Freud’s Oedipal Bind-2
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.
