On a rainy Saturday night a couple of weeks ago, I was graced with an opportunity via the CG Jung Society of Sydney to listen to a comprehensive talk by Dr. Roger Brooke about how the Oedipus complex features through psychological development in the human life span.
Specifically, Dr. Brooke proposes a widened definition from the typical Freudian interpretation of Oedipus to incorporate the Oedipus complex as a cluster of family relationships from which the gender identity and sexual orientation of a given family member is constituted. Because this is a developmental framework, cultural and linguistic variables are incorporated into an embodied sense of identity, with endless permutations arising in terms of personality and disposition as represented in each individual.
As an archetypal pattern, the speaker proposed that a universal situation of psychic transformation is imbued into the cultural symbolic representations that individuals construct as an interface to the wider world.
(in plain English that means that in my head, as a kid, my Da became a complex combination of Mike Brady, Alan Alda, Heidi's grandpapa and Captain Von Trapp. Someone that I fell in love with, and so, at the grand old age of six, I had to 'oust' Ma, which was doubly as hard as it would be for my brothers to fall in love with Ma and, erm, 'eliminate' Da, because Ma is my primary attachment figure, as much as she is the boys'.)
The core module of this construct is the triad that the child first encounters in the world - Mother, Father, child. The shape of the child's inner life that emerges is attributable to, but not reducible to, the experiences that the child first has with it's primary carers.
What was revelationary for me in this talk was the reminder that the reaction formations and repression activity that is key to understanding the Freudian psychodrama is represented in an extremely limited way in actual interpersonal communication. The Mother/Father/child triad becomes the basis for the fantasy life of the child - so a dreamscape that included patricide, for example, may manifest as a refusal by the child to listen to the father figure.
The revelation was important to me because, courtesy of Integral Life Practice, I've found myself characterisable as a 'shadow-hunter' - that is, in ways almost paranoid, I'm looking for projections that I'm making as I'm speaking or thinking about another precious human being. These shadow projections that I'm searching for typically have a familial orientation, because I firmly believe that nurture, in these terms, accounts for much of what we call personality, and so would have a big role in what I might be construing about somebody else's actions. This talk made me aware that this type of shadow search is identifiably superficial - I might skim the surface of something useful, but ultimately there's a deeper level of engagement that I'll be seeking from other human beings than will be analysable from a conversation over drinks on a Friday night.
Dr. Brooke takes the Oedipus complex, that side of ourselves that thinks that we can triumph over the Father to win the Mother (for he hints that the Electra complex might have as little validity as the field evidence would seem to imply) and proposes that the adult sense of self that we locate through our gender, identity and sexuality, the omnipotence that is implied, are gains born of an immense personal loss. In childhood, this loss is made up of the awareness, for example, that the child can't always have Mother's attention, and so from here the birth of consciousness is initiated. This loss of omnipotence is ritualised in circumcision, and the loss is necessary for an experience of limited, but real authority as is found in the loving embrace, and in the capacity for sexual love.
By comprehending this separation, and by virtue of the taboo of incest, Dr Brooke proposes that instinctual energy is liberated into our cultural life. The renunciation that we undertake of our incest instinct gives us, as adults, a relationship to our own psychic interiority, our own desires. We're forced to be come aware of our desire because of the unavailability of our most significant other.
The Jungian perspective shines through here in the proposition that our creativity is not only inspired by our positioning and role in our original family triad but also by an inner desire, or instinct, to individuate. For example - Freud saw the life of St Francis of Assisi as the life of neurotic compromise. Jung says that the life of St Francis of Assisi represented the highest fulfilment of that one human existence, and would say that the inner drive of St Francis needs to be understood on it's own terms.
Opposites are understood to be integrated into the psyche with the resolution of the incest complex, with personality transformation and a higher state of consciousness enacted in both:
- regression and progression
- action and receptivity
- ego strength and ego sacrifice
- resilience and flexibility.
There were some great portraits of the Mother and Father archetypes as well - the source of non-verbal understanding, the holding and contentment, freedom from critique and open and bounded embrace where all seems possible of the Mother contrasted with the language and symbolic satisfaction through thought and values, and a structured executive function of the Father (doesn't that just whiff a little of the Victorian era).
Discussion time brought out the Oedipus complex of omnipotence into present day examples, where chronic feelings of inadequacy, the narcissism of wealth and the inability of the younger generation to respond to authority figures were all broadlined as possible Oedipal manifestations.
I haven't even half covered the depth of the talk , but Dr. Brooke has left me with a deepened sense of how Oedipus appears in my own life, and has prompted an exploration of my own reaction formations and subceptions, a new depth in my old 'shadow'.
Jung and Phenomenology by Dr. Roger Brooke indeed seems worth a read.
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