The Oedipal Mold and Oedipal Culture
Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis in Human Evolution
Book Contents
Introduction
The Natural Order (Thesis)
The Early Natural Order
The Pleasure Function
The Destruction of the Natural Order (Antithesis)
Reductionism and Moralism
Repression and Perversion
Love vs. Split-Love
The Disintegration of Sexual Paraphilias
Parent-Child Codependence and Emotional Child Abuse
The Oedipal Mold and Oedipal Culture
Mysticism and Atheism
Narcissism
Denial of Complexity
The Plague of Sadism
Conspiracy Thinking vs. Critical Thinking
Youth Fascism
The New Natural Order (Synthesis)
The Eight Dynamic Patterns of Living
The Twelve Branches of the Tree of Knowledge
The True Religio
Toward a Science of Life
Primary Power and Permissive Education
Research Bibliography
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Page Contents
The Oedipal Mold
—What means Oedipus Complex?
—Is the Oedipus Complex Universal?
—Criticism of the Theory
——1/8
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Oedipal Culture
—Introduction
—Are Masturbating Children Better Citizens?
—The Dogma of the Auto-Erotic Consumer Child
—Intellect Boosting for Sexually Demanding Children
—Qualifying Oedipal Castration as Child Abuse?
—Rationality vs. Oedipal Mysticism
—Oedipal Hero
The Oedipal Mold
What means Oedipus Complex?
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), an Austrian neurologist and co-founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology believed that psychosexual growth comes about through three stages, the so-called oral phase (0–2 years), anal phase (2–4 years) and genital phase (4 to 7 years, followed by the latency period (7–11 years) and adolescence (11–16 years) and that the child invariably passes through these stages.
In addition, Freud argued that the intrinsic setup of the sexual drive structure was taking place through identifications, the identification, during the anal phase, with the parent of the same sex, that Freud called homosexual identification and the following heterosexual identification with the parent of the opposite sex, during the genital phase.
This latter sprocket in the psychosexual machine of sexual growth was called Oedipus Complex by Freud. More specifically Freud and later psychoanalysis require the child to successfully liquidate each phase or fixation, and conclude that if a child was not able to do such liquidation, the sexual energy would become stuck in the particular phase where the development was arrested, with poignant consequences on sexual habits.
For example it is argued that when a child does not successfully liquidate the Oedipus Complex by developing a strong heterosexual relationship with the parent of the opposite sex (without however acting this attraction out), the child would probably become homosexual later on. Freud has found this first for boys with regard to their mother, and later added it on for the girl-father relationship, which he called Electra Complex.
Is the Oedipus Complex Universal?
I think a number of intelligent and childloving people find it makes sense when Freud affirmed the basic sexual nature of the child and infantile sexuality. But my question is if this understanding really implies that they see and acknowledge Western culture’s fundamental denial of the child’s affective, emotional and sexual complexity? As a parent, to allow one’s child to be sexual in a culture that is outspokenly against that kind of freedom really is a challenge; that is why only when parents get the whole picture, they can do what needs to be done. If parents are wishy-washy on this question, and half-hearted, it makes it probably only worse.
When I was starting my research thirty years ago, I honestly had no idea that children could have an authentic sexual life, I mean in the sense of copulating with each other, and not just in the sense of being autoerotic through masturbation or mutual masturbation with a friend.
I learnt these facts through anthropological field work, through the already mentioned ethnological reports published by Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and others, and through literature on alternative childhood, and children in the counter-culture.
In the absence of this knowledge, Freud’s theory that children’s psychosexual development was a process of libidinal identifications was for me an attractive surrogate for the real knowledge! And it is an attractive lie, for it justifies the existence of the holy consumer family with a child as the main stage clown who is used and abused under the pretext of his or her needs—while the reality is that this psychological construct rather serves the parents’ needs for emotional security and the socially sanctified and legally imposed avoidance of children’s real autonomy through real erotic experience with people outside of the nuclear family.
This reductionism is the pseudo-scientific cover-up of today’s mainstream child psychology; it could appropriately be called child sex mythology! Freud was the avatar for what later became, and today still is, the mainstream paradigm in child psychology and education.
In other publications I retrace the building of identity and autonomy, and point to the pitfalls in the Western educational system. One of these pitfalls is the exclusion of parameters that serve to build identity through self-knowledge, intuitive or inner knowledge, psychic knowledge, pre-life knowledge and relational experience. The identity that is said to be the only possible mold according to Western mainstream psychiatry is a derived, not a genuine, identity. It is derived from the parents’ identities. For a boy, for example, the process will be identification with the father, as a primary homosexual identification, during the anal phase and identification with the mother, as a secondary heterosexual identification during the genital phase.
According to Freud, the Oedipal Complex comes in at that moment in the child’s psychosexual development. True identity is built, according to this theory, when the boy has successfully liquidated the Oedipus Complex by having developed enough aggressiveness toward the father and enough castration of his incestuous desire toward the mother at the same time.
That this system is built upon the grave of child sexuality, in the sense of child-child sexual activity, is clear from the start. It was clear to Freud but he thought that a deeper yielding to the core of nature’s laws would catapult Western bourgeoisie into chaos.
I have critically reviewed Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality and came to the conclusion that Freud’s scheme is clearly detrimental to the child’s building autonomy, by keeping the Western consumer child in pseudo-fusional dependence on their parents, thus creating codependence and perversion, and a fake heterosexuality that covers up all the undealt-with secondary drives that are produced by forcefully impeding the child from living out their natural emosexual attraction toward peers.
My wake up call finally came not from psychology, but from the side of anthropology and the insights I got through my studies of the human energy field, and the nature of the bioenergy. It was first through the anthropological findings of Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead and their observations of biologically healthy child-child sexuality with the Melanesian Trobriand culture and other tribal cultures, that triggered a change in my regard on child sexuality.
We have two ways to create a new reality, in which society, recognizing the child’s affective, emotional and sexual complexity and high bioenergetic charge, sets up new and comprehensive forms of child-rearing:
- by confining the child in an oedipal triangle within the nuclear family, depriving them of all and any non-incestuous erotic relations, and artificially raising their gerontophilic eroticism, while projecting this eroticism exclusively upon the parents, thereby creating a striking conflict within the child’s psychosomatic setup; or—
- by transforming mainstream culture and granting children their own domain of intimacy, outside of the parent’s embrace and control, allowing the child to live their affective, emotional and sexual complexity in freedom, thus helping the child to build true autonomy and self-reliance.
The first alternative leads to the consumer child. The second alternative leads to a complete human.
To summarize, Sigmund Freud has significantly contributed to forging and consolidating what I call Oedipal Culture, to a point to have prepared the subtle ideological soil for the most sordid fascist ideology of humanity of all times: postmodern international consumer culture.
Freud has less significantly contributed to helping the modern child with their natural quest for autonomy and self-reliance, and their birthright for an unobserved realm of intimacy, outside of the jovially persecutory parental and educational embrace, if not to be kept save from the Kindergarten regime of slave-puppets to their culturally perverted and schizoid parents and educators.
Criticism of the Theory
1/8
The Freudian scheme is only if ever valid for cultures where child-child erotic relations are forbidden and structurally impaired, that is, for patriarchal culture and postmodern international consumer culture as the successor, in a new garment, of the patriarchal rut;
2/8
The Freudian scheme represents systematic perversion of the child and implies the cultural conditioning into homosexuality because identification is not the natural way for the child to build their love map, and to individuate, but a culturally conditioned one, which is why I call this kind of culture also Hero Culture, implying the child is molded after their parents taken as cultural standard models, and not in relation to their own specific soul structure, content of consciousness, and emotional setup.
3/8
Building homosexual attraction before building heterosexual attraction is not the way nature builds our psychosexual structure, but is a pure projection upon nature. Small boys are erotically attracted to their mothers and girls to their fathers, and not homosexually toward their same-sex parents. This is so from birth, not just from age four or five, as the Freudian myth assumes. When, as this is admittedly often the case within patriarchal cultures, children are homosexually fixated upon their same-sex parent, and refuse to open up for embracing their parent of the opposite sex, exhibiting anxiety in front of anything erotic, this is so because the child is narcissistic and neurotic. Needless to add that the neurotic child is of course not the natural child; when this happens, it has a reason, as it does not happen with children who are educated with love. I have personally seen it over and over with children whose parent of the same sex gives only conditioned love, and where children lack emotional constancy and security with their parents, or even grow in disruptive and dysfunctional families.
4/8
Freud’s professional and private life philosophy was patriarchal and at the same time materialistic, and mechanistic. He had discarded out of his life any spirituality as well as his wistful Jewish tradition, and most of his theories defy truly spiritual insights and truths. The very essence of a holistic worldview that sees the hidden connections, was alien to Freud. This was one of the reasons that his relational life was full of strife and disruption, and ended in many painful separations and personal conflicts. It can be said, cum grano salis, that Freud was abandoned later in his life by all his real friends, which was one element in the etiology of his atrociously painful death of jaw cancer. When we consider that we are talking about love and erotic attraction, when we talk about the psychosexual growth of the child, it denotes confusion to choose Freud as the wistful authority on the matter. He surely was not. That Freud’s theories are slavishly followed till today has political reasons, and is in no way to attribute to any real insights he had. In fact, Freud’s psychosexual theories are the ideological base justification for the enslavement of the consumer child, with all that results from this cultural perversion.
5/8
Freud overlooked not only female sexuality, as the feminist movement alleges, but he also overlooked that the small child is not an autoerotic freak and serial masturbator when being allowed to have full relations with other children. Freud ignored the real natural emotional and sexual growth processes in children, as they are amply demonstrated by non-patriarchal cultures where children enjoy full sexual freedom from early childhood. In these cultures, children engage in sexual peer relations that are tolerated and encouraged, by not interfered with by tutelary adults, as shown by the already quoted research of Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead and Wilhelm Reich, and many others.
6/8
Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality reflects the power structures of patriarchal society; he just put names on things that were already there. In fact, today’s global consumer society is unthinkable without the dogma of the Oedipus Complex, the resulting parent-child codependence and the confusion it brings about in the mind of the child. When natural peer relations are forbidden to the child because autonomy and self-thinking abilities of the child are replaced to a large extent by system-conform consumer conditioning, the way is open for total addiction in form of non-ending consumption. The result is the perverse consumer child, and the so-called citizen, that are both based on the massacre of the original primal child that was naturally heterosexual — and more generally so, sexual in the first place.
7/8
Freud’s theory of the polymorphously perverse infant is a direct result of the mechanistic science tradition along the lines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Isaac Newton, La Mettrie, Baron d’Holbach, René Descartes and others, which considered man being a machine and infants to be born as a tabula rasa. While this view today is scientifically outdated and while we know that infants are born with a full heritage of former incarnations and resulting imprints in the soul, positivistic child psychology has to this day not done the necessary shift from a blind mechanistic and highly doctrinaire pseudo-science into a real holistic science of the bioenergy. I have created this science and call it Emonics (Emotional Identity Code Science). It assumes that our emotional identity is a soul imprint, which is the blueprint of our later individuality. It also assumes that all in life is a function of the human energy field or quantum vacuum. Hence, sexuality is but flowing vital energy streams and has very little to do with the mechanistic assumptions an ignorant sexology and a myth-ridden psychology projected upon it.
8/8
Responsible parents raise their children in total opposition to Freud and the cultural slavery that his theories and the power structures of patriarchal society require, and give their children ample opportunity for peer-peer, and peer-adult, emotional and sexual relations, by interfering as little as possible in their children’s love lives, which includes avoiding both emotional and sexual incest, while at the same time encouraging the child to project their libido on figures outside of the family framework.
Oedipal Culture
Introduction
My critique of Oedipal Culture is inextricably woven with my criticism of Sigmund Freud’s cultural concept of psychoanalysis, and here especially my critique of his theory of the Oedipus Complex.
Many young parents believe that psychoanalysis had contributed to the liberation of the child; they tend to think it was a professional vintage of permissiveness, or a variant of permissive education. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Freudian psychoanalysis, applied to children is not permissive, it is normative; it is a tool for forging the ideal consumer child within consumer culture that is based on the economic paradigm of total consumption. As such, it is an ideological pillar for the functioning of a society that needs to repress natural pleasure because it replaces it by consumer pleasure.
Psychoanalysis is not permissive at all. It can be proven statistically that the word most used in psychoanalytic publications is the word castration. Castration is a highly violent term that suggests the cutting off of the male sexual organ or the infibulation of the female sexual organ, the latter often also being called clitoridectomy. While psychoanalysis claims to use a mythical or metaphorical vocabulary, this vocabulary becomes strangely real when it goes to take a measure that will affect the long-term destiny of a child or a family. In discarding out children who are judged as sex offenders or social delinquents, psychoanalysis exerts its full social power in that it can put people, not only adults, but also children, in jail. The children’s jails are cutely called educational rehabilitation centers, but their regulating principles are the same as those of jails for adults, however with the difference that in child jails to this very day constitutional guarantees are absent, while those guarantees are well in place for adult prisons. This shows, more than anything else, the true attitude of Oedipal Culture toward children, as it shows the devil’s face of this matter called child protection.
Are Masturbating Children Better Citizens?
Françoise Dolto, the late French child therapist and psychoanalyst is very outspoken about the benefits of masturbation but we are not set in the world to masturbate, but to copulate and lovingly embrace others. We are not set in the world to engage in endless autoerotic self-satisfaction, but to use our natural erotic desire for building relationships. In this sense, sexuality is social, a social factor, and social behavior. Hence, people who are sexual are more social than those who repress their sexual wishes.
Child development, as a whole, cunningly cheats about this fact and relegates the child to eternal masturbation in the name of their own best. Children are encouraged to develop the habit of masturbation, instead of learning to make love with another human, which is the real, and natural, form of loving sexual embrace.
What a split paradigm this is! The child is encouraged to be autoerotic and to develop erotic fixations upon their parents, but violently, with all the police power in modern society, withheld from engaging in what is most natural: to embrace others lovingly, others who are not incestuous objects, and thus peer children and adults other than their parents.
Western culture’s child-rearing paradigm, whatever Dolto and others had and have to say about it, is perverse in my view, as it really puts life upside down in the name of culture, morality or whatever other fake arguments.
Dolto encourages professionals to take note of the child’s sexuality to better serve the child, but what is this service about down the road? To transform loving children into egoistic masturbators and incestuously fixated psychopaths? The functional organic troubles she mentions in her books are often the result of love prohibitions, not prohibitions to masturbate, but prohibitions to have real love relations outside of the family, and to have the basic freedom to build such love relations in the first place. See the following quote from Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie (1971):
All those who study behavior problems, functional organic troubles, the educators, the doctors in the true sense of the term, must have notions about the role of libidinal life and know that sexual education is the grain for the social adaptation of the individual. (Id., 63, translation mine)
It is of course true what Dolto says about the negative effects of prohibiting masturbation. But the trick is that the reverse argumentation is not per se correct. To allow masturbation does not mean to give the child real freedom for love. This is the logic error here, and here is where society cheats the child and argues from an irrational and mystical position that is not factually verifiable. The prototype example for this mysticism is where society or psychoanalysis — and here they lovingly coincide in their spanking the consumer child — speak about pedophilia when the question is not giving pedophiles their right, but giving children their right to love adults. These are two different matters, do what you will, but they are thrown in one pot and judged as one and the same thing. Here is exactly where the trail of lies begins.
To prohibit the child to masturbate and sexual curiosity means to force the child to pay unnecessary attention to activities and which normally, before puberty, are unconscious or preconscious. (…) Developing consciousness prematurely in an atmosphere of guilt does great harm to the development of the child because it deprives the child of ways to use their vital energies (libido) that is inherent in those spontaneous activities. Psychically healthy children who have mastered the genital stage are toilet-trained, graceful in their body and dexterous with their hands, they talk well, listen and observe a lot, like to imitate what they see others doing, ask questions and expect truthful answers, and when they don’t receive them, begin to make up magical explanations. (Id., 66, translation mine)
The truth is that normal masturbation does not at all fatigue the child, but appeases the phallic vital tension of which give his erections ample evidence. Masturbation provides the child with physiological and affective relaxation which does not equal in intensity the orgasm of an adult as there is no ejaculation (…). (Id., 70, translation mine)
The Dogma of the Autoerotic Consumer Child
It goes without saying that for those who are against all expressions of children’s eroticism, Dolto’s ideas about child masturbation will probably sound somewhat progressive or permissive. But from the background of the larger picture that I am trying to paint here, masturbation, while it’s good of course and while many people, big or small, need it just for getting rid of their surplus bioenergetic charge, is not the real thing what the child needs and asks for.
To repeat it, we are born to learn copulating, not masturbating, and what children should learn instead of becoming proud masturbators is to become humble partners in a real sexual embrace where set and setting are correct, and where there is mutual respect, dignity, love and acceptance. To say this, excuse me, is not an apology for pedophilia, as such a social policy, once enacted, would naturally lead, just as in most native cultures, to sexual relations among children.
If a random number of children choose adult mates, this then has to be respected, for there can only be one result when we give the child the right for free choice relations. If children are free to choose their mates, they must be allowed to engage with adult partners as well. To do so does not imply a legal implementation of pedophilia as a new social and legal paradigm, and I am very explicit about this! However, it well implies that there is no criminal punishment for adults who engage in sexual relations with consenting children.
But as matters are in our culture, the basic resistance against children as erotic beings is primarily child-child sexual interaction. According to Freud’s cultural preservation theory, to admit and endorse child-child sexual relations is against the setup of our culture. This dogmatic position of Freud is documented and led to a number of conflicts with his students. It was the main reason for Wilhelm Reich taking a distance to Freud, after the latter said regarding Reich’s activism for the sexual liberation of youth ‘Culture must prevail!’
Françoise Dolto, when I interviewed her in 1986 in Paris, put it in the following terms:
It is true that Freud was normative in this matter. But why not? The task of psychoanalysis is not to trigger a social revolution or changing the cultural paradigm. We are here as psychoanalysts to heal the neurosis, in the individual case, that comes from the cultural repression of the child’s sexuality. This is our task, not more and not less. Freud has seen it in the same way. (Quoted from memory)
Hordes of psychoanalysts followed their master guru in this greatest myth of all myths that Freud created with the whole of his doctrine of the Oedipus Complex. It may be against our tradition to eventually accept the child’s full sexual freedom, but every culture can change, and only when it’s in constant change, it’s alive. A culture that never changes is a dead culture, and a dead culture is a no-culture.
In truth, what Freud ordained here as some kind of cultural imperative was a command to uphold patriarchy; he cannot be taken as the progressive childloving psychoanalyst that history has made out of him, but a reactionary! His ‘Oedipal’ doctrine is a recipe for cultural neurosis and stagnation, not for cultural progress.
The advice Françoise Dolto gives to parents for the child who is found to masturbate often is equally ambiguous, and suspiciously on the line of Freud’s cultural reasoning. She argues such a child would have to be initiated. Until here I agree. But she continues that such a child has to be initiated into superior activities, which require a higher mental level than those usually reserved for children of that age.
[W]hen you see a child masturbating often, a child who is normal, you can be certain it’s a gifted child that should be initiated into superior activities, which require a higher mental level than those usually reserved for children of that age. But even more often, it’s a neurotic child for whom masturbation has become an obsessional habit. Such a child must be given treatment, not punishment. To intimidate the child, or even prohibit masturbation will impair the development of the child; in case the child obeys the prohibition he will become dull and insensitive, and if he does not obey he will become instable, angry, undisciplined and revolted. Neither of this is intended to be brought about by the adults who react in those ways; but this is what adults are doing to children, without knowing what they are doing. (Id., 74, translation mine)
Intellect Boosting for Sexually Demanding Children
That means a child who is longing for stronger sexual fulfillment than that of masturbation has to receive an intellect boost. That is really giving a child a pear who asks for an apple. What a child naturally wants is to be initiated into loving copulation, because in masturbation, as all my research on the human energy field clearly shows, the vital energy level is well brought to a new balance through orgasm, but that is not all there is in sexual love. What is perhaps even more essential than the sexual abreaction is the tactile experience of two nude bodies being close in excitation for a while, which namely results in a high-level exchange of bioelectricity and emotional flow which is like feeding our internal batteries, strengthening our immune system and working counter to the aging process.
From this larger picture that I tried to paint here, the pretended revolution of so-called infantile sexuality sounds like a bad joke, if it was not a bad trick, and actually a big lie and a real enslavement of the child in the name of a life-denying dead culture that knows only to consume and to possess, and as a result, to conquer and to rape, but not to live and to love and respectfully embrace.
Of course, what Dolto reasons here on the development of the rational mind is all true; it’s genitality that brings about the objective mind. But our society is not a group of genitally developed individuals, which is why it is so deeply irrational and mystical, and so little responsible. Our society is one of anally fixated fabulators who are caught in the trap of mysticism that they call, in their madness, psychoanalysis. To take an ideological crap science and culture-protection system such as psychoanalysis for the ultimate truth about life or childhood is about the greatest madness I have ever heard of in my life.
What Dolto says in the following quotes is valid even more for real genital cultures such as the Trobriand islands where children learn to copulate from early age, and not, as in our culture, to become virtuous masturbators and pleasing night cushions for their emotionally frigid parents. But the difference is that they do not need the whole of the Oedipal construct, with its detour to arrive at genitality and heterosexuality via homosexuality, simply because they give real freedom to their children, and real sexuality, not a perverted form of it.
And that is why the outcome is real heterosexuality, and not, as in our culture, fake heterosexuality. Françoise Dolto writes:
It is only after the liquidation of the Oedipus that thought can be put at the service of so-called altruistic sexuality, which means that seeking narcissistic satisfactions must have been overcome, without however invalidating those satisfactions.
In the genital state, thought is characterized by common sense, prudence, and objective observation. It’s what we call rational thought. (It., 54, translation mine)
Qualifying Oedipal Castration as Child Abuse?
My criticism of Dolto’s approach to child sexuality, as I was on good terms with her and exchanged with her for a while, may sound strange and exaggerated, but it is not in any way directed against her personally. I am speaking here about the perversity of the whole of psychoanalysis, the whole theater and comedy it represents, the grotesque family scenarios it plans and puts on stage, and the whole abstruse worldview it embodies.
What Dolto explains in the following quotes is certainly true, sadly true, as it exactly shows the shadow side of the whole of the Oedipal construct, and what it results in when the boy does not make it to liquidate his Oedipus, as psychoanalysts express it. And yes, the problem is more stringent with boys than with girls, for reasons we do not yet fully understand, but it has been argued by many psychologists that men generally are psychically more fragile than women.
There are boys who stay lovingly fixated upon their mothers; their behavior is characterized by the fact that they do not attempt to ‘seduce’ any other woman. If the father is alive, the two men are constantly disputing, for the fact that the boy does not detach himself from his mother and searches out other love and sex objects proves that the boy has not liquidated — in a friendship of equality with his father — his pre-oedipal homosexuality. He will therefore prepare for getting ‘in trouble’ with his father through his difficult and provocative behavior. (Id., 88, translation mine)
When the father has left and the boy ‘dedicates himself’ to his mother, this behavior can be accompanied by real social sublimations, which are associated with the activities derived from the repression of genital and procreative sexuality, but this boy cannot behave sexually and affectively like an adult. He suffers from inferiority feelings toward men that he unconsciously identifies with his father; he can also be a hyper-genital who is always avid to get new sex partners toward whom he will never build real attachment, but he will show impotent in relations with any woman he really loves, because this is associated in his unconscious with the tabooed incestuous object. (Id., 88–89, translation mine)
This is how the superego of the boy becomes very early rigid (…); the reason for this is the necessity to repress the heterosexual desire in the ‘maternal sphere.’ (Id., 89, translation mine)
The symbiotic fixation on a parent, especially the mother, beyond the natural mother-infant symbiosis, and thus after the age of 18 months of the infant, is pathological and it brings about a clear reduction of intelligence because of the entanglement of the vital energies of parent and child. This is particularly true, as Dolto points it out, in the mother-son relation, and less in the father-daughter relation because the mother-matrix has naturally a greater attraction power for the child than the father-spermgiver.
When mothers do not encourage their children to develop autonomy, they are on the best way to entangle their children in a codependence where the parent is the winner and the child the loser, and where the child, in most cases without parent and child being really conscious of it, becomes the ersatz-mate for the parent. While this mating is in most cases not sexual, the consequences of mother-son codependence are devastating.
I talk about emotional abuse in cases where the parent has received clear signals from the child for being granted more freedom and autonomy, but does repeatedly not comply with this request, or even actively cuts down or prohibits love and erotic relations of the child with persons outside of the family, whatever their age. Last not least, it doesn’t come as a surprise when Dolto categorically judges perverse behavior and social delinquency as the result of a non-liquidated Oedipus, or one that is not yet liquidated.
[P]erverse behavior or social delinquents, both are the result of a non-liquidated Oedipus, or a not yet liquidated one. (Id., 130, translation mine)
Rationality vs. Oedipal Mysticism
The judgmental attitude of psychoanalysis is not surprising; it rather shows how devastating the Oedipal construct is at the end of the day, together with all the cultural weed that has grown around it. This insight, that is shared by most psychoanalysts and psychiatrists is not the real bomb; the real bomb is the fact that our society tolerates psychiatric nonsense that perverts our children into potential violent perpetrators, using a construct for the psychosexual growth of our children that is anti-life, dysfunctional, dangerous and unnatural.
There must be an awakening one day, and perhaps a movement is to be created that is similar to Antipsychiatry in that it clearly unveils the social utilitarianism of Oedipal Culture’s child development paradigm because what it creates is not psychic health and responsible citizens but emotional and sexual cripples and a horde of silent anarchists who, while paying lip service to order and morality, are in fact barbarous uncivilized rapists because they have never learnt to copulate and embrace another in love when they were young and still open for sexual learning.
Modern rape research has shown that rapists are highly sexually inexperienced individuals who foster in most cases a repressive and moralistic worldview. These people suffer not from too much but from too little permissiveness and a blown-up super ego, and they are usually endorsing educational violence. In addition it has been shown that they are hostile toward healthy and caring touch, and suffer from actual tactile deprivation.
It is for this reason correct when researchers on the roots of violence, such as Dr. James W. Prescott, suggest to treat sex offenders with sexual permissiveness, granting them relaxation, massage, psychotherapy and frequent loving sexual embrace, even in prison.
— James W. Prescott, Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence (1975) and Deprivation of Physical Affection as a Primary Process in the Development of Physical Violence (1979), pp. 77, 78.
Seen from a social policy point of view, we must conclude that it’s exactly this denial of real child sexuality in the form of an active involvement of children in love relations outside of the family that renders our culture so outright false, morally corrupt, violent and destructive. And what we get from the pulpit of psychoanalysis here is but reject and denial, a false, jovial and grinning pseudo-permissiveness which is an outright betrayal of the child, together with cathedral lectures from a blown-up patriarchal superego incarnated in women like Dolto, who ‘speak the rude truth in all ways,’ to paraphrase Emerson. Only that contrary to Emerson’s, this truth does not liberate, but enchains our children in still more codependence, still more emotional entanglement and abuse and still more murderous fascist ideologies to come from this soil of a deeply perverted psychosexual base structure, which is the rotten foundation of our culture.
Oedipal Hero
Oedipal Hero is a term I have forged for an individual, usually of male sex, who suffers from a specific pathology that comes from a combination of an unresolved Oedipus Complex and a narcissistic fixation. In my view, modern psychiatry has just begun to identify this problem, and my approach to scientifically and psychologically outline this pathology is therefore to be seen as a pioneering work.
I use the term Oedipal Culture or Oedipal Consciousness synonymously with a range of similar expressions so as to denote the complex process of denial of truth about the cyclic and pleasure-bound nature of life through the repression of the child’s emonic vitality. Wilhelm Reich writes in Ether, God and Devil (1959/1972):
The unarmored organism does not know an impulse to rape and murder little girls, or to get pleasure through violence. It is therefore indifferent toward all moral rules that try to repress such impulses. It cannot comprehend that one has intercourse with another only because there is an opportunity for it, for example being in one and the same room with a person of the other sex. The armored character, by contrast, cannot envision an orderly life without coercive laws against rape and lust murder.
While the true reason for repressing the child’s vitality is hardly ever discussed in international consumer culture, the lifting of the veil behind so-called morality used to be a strong domain of post-revolution French philosophy. Most people in modern consumer culture really believe the main reason for inhibiting the child’s free sexuality had to do with morality or with a concern for protecting the child’s natural vulnerability. This cultural and social naiveté strongly contrasts with other cultures’ perspective, such as the French or Hispanic cultures, and it stringently contradicts the life and love philosophy of most tribal cultures.
French social historians such as Michel Foucault and social philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze or Felix Guattari have clearly demonstrated that the reasons for the child’s emotional castration are to be found in the setup of Western consumer economy. It has economic, not moral reasons why the Western consumer child is relegated to forced orality and deprived of tactile stimulation.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their philosophical exposé Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism & Schizophrenia, set out to formulate a fine and detailed philosophical, logical and ethical critique of Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex.
To illustrate my own point of view, subject to several of my books, I will provide here some quotes of this major philosophical and psychoanalytic treatise. All the quotes are taken from my own translation of the French original, L’Anti-Oedipe (1973):
People often believe that with Oedipus, it’s easy, and you can take that for granted. But it is not so: Oedipus presupposes an extraordinary repression of desiring machines. And why, and for what reason? (It., 8, translation mine)
Does Oedipal imperialism only require to abandon biological realism? Or has something else, infinitely more powerful, been sacrificed to Oedipus? (Id., 63, translation mine)
The un-Oedipal nature of desire production continues to exist, but is aligned with Oedipal coordinates that translate it in ’pre-Oedipal’, ’para-Oedipal’ or ’quasi-Oedipal,’ etc. (Id., 65, translation mine)
