Archive for the Double Bind Category

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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