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Freud’s Oedipal Bind-2

Posted in Double Bind, Freud, MetaTherapeutics, Oedipus, Sophocles, Speaking Desire on 30 March 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        In one sense at least, and as far as Oedipus is concerned, Freud could not have been any more inconsistent for having remained silent about a presumably blinding truth while advocating speech as the principal instrument of insight.

        There is nothing triumphal about such an observation since Freud’s was not a logical inconsistency, let alone a clinical hypocrisy. Freud’s was the deep-seated psychological ambivalence one lives through and witnesses daily, on the couch, in the bedroom, and on the street. What the ambivalence does however is betray the sway of not a single myth but that of a host of Olympian characters crowded inside a Pandora’s box from which the psychoanalyst falsely hoped he could retrieve only those scripts he had deemed useful. Alongside an Oedipus, a Dionysus, and a Sisyphus, one can also find an Adonis born out of incest but suffering none of the trials of an Antigone, or a Thamyris blinded by the Muses for his mortal vanity rather than for his poetic blunders, or even a Nemesis countering the careless and haphazard fortunes bestowed by a Tyche. The reference to Nemesis here is not to her modern day collapsing onto a logic of opposition and enmity but to her original place in the classic Greek lexicon as a nymph-goddess of redress symbolized by the wheel of transformation from peak to pit, and back again.

        While swearing allegiance to some of the gods, demi-gods, and dramatis personae of ancient Athens, Freud had in fact refused to acknowledge and suffer his idols as multiple, impetuous, and violent.

To be fair to Freud, again, his was not a singular or idiosyncratic betrayal. We are all invariably confronted with an immense and seemingly infinite network of meanings and words, characters and dynamics, that we hastily reduce to what we, at any given point in time, find manageable and/or useful. We devise systems of reference along whose axes we can begin to pin a sense and a service. We select; we bracket; we prioritise; we abstract; we interpret. Faced with the other alternative, the one that is all too keen to deploy the multiplicity of meanings and values as a justification for upholding the futility of any and all intervention, Freud’s often seems the only responsible route for us to take.

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Freud’s Oedipal Bind-1

Posted in Double Bind, Freud, MetaTherapeutics, Oedipus, Repetition, Sophocles, Speaking Desire on 26 March 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Though reverential, Freud’s investment in the Sophoclean script as a founding principle of psychological activity is not without its ironies. Freud understood the myth as a representation and, in so doing, broke his own golden rule of never mistaking manifest content for latent thought or symptom for process. Much more significantly, though, Freud thought he had apprehended Oedipus on the street, in the bedroom, and on the couch. In the process, he demythologized and made common that which he had spent an entire life revering. And by making the myth common, he found himself as implicated in its dynamic as his next-door neighbour, and in ways that may not have been entirely explicit for him. By solving the Sphinx’s riddle, Oedipus had precipitated both his access to the Theban throne and his subsequent destitution. Perhaps the solver of psychological riddles had detected in his hero’s downfall what lay in wait for him should he too speak the truth of desire.

        Perhaps this, amongst all the other by now familiar reasons, would shed yet a different light on why the young Freud, so eager to prove his legitimacy and originality, did not press the Oedipal issue as much as he might otherwise have with his mentor and sounding board. One would expect that the radical discovery of incest and parricide as universal psychological bedrock would have merited more than its three measly references (dated 15 October, ’97, 5 November ’97, and 15 March ’98) in a Freud-Fliess correspondence that had lasted an additional seven years beyond the initial mention. This, amongst yet other equally familiar reasons, would shed further light on why Freud never committed himself to a comprehensive account of the myth’s dynamics and echoes. Instead, he offered but a smattering of observations and hypotheses hinting at his insights while sparing himself the fate of his accursed hero and model.

        Such explanation and light cannot but be analytically hypothetical in nature; they treat much less of Freud’s conscious processes than of the unrecognized and hence unresolved inhibitions his Oedipal axioms could not but have produced. For his part and to his credit, Freud could not have been any more consistent: he believed his hero’s entanglement in an exhausting and yet unavoidable circle of causes and effects to be the fate of one and all. One can only begin to imagine the frustration, if not the fear, of a researcher caught in the vice-like grip of a truth he so desperately needed to speak but whose logic dictated that its utterance be the ground for silence and its sight the ground for blindness.

        It is no surprise that, with time, Freud’s Oedipal identifications found refuge in yet another mythological entanglement. While speaking Oedipus, the psychoanalyst began to live the logic of a Sisyphus, barely glimpsing the open landscape of relief only to have to wearily give it up and descend the slopes of blindness he had just scaled, and begin all over again. Caught in the logic of such hopeless repetition, no wonder his analysis had become interminable. Meanwhile, and yet again, Freud’s reenactment of this second myth illustrates, and in the strictest of psychoanalytic ways, the extent to which our conscious experiences of fate and punishment are often grounded in covert but no less potent choice and collusion.

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Oedipus — A Directorial Note

Posted in Aristotle, Dreams, Freud, Laughter, Oedipus, Productions, Sophocles, Speaking Desire on 22 March 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Aristotle argued that tragedy’s audience is treated to an experience of emotional stimulation rather than historical education. While in many respects unavoidably imitative, tragedy’s highest value and pleasure lie in its ability to occasion the excitement and catharsis of its audience’s fear and pity (Poetics, 1449b/25 and 1452b/30). Firmly planted in his culture, Aristotle was drawing on the Athenian understanding of tragedy as Dionysian. The domain of the god of wine and ecstasy ran the gamut from orgy to performance; intoxication was his means, purgation was his goal. The philosopher was also echoing the dictates of a Hippocratic culture that understood illness as excess in the humours and treatment as their purgation.

        Freud will trail closely tragedy’s Athenian dynamic as he will come to identify pleasure’s basic principle in terms of an economic discharge of tension rather than a hedonistic consumption of object. Indeed, for Freud, the charge of the libidinal drive is bound to, intensified by, and subsequently cathected through its object much as, for Aristotle, an audience’s fearful and/or pitiful tremor is caught up in, heightened by, and subsequently released through the drama it witnesses on the stage.

        An Acropolis, a La Scala, and a Hollywood are much less the stagings of truth and morality and much more the sites of Dionysian manipulation, transformation, and release. The unconscious too is such a site; we have come to know its productions under the headings of dreams, slips, and phantasies. Such productions point to the so-called truth of their subject only insofar as they illustrate the latter’s individual qualities as, if you will, writer, director, and producer. When presented with such stagings, the threads clinicans are most interested in picking up and following lead not to their historical or ethical worth (Are they true? Are they morally acceptable?) Rather, it is the unconscious processes and investments by which they have been produced and shaped that form the bulk of the analytic material.

        I hold this observation to be perfectly in line with the classic Freudian appreciation and use of a dream’s imagery for instance, an imagery that is much less a representation or an account of a truth as it is the product of an unconscious mise en scène that is itself the focus and concern of the clinical inquiry.

        Indeed, and once he thought he had established the universality of incest and parricide, once, in other words, he had identified what he considered to be the inevitable components of primary phantasy, Freud was much more invested in uncovering the particular ways in which an analysand weaves, structures, and negotiates the components than in their (dare one say it?) quotidian content. The sense of newness, discovery, and individuality that psychoanalysis brings its participants is hardly in their investment in what has become a joke of a myth (“Doctor, please tell me something I haven’t already heard, read, or been warned you would say!”) The sense of newness, discovery, and individuality lies in uncovering the dramatic style each analysand adopts in staging the myth, in his or her poetic scriptwriting and directorial techniques, in his or her idiosyncratic modes of excitement and catharsis, the grounds on which they are erected, and the purposes they are made to serve.

        Of the myth and its tragic truth very little is left of analytic import, at least as the myth of origin whose repercussions are necessarily and exclusively tragic.

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Oedipus — Zoom out

Posted in Antigone, Aristotle, Laughter, Oedipus, Sophocles on 17 March 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        As much as the Oedipus with whom we are most familiar is the one fixed by Sophocles, the character’s life extends far beyond the tragedy with which it has become marked. Homer (The Iliad, Book IV and The Odyssey, Book XI), Aeschylus (Seven Against Thebes), and Euripides (The Phoenician Women) had already treated of man and destiny. Since, Seneca, Corneille, Hofmannsthal, Péladan, Gide, Eliot, Cocteau, Stravinsky, el-Hakim, and Pasolini are but a few of the signatures borne by the reworkings of story and theme. As the reiterations multiply, no matter the era, genre, or medium, what we have come to identify and value the most are their distinct variations in recasting dramatically, politically, and psychologically the fate with which we all have been presumably doomed. Whether tragic, banal, satirical, joyous, or prudent, the story’s components remain more or less the same. What differs, what gives them their qualities as tragic, banal, satirical, or what not, are the ways in which they are woven, the distances and juxtapositions they inhabit, the relations they endure and produce, and, in turn, the relations they provoke for their audiences to endure and produce.

        Lest we assume that it is only we that are familiar with the plot and its details, that it is only we for whom form has come to eclipse content, let us not forget that the tragedy’s first audience was well acquainted with the myth and its major detours, partly through its cultural surround, which included the above mentioned pre-Sophoclean sources, and partly through Sophocles himself. Antigone, as the last installment of the three Theban tragedies and the thematic conclusion to the accursed family’s travails, was the first to be conceived and executed (in 441 B.C.E.). By the time Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus were produced (in approximately 426 B.C.E. and 405 B.C.E. respectively), the Athenian theatregoers were already well apprised of history and fate. To borrow from Aristotle his Poetics terminology, Antigone’s dénouement, her change in fortune, was possible only in light of her complication, i.e., in light of her family’s story in its entirety up until the point at which the play that bears her name begins to unfold; Antigone’s complication became the source and raw material upon which Sophocles could draw for his two remaining plays’ dénouement. And if, in spite of all of this, some theatergoers were still unaware of the plot and its outcome, they would have most likely treated the performance as much a detective mystery as a tragedy.

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Oedipus — Take Two

Posted in Antigone, Dreams, Laughter, Oedipus, Sophocles on 14 March 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        Look out for the noble and upright king who, because of his pierced ankles, has to hobble his way across the stage. Make sure not to miss our hero’s hyperboles for everything about his words and deeds is in line with the basic structure of humour as exaggerated non-sense. Note the sympathy you feel for him as he heaps his misdeeds and confusions one upon the other, à la Lucy Ricardo, desperate for the clear-minded and practical interventions of a Creon, his Ricky. (Might there be a psychoanalytic import to the implicit homosocial contract between king and brother-in-law here?) Keep track of our hero’s familial lines as they progressively blur beyond recognition: his children are his siblings; his brother-in-law is his uncle; his daughter will soon plan to marry the man who is both his nephew and cousin; many of Jerry Springer’s most outlandish of scenarios could only dream of such twists and complications. Last but not least, do not overlook Jocasta, Antigone, and Euridyce’s final suicidal gestures, sacrificial and redemptive only from the point of view of a modernity that has been thoroughly Christianized; to their original, almost exclusively male, audiences, they remained pitiable and laughable.

        Was the classical Athenian theatregoer any more resistant to the temptations of laughter and hooting than the modern day viewer of television talk shows and situation comedies? Was he any blinder to the absurdly comedic, was he any more aesthetically refined, any more sensitive, any nobler, any less moralistic, any less adolescent? Hardly. Are we then disavowing our own insensitivity and adolescence and setting ourselves up as the nobler ones by recasting the Athenian drama and distilling it down to what we have conveniently declared as its purest and loftiest? To me, that would be more likely.

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Oedipus — Take One

Posted in Laughter, Oedipus, Sophocles on 13 March 2008 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        A man, weak in the ankles but strong in combat, politics, and love, is doomed to a life of wandering because of the crimes his strengths had afforded him. Aimless, he reaches a sacred ground; blinded, he sees the truths that had previously eluded him. Those he had rescued will come to suffer the most abominable of deaths; those he had opposed will ultimately triumph and prosper. While many of his innocent subjects will have perished of pestilence, our parricidal and incestuous hero, our criminal par excellence, will die serene and wise at a ripe old age. Previously, he had murdered his father in a roadside altercation, and, in the meantime, his two sons are preparing to slaughter one another on the battlefield. He will die serene and wise at a ripe old age! The women in his family too will suffer their ignoble deaths. Sadly though, and by the times’ doctrines and standards, their suicides will bring them neither peace nor redemption. Still, he will die serene and wise at a ripe old age! And, lest such ironic, if not absurd, twists of fate be not enough to satisfy our hunger for the agonizingly overdramatic, the story of Thebes and its wretched ruling class is riddled with complicated but oh so predictable political intrigues, familial feuds, and psychological torments.

        Is it that much of a stretch of one’s sensibilities, aesthetic and otherwise, to suggest that at least one component of the classical Athenian response to the Oedipal scenario might be in line with what the Italian composers of opera buffa and the American screenwriters of soaps and sitcoms have sought or triggered in their audiences? As much as each of these styles belongs to its particular surround and each has acquired its particular place in the West’s history of cultural production, the thread of excitement and catharsis links them all in a series that runs counter to our current cultural siftings of the proper and everlastingly artistic from the trite and the mundane. Worth noting here is the fact that, had such siftings been dominant at the time, they would have no doubt heaped, and ruthlessly so, both tragedy and opera under the same heading of the common and boisterously distracting. In the meantime, much has complicated our standards and perceptions: historical revisions, national heritages, intellectual and/or artistic pride and territoriality, and, lest we forget, financial returns.

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