PARENTS' OEDIPUS *
*
Translated by Concetta
Violante Rutigliano
3 agosto 2002
When we speak
about Oedipus, we enter a sufficiently popularized dimension
and we seldom meet astonishment on the topic of a son’s
love for his mother. The theme of infantile sexuality, which
cost Freud many difficulties in his days’ academical world,
nowadays seems to have entered the common acceptation even though
it is often as commonly dismissed, touched on for duty of quotation,
actually ignored in its consequentialities. We could say
that there is no person who approaches psychoanalysis without
speaking about Oedipus, sometimes from the very beginning, as
an expected situation: it is mentioned and dismissed, if we
can say so; and from there opens a chasm which many people have
covered and covered again in their personal analyses. But what
happens on parents’ side? Same question: according to the
most popularized meaning, everybody knows fathers’ partiality
for doughters and mothers’ partiality for boys: people
sometimes come to notice that the little girl looks like her
father and the little boy his mother and so they decree a somatic
equivalent of love bent and, after all, of identification. The
Oedipus on parents’ side, as commonly known and mentioned
as a child’s one, has been formulated by Silvio Fanti in
his first publications. He defines it “Oedipus II”
as “ a synonym of either parent’s unconscious
sexuality-aggressiveness towards their child. The unconscious
ambivalent bent of parents’ desires is commonly observed
in professional practice and, although the Oedipus is the same,
the psychic experience cannot be led back only to reactivation
by displacement: it must not be forgotten that a grown-up Oedipus
presents the peculiarity of insisting in a subject who has completed
his/her somatic development and generally has all potentialities
including the reproductive one. Many of the problems connected
with incest and sexual abuses on minors can be led back to non-elaborated
Oedipus dynamics. The displacement of libido charging during
the post-birth development proceeds in the cranium-caudal direction:
when the process develops physiologically, at first it is taken
up in the oral cavity, then it goes to the anal region and at
last it settles in the genital area. It is here that the correctly
called Oedipus structures itself: a child from 3 to 5 years
old wants to possess
the opposite sex parent sexually and kill the parent of the
same sex Such stabilization is, however, far away from being
static.
I am not referring to the swings from one phase to the other
or from the positive Oedipus to the negative one, but to the
further proceeding of the libido displacement, which will
continue to express itself with the movement of the germinal
cells during its whole fertile life. In fact, the germinal cells
will yet have to execute a displacement till they recover that
chromosomal, diploid patrimony which they have lost during their
maturation process.We could ask ourselves if it is the haploid
state (which goes with the ultra-specialization of a staminal
cell) that pushes a cell on: a kind of compulsion to repeat
at cellular level from the haploid state to the diploid one,
return to the haploid state etc. (As Monod and Jacob say,”
the dream of a cell is to become two cells”). The somatic
process I have described has, as an equivalent, a tendency towards
the outside which is exogamy in the Oedipus case: a subject
is in psychosomatic fusion with his mother during gestation,
passes through primary symbiosis during nursing, then proceeds
to the classical stages of psycho-sexual development (or libido
displaces in the cranium-caudal direction) and, if the Oedipus
is sufficiently elaborated, at the stage of puberty it will
turn to an external object repeating the cycle. Nevertheless
the process contains a tendency to return to the previous situation
as in the case of the staminal cells which return to a diploid
state: the position of return to endogamy moves from a search
for partners leading again to the first object of charging,
to a desire for incest or to the correctly called incestuous
act. Professional experience is full of these examples. I shall
introduce an example of Oedipus II in delirium, a case of displacement
to the daughters’ girlfriend; then there will be a case
of incest and one which I shall call “transgenerational”
or phylogenetic Oedipus.
I
A woman presented
a form of tardy paranoia, or paraphrenia, hinged on the idea
that women in her village accused her of being her son’s
lover. It was a case of an emblematic state of psychotic break:
the contents of the unconscious crossed the Ego’s fragile
defence mechanisms, scantily reached the most archaic such as
projection and acted the conscious practically without mediation.
The desire was therefore expressed just as it was, only changed
into an ignominious accusation and attributed to her fellow-villagers
who played the coryphaei’s parts of Sophocles’ text.
II
A depressing
episode struck a woman during a series of loss-events among
which there was her mother’s death: the sight of the perturbing
games which, in her opinion, her husband played with his adolescent
daughters, emphasized her sense of guilty in the relation with
her mother, but only after she had managed to displace her rivalry
to one of her daughter’s girlfriends, being therefore able
to express the aggressiveness to which the young girl’s
provoking seductiveness gave rise, she came to speak about her
father’s jealousy. In other words the Oedipus presented
itself in a secondary form and was reactivated by her daughter’s
coming into play with puberty, but her associations ineluctably
led back to the primary one and to the triangular dynamics of
her adolescence.
III
Among various
cases of children sexual abuse or of incest I have chosen to
report a specific one: a father’s act on his prepuberal
daughter and on one of her little girlfriends. The story had
involved several family groups, but the only person who had
asked for psychotherapeutic help was the abused little girl’s
mother, the abusing man’s wife. The woman complained about
their destroyed life, their obscured social image, the precarious
balance of her second-born son who had seen his father’s
departure without realizing why. As regards the event she said
that the daughter who had suffered the series of libidinous
acts was in good conditions and the woman ended up by considering
her daughter’s girlfriend responsible for seduction. Such
a displacement implied that the woman accused her daughter of
having seduced her husband whom she was ready to forgive and
welcome back again. The form in which the Oedipus II expresses
itself in this case of child sexual abuse is the annihilating
aggressiveness which animates a parent in the relation with
a child of the same sex. By the way the ambivalence of possession-destruction
desires finds a paradigmatic expression in the character of
Jocasta. As a matter of fact it is true that the queen of Thebes
is a passive character in the tragedy as Q. Zangrilli writes
in his
article on Oedipus in 1997, but at the beginning of the
story she acts resolutely: in fact, she’s the one who consigns
her new-born son to a servant telling him to kill the baby.
Then everything becomes consciousness and Fate is fulfilled:
the ancient man is still crushed by Fate, he does not introject
the sense of selfdetermination, even if this is partial and
becoming conscious is not salvific but tragic. The quoted article
very appropriately displays the antecedent facts of the tragedy
of Thebes royal house: the primary trauma consists in the rape
of Europa by Zeus.Therefore several generations cooperate to
the necessity to abreact the trauma which crystallizes into
Oedipus story. It is what Fanti means in the definition “phylogenetic
legislation” which allows an introduction to the following
case.
IV
An analysand’s
father had received his uncle’s name (mother’s brother).
This uncle had died during the war. The analysand’s grandmother
( on father’s side) or the first Oedipus object of the
analysand’s father, had never elaborated the mourning of
her brother because of several reasons and had tried to make
him live again by giving her son her brother’s name. 7O
years later this woman’s grandaughter, or our analysand,
fell in love with a man who had some somatic details and some
particulars of his personal story which were completely similar
to his paternal uncle’s. Moreover he was named after a
great-uncle died during the same war. In other words we can
say that the Image of the ancestor who has been the parent’s
object of Oedipus charging, insists in the formation of the
Oedipus of the father of the analysand who, programmed by this
dynamic set of phylogenetic images, will, in her turn, choose
a partner who is a double of her great-uncle and so she’ll
adopt the model on which her grandmother’s first object
of charging had displaced. We could say that, as the Oedipus
is a dynamic set of representations and affections, it is an
expression of the phylogenetic
Image Def.: dynamic
set of representations and affections which is conditioned by
the idean Image which conveys ancestors’ co-pulsional experiences
registered since hominization.
Considering that
the Oedipus is always the same for parents, children and ancestors
and that to speak of Oedipus II (or secondary or of second type)
does not give the legislation any priority except in terms of
appearance in the psychobiological entity (man) which we deal
with, we could say that a parent’s Oedipus can express
several phylogenetic aspects of the phenomenon. A parent plays
an active role with an object by conferring it attributes of
his/her first object (father, mother, or grandparents), which
will be, on its turn, an active support, a historic trace which
can be identified.
© Gioia Marzi
- Ceccarelli
R.: S. Freud: i rapporti con il mondo accademico, Scienza e
psicoanalisi, gennaio 2001
- Fanti S, Dizionario di psicoanalisi e micropsicoanalisi. Borla,
Roma, 1984
- Fanti S, La micropsicoanalisi.
Borla, Roma, 1983
- Fanti S, Il matrimonio. Borla, Roma, 1987
- Fanti S, Il desiderio d’incesto, Borla, Roma, 1987
- Freud S, L’interpretazione dei sogni, 1889
- Monod J., Il caso e la necessità, Mondadori, Milano,
1970
- Peluffo
N, Immagine e fotografia. Borla, Roma, 1984
- Sofocle, Tragedie, Nuova Stampa Mondadori, Trento, 1984
- Zangrilli
Q, Edipo: rappresentazione antropomorfica del conflitto vitale,
Bollettino dell’ Istituto Italiano di Micropsicoanalisi,
n. 22, 1997
