, far from being a mere linguistic problem, both Freud’s 1940 revision of his own text, Massenpsychologie Und Ich–Analyse, and Strachey’s failure to translate it in the English Group Psychology and the Ego situate a logical paradox of the Oedipus Complex.
What follows is, therefore, not simply the admission of a difficulty in translating a text of Freud and its correction, but the formulation of another project: both how an unresolved logical paradox of the Oedipus Complex resists being stated in ordinary language and how the psychoanalytic tradition has been systematically warped by failing to identify this paradox much less resolve it.
Plan of the Article
Before identifying the logical paradox of the Oedipus Complex — and resolving it – we must first situate the linguistic problem of translating the Oedipus Complex from German to English.
But to situate the translation problem, it is helpful to be familiar with the received Oedipus Complex, the everyday notion of the Oedipus as you are likely to find it in a popular tabloid or a journal of psychoanalysis. Once this descriptive of the everyday Oedipus and translation problem is situated, we will turn to the real problem of the logical paradox.
My trajectory here is didactic in so far as I take the position of Freud, Bion, and Lacan, among others, that if the Oedipus Complex cannot be rigorously articulated then a statement of psychoanalysis, pro or con, is nil.
Freud stated as one of the criteria by which a psychoanalyst was to be judged was the degree of the understanding allegiance he paid to the theory of the Oedipus Complex. He thus showed the importance he attached to this theory and time has done nothing to suggest that he erred by overestimation; evidence of the Oedipus Complex is never absent though it can be unobserved.
W. Bion, Transformations, p.50; 1965
[…] to withdraw the Oedipus, and psychoanalysis in extension, becomes as justifiable as the delirium of president Schreber.
J.Lacan, Proposition for the Psychoanalyst of the School, Autres Écrits, p.256
1.1 Internal and External Difference
In an oeuvre, it is important to distinguish two plans of production between what is said in what is written:
• what the author expresses, intends, and wants to write;
• and what is written in what goes over and beyond what one intends and wants to say.
The oeuvre of Freud has all its importance not simply in what is said in what is written, but writing things that can end up differing from what is said or what he wanted to say, which can become, in fact, the occasion for the critique from others or even Freud himself.
One prophylactic way to try to stabilize this internal difference and contradiction of reading and writing is to reformulate them as an external difference, i.e., differences and contradictions resolving into conflicts between different people, schools, approaches, or theories.
Thus, instead of speaking of Freud’s oeuvre as saying something over and beyond what it actually writes — thus, always on the verge of forming an internal contradiction — it becomes expedient to speak of varying psychoanalytic traditions that differ, but somehow still share the same fundamental concepts (the problem of reading and writing being put aside or left as a mere means for communication).
Adopting this notion of an external difference in the development of a variety of psychoanalytic theory-practice, one can then speak of a monument of Freud as a place — an institute, school, or academy — where all the tourists visit to democratically share their concepts, experiences, theories, approaches, education, etc.
The history of psychoanalysis very well attests to the difficulties of maintaining the tourism of this monument; the fractioning and conflictual psychoanalytic school-theories are witness to the fact that the monument is as much a landmark of war as of peace. Of course, there is the celebrated couch, antiques, and Persian carpets that can always add to the monumental decor. But shouldn’t we ask for something more than a hypnotic entry?
1.2 De-monumentalizing the Oedipus Complex
Beyond the monuments, I want to present here a discontinuous reading of the oeuvre of Freud where the writing produces its own internal difference-contradiction.
I take the position that the letter of Freud’s text — or the letter in general – is not a concept, it can not be stabilized by sharing ideas in ordinary language and the creation of analytic schools; while the only way to get out of the current monumental wars and peace between the different schools, is to get into the problem of writing and reading differently.
Said in the banalest way, I am seeking to produce a reading-writing of Freud that begins with the vicissitudes of the drives and the clinic, not the spiritual institutionalizations and the school.
To begin, therefore, clinically, I will start by de-monumentalizing psychoanalysis at the place where it has erected its greatest monument of the Oedipus Complex.
I want to show that it is never a question of becoming Anti-Oedipus in the sense of Deleuze and Guatari, as if one were critiquing the Oedipus from the outside; on the contrary, analysts today have to take up their own critique to construct the internal difference of Oedipus more consistently and rigorously. In so doing, they will discover — as we will show – this internal difference is nothing other than sexual difference itself; what Derrida will reformulate as différance and Lacan will generalize in a more absolute diférAnce.³
In alleging — correctly or incorrectly, as will be determined — that the difference of the Freudian oeuvre is internal and the entire development of the Oedipus Complex can be pinpointed by this internal and sexual difference, I will begin oppositely: by describing the monument of the Oedipus Complex as it has been handed down in the external differences between the various conflicting psychoanalytic schools and traditions.
After exhausting these Oedipal Monuments, which are actually variants of the same basic formula — the child loves the parent of the opposite sex and hates the parent of the same sex — I will show how the Oedipal Monument breaks down in the lack of an adequate logical formulation.
1.3 The First Monument: The Oedipal Triangle
Though it was prefaced by other uses, the Oedipus Complex appears to be first explicitly mentioned in Freud’s theory in 1910:
He begins to desire his mother herself in the sense with which he has recently become acquainted, and to hate his father anew as a rival who stands in his way of this wish; he comes, as we say, under the dominance of the Oedipus complex.
A Special Type Of Choice Of Object Made By Men, Standard Ediction, Trans. Alan Tyson, Vol. XI, p.171, 1910.
Descriptively, the Oedipus Complex begins with the Masculine version which assumes the Boy identifies with the Father and takes as an object-choice the Mother.
Hence, the monumental Oedipal Triangle:
If this reading of the Oedipus Complex is accepted, then it is habitually stated that the Boy has a rivalry or parricide relation with the Father and a love or incestuous relation with the Mother. This configuration being one special case of the more general formula: the child has a rivalry relation with the parent of the same sex and a love relation with the parent of the different sex.
This brief description of the Oedipus Monument will serve here to provide the starting point for a whole tradition of both possible and impossible (critiqued, refuted, revised, etc. ) post-Freudian readings of the Oedipus Complex. What I want to show is how the possible narrations of the monumental triangle are warped by a structural impossibility.
If Freud, as much as anyone else, is attentive to these problems, it is more in the sense that the warping of this Oedipal Triangle is practiced rather than formulated. By this, I mean that Freud’s Oedipus never does get written precisely in his oeuvre — as I will show — but is indirectly made present, in a kind of metaphor or symptom covering over a linguistic impossibility and logical paradox.
At least this is what is to be presented: that in spite of the monument of the Oedipus a different project must be discerned, not one that varies to infinity from one school to another, from Object Relations of Melanie Klein to the Self-Psychology of Kohut, to the dead-end of Deleuze and Guatari’s Anti-Oedipus, but one that is contradicted by its own narration. I show this paradoxical construction opens up in three directions:
1) linguistically: in a constant revision of Freud and translation lapsus of Strachey
2) epistemologically: in an obstacle of analytic knowledge produced in this lapsus
3) logically: in a paradox of the Oedipus situating the difficulties at a more structural level.
Part III — The Lapsus of Strachey: The Linguistic-Translation Problem (to be continued)
Bibliography
[1] S. Freud, Massengpsychologie Und Ich-Analyse; G.W. 13,1940.
[2] S.Freud, Group Psychology and the Ego; Standard Edition, Strachey trans. (1922); Vol.XVIII, Original German 1921.
[3] In the L’Identification (1961), although Lacan commends Derrida’s Grammatologie for his treatment of the difference of writing as différance, he critiques it for not going far enough in including the trait and the barring of the capital A.
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Nota Bene
I have chosen to publish these articles on Medium and not a university or professional journal for three reasons. First and foremost, because there needs to be a profane distribution of analytic material that is not bound by institutional boundaries. Second, because these articles are in production and not final products, they exemplify a process and state of research that many journals are not conducive to. Perhaps when the articles stabilize, I will publish them elsewhere, but for the moment, they are uniquely on Medium. Third, when all is said and done, it is not sure that there are any contemporary scholarly psychoanalytic journals that are any better reviewed than by the audience one could find at Medium.
Scully Maywood
Los Angeles, CA
Winter 2019
