Murdered Father, Dead Father

Revisiting the Oedipus Complex

Rosine Jozef Perelberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317527497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Murdered Father, Dead Father: Revisiting the Oedipus Complex examines the progressive construction of the notion of paternal function and its central relevance in psychoanalysis.

The distinction between the murdered (narcissistic) father and the dead father is seen as providing a paradigm for the understanding of different types of psychopathologies, as well as works of literature, anthropology and historical events.New concepts are introduced, such as " a father is being beaten ", and a distinction between the descriptive après coup and the dynamic après coup that provides a model for a psychoanalytic understanding of temporality. The book includes a reflection on how the concepts of the death instinct and the negative, in their connection with that which is at the limits of representability, are an aid to an understanding of Auschwitz, a moment of rupture in European culture that the author characterizes as " the murder of the dead father".

Perelberg's book is an important clinical and intellectual marker, and will be required reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as students in all these disciplines.

Part I

Paternal Function

Theoretical and Clinical Considerations

1

Murdered Father, Dead Father

Revisiting the Oedipus Complex¹

This book recovers the notion of the sacrifice of sexuality as the central, tragic element of the oedipal structure, a notion that has been largely abandoned in the psychoanalytic literature. Freud’s work progressively elaborated the role of the father. In Studies on Hysteria (Freud, 1893–95), he emphasized the importance of a real seduction of his female patients by their father; in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900), unconscious phantasies are discovered; in Totem and Taboo (1912–13), he introduced the notion of the distinction between the murdered father and the dead father; and in Moses and Monotheism (1939), he put forward his notion of a more abstract paternal function. This book traces the development of these theoretical and clinical transformations and suggests that they allow us to comprehend more fully the Oedipus complex proposed by Freud.

Lacan was the first psychoanalyst to give conceptual status to the term dead father, used by Freud in Totem and Taboo, establishing the equation between the symbolic father and the dead father.² This line of thinking was further developed by Rosolato (1969) in his distinction between the idealized father and the dead father. Stoloff (2007) traces the progressive development in Freud’s work towards a delineation of a paternal function (see also Green, 2009), but it was Jacques Hassoun (1996) who proposed the conceptual distinction between the murdered father and the dead father explored in this chapter. The passage from one to the other inaugurates the law and genealogy (Hassoun, 1996, p. 17). If the Oedipus story represents the former, the story of the murdered father and patricide as a universal infantile phantasy, the Oedipus complex represents the latter – the institution of the dead father as the symbolic third. The shift from the murdered to the dead father represents the attempt to regulate desire and institutes the sacrifice of sexuality. From then on, certain categories of kin are excluded from the field of sexual exchange, a fact that constitutes a crucial marker of the beginnings of culture.³ Sexuality within the human group is social as well as psychic and can never be reduced to biology. The notion of sacrifice is central to the understanding of the Oedipus complex; I indicate the connections between the dead father, the sacrifice of sexuality and the Oedipus complex. I also examine how Freud discussed the issue of the transmission of the phantasy of the dead father in the body of his work. Although Freud emphasized the idea of phylogenetic transmission, he also suggested the relevance of the unconscious of the Other in the transmission of phantasies and symbolic structures.

These ideas are crucially linked to the progressive centrality of the Oedipus complex in Freud’s formulations. According to Green, the Oedipus complex constitutes the first, basic symbolic structure and includes a network of concepts such as the murder of the father, the setting up of the ego ideal, identification, superego, loss, castration, desexualization and sublimation (Green, 1992, 2004; see also Kohon, 2005b). The Oedipus complex retrospectively retranslates earlier experiences in terms of après-coup (Perelberg, 2006). These ideas contrast with Klein’s formulation: it is the mother (or her loss) that is at the origins of symbolization (Klein, 1945); the father is an “appendage” of the mother, and the penis becomes a substitute for the breast (Kohon, 1999; Kristeva, 2001). For Freud, the father is crucial as a presence in the mother’s mind, but essentially as the third element that institutes the prohibition of incest in the relationship with the mother (see also Britton, 1989). Two clinical examples are discussed later in this chapter. In the first, one can identify a perverse structure in which the father has been “murdered”; in the second, there is a progressive construction of the dead father as the symbolic father in the analytic process.

Following the path of Freud’s thought, some of the significant steps can be discerned in his work, from the discovery of the ambivalent relationship to the father to the establishment of the dead, symbolic father.

The Interpretation of Dreams: towards the Oedipus complex

It is through the analysis of his own dreams that Freud discovered the nature of the ambivalent feelings towards one’s own parents: the incestuous desires towards them on the one hand and the desire to kill them on the other. In the interpretation of his dreams as well as those of his patients, Freud discovered the murderous feelings that any son feels towards his father. The study of myths, culture and anthropology gave this discovery universal status. Thus he quotes from Greek mythology as evidence of the universality of the hostile feelings between fathers and sons:

It is the fate of all of us perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that that is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laïus and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfilment of our own childhood wishes. But more fortunate than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers.

(Freud, 1900, p. 258)

This violent account is re-found in the personal (unconscious) history of each individual:

If a little boy is allowed to sleep beside his mother when his father is away from home, but has to go back to the nursery and to someone of whom he is far less fond as soon as his father returns, he may easily begin to form a wish that his father should always be away, so that he himself could keep his place beside his dear, lovely Mummy. One obvious way of attaining this wish would be if his father were dead; for the child has learnt one thing by experience namely that “dead” people, such as Granddaddy, are always away and never come back.

(p. 257)

Freud wrote his book on dreams after the death of his own father. In the preface to the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud himself pointed this out:

For this book has a further subjective significance for me personally, a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis. My reaction to my father’s death – that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life.

(p. xiv)

If there is a work of mourning present in the writing of the book, it also expresses the experience of liberation, as Freud implied in his own words:

… a physician will often be in a position to notice how a son’s grief at the loss of his father cannot suppress his satisfaction at having at length won his freedom.

(pp. 255–256)

This book is viewed as marking the beginnings of psychoanalysis and the discovery of the work of the unconscious. In dreams such as the botanical monograph and Irma’s injection, it is the nature of one’s unconscious, forbidden desires that is discovered. Anzieu pays special attention to Freud’s four dreams about Rome, which were interpreted in the dream book as expressing Freud’s journey towards the discovery of the Oedipus complex. The Rome dreams fall into two groups: in the first, Rome is seen from afar: it is both a dangerous and a promised land; in the second, Freud dreams that he is in Rome (Anzieu, 1986, p. 183). Anzieu suggests that crucial themes in these dreams are Freud’s incestuous desire for his mother, the fear of punishment and the “heroic identification with those who fail at the point of success” (p. 205). The Rome dreams have also been understood by both Anzieu (1986) and Conrad Stein (1967, 1968) as part of Freud’s work of mourning his father’s death (Anzieu, 1986, p. 210).

[If] anyone dreams, with every sign of pain, that his father or mother or brother or sister has died, I should never use the dream as evidence that he wishes for that person’s death at the present time. The theory of dreams does not require as much as that; it is satisfied with the inference that this death has been wished for at some time or other during the dreamer’s childhood. I fear, however, that this reservation will not appease the objectors; they will deny the possibility of their ever having had such a thought with just as much energy as they insist that they harbour no such wishes now. I must therefore reconstruct a portion of the vanished mental life of children on the basis of the evidence of the present.

(Freud, 1900, p. 249)

Although Freud had not fully developed the notion of the Oedipus complex, he nevertheless spoke in the text of a “father complex”, marked by ambivalent feelings towards the father and the wish to possess the mother (p. 363). Dreams in adulthood that revolve around ambivalent feelings towards the father are rooted in unconscious childhood conflicts, as the following passage indicates:

While he was nursing his father he had repeatedly wished his father were dead; that is to say, he had had what was actually a merciful thought that death might put an end to his sufferings. During his mourning, after his father’s death, even this sympathetic wish became a subject of unconscious self-reproach, as though by means of it he had really helped to shorten the sick man’s life. A stirring up of the dreamer’s earliest infantile impulses against his father made it possible for this self-reproach to find expression as a dream.

(p. 429)

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud studied his own relationship with his father and his rivalrous feelings towards him. It is, however, in Totem and Taboo that Freud constructed a myth about the beginnings of culture. Between these two works, there is a passage from the elaboration of the role of the real father and the process of internalizing him to the understanding of the role of the symbolic father, now seen as the “dead father”, constituted through an internalization of the role of the generations and the representative of the law and culture.

Totem and Taboo: the notion of a “complete” person

In Totem and Taboo, Freud described the primal parricide committed by the original horde who killed and devoured their father, who had possessed all the women and ruled through terror. This murder was followed by remorse and guilt (as the sons both hated and loved their father). Moreover, although the brothers had been able to get together in order to kill their father, they were now faced with a situation in which each of them wanted all the women for himself. In order to prevent their own destruction, they instituted the law of incest, denying themselves sexual access to their mother and sisters. This prohibition inaugurated exogamy and reciprocity and represents the beginnings of society.

The killing of the father brings the realization that this renunciation and sacrifice needs to take place if society is to survive. It lies at the origins of the social contract: the unconscious nucleus of all religions becomes the “parental complex”, with the stress on ambivalent feelings of love and hate towards the father. Freud argues that this is the beginning of society, culture and religion. Many years later, when he wrote about Moses, Freud would indeed state, “Religions might have been invented as antidotes to man’s murderous desires” (1939, p. 188).

The dead father, now constituted as a symbolic father, however, was more powerful than he had been while alive, and as the possessor of the phallus, he is the representative of the ego ideal and of the law (prohibition):

The dead father became stronger than the living one had been – for events took the course we so often see them follow in human affairs to this day. What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves, in accordance with the psychological procedure so familiar to us in psycho-analysis under the name of “deferred obedience”. They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free.

(Freud, 1912–13, p. 144)

This passage links some of the notions developed in this chapter: the link between the dead father, the phallus and the law; the notion of sacrifice (renunciation of a certain category of kin) and the ego ideal in its connection with the regulation of sexuality. This is discussed further in Chapter 6.

These ideas were to be given further depth and an anthropological underpinning in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who pointed out the universality of the incest taboo in human societies. The incest prohibition is found in all social groups, even if the category of kin that is forbidden varies from one society to another. Lévi-Strauss’s work firmly separates the universality of the incest taboo from biology, especially when exploring the distinction that so many societies make between marriage between parallel cousins and marriage between cross-cousins – the former being between offspring of siblings of the same gender, the latter between offspring of siblings of different gender. Whereas the former is forbidden in many societies, the latter is often favoured, even though, from a Western point of view, both sets of kin have the same biological distance from the individual. Lévi-Strauss argues that the incest taboo is “the fundamental step” by which the passage from nature to culture is accomplished: “It sparks the formation of a new and more complex type of structure… . It brings about and is in itself the advent of a new order” (Lévi-Strauss, 1967, p. 25).

Thus the killing of the father is linked to the notion that the children will, from then on, renounce the women in their own group – their mothers and sisters – and seek marriage in another group: this is the beginnings of exogamy. However, by instituting the law – which is the law of the dead father – the father then becomes more powerful than he had been when alive.

These ideas are familiar to anthropologists, who have pointed out that in many traditional societies, the individual becomes a full person only when dead and transformed into a (phallic) ancestor. Among the Tallensi of Ghana, for instance, the category of a full person is confined to dead males. The totem of an individual does not mean a full person. This is a status achieved after a lifetime – more specifically, only after death. Parental authority also becomes greater as the father dies, through totemic practices. For instance, among the Tallensi, the crocodile is understood to be the incarnation of an ancestor, and to kill a crocodile is considered to be an especially heinous crime (Fortes, 1949; see also Fortes, 1973; Lévi-Strauss, 1973, 1977). There is an equation between the ancestor and the ego ideal. It is the distinction between the biological individual and the socially defined category of the person that is being discussed here, a theme that has permeated the anthropological literature since Mauss’s celebrated article on the notion of the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Paternal function: Theoretical and clinical considerations
• Part II Thirdness and temporality
• Part III Is the Oedipus complex universal?
• Part IV The murder of the dead father
• Postscript
• Glossary
• References
• Index