Freud’s Oedipal Masterplot

I believe a brief summary of my version of Freud’s masterplot at this point will be helpful–that is, one that includes both phylo-"genetics" and ontogenetics. The "origin of origin" for the post-war Freud is his primaeval "man," and the androcentrism here is intended. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle it will be the simplest form of life, a plotting that attempts to go beyond human kind, beyond a "racial masterplot." Freud is more an "archeologist of the mind" during the war years, whereas in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he is more a "philosopher of life," despite his railings against philosophers and his disavowal of their influence on his writing (see Derrida’s "Speculate" and below). The essential primaeval man, like the infant and the primary process, knows no deferral, no difference between thought and action. He acts on his desires without hesitation. He is imbued with sexuality and knows no limits as to whom he can pursue as a sexual partner. Once he is a part of the primal horde, however, the primal father has blocked his access to potential sexual objects. Freud’s primal man is essentially a primal son, an Oedipus. The primal father is totemic. The subject mother/sister/wife/daughter is largely absent: she is reduced to an object of exchange. Parricide leads to access to all the potential sexual objects, including and especially the primal mother. Cannibalizing the primal father is not just vengeance, but a process of incorporation, something more profound than identification, and related to the process of mourning. The guilt the primal son feels follows this incorporation and is transformed into totemic law (eating of the totem), especially in the form of structures of exogamy and the punishment of castration for transgression of these structures of Law. Castration is the punishment for going outside these boundaries, but it can also describe the state of those that do transgress–not the effects of punishment necessarily, but the effects of simply transgressing the structures of the law. This is the state of being the sons experienced, the trauma, after they transgressed the original law of the father. The law erected by the sons is not arbitrary, but repeats the effects of their original deed: it tries to fix it, work through their trauma, totemically, symbolically. As a threat of punishment for transgression, castration is associated with both that which structures and the trauma of going beyond those structures. As a totemic symbol, we might call castration a trauma-structure trope. Not only do we have the Oedipus complex encoded here in Freud’s cave man theories, but we also have its resolution in the Symbolic of the Law of the Father (Lacan): the polymorphous perversity of the infant-man-son (trauma castration) is transformed into civilized man of the totemic father-law (structure castration).

What is crucial to understand about the phylo-"genetic" inheritance is that it contains symbols of both trauma–something akin to the sliding signifiers of Lacan’s Symbolic–and the center of the inherited structures of drives and fantasies–something akin to what Lacan calls the "point de capiton" of the Symbolic. If trauma is defined as a puncturing, that which disrupts a certain order by breaking its boundaries and creating chaos in its structures, a symbol of trauma would seem paradoxical: how could there be a universal symbol of disorder? Freud makes this symbol castration, the absence of the penis-phallus, an opposition of a specific absence to a specific presence. The unconscious, according to Freud, is indifferent to contradiction. Referring to Lacan, Derrida calls the logic of castration, "le manque à sa place," or the "lack in its place/the lack has its place" (Der87a 425n10). Castration as trauma suggests there is only one order to disrupt, a phallocentric one, and one type of chaos, the specific absence of this order. Whereas for Freud it suggests that there is only one possible order, for Lacan it is much more than merely suggested. Given that Freud’s phylo-"genetic" conception of order in Totem and Taboo is the law of the totemic or symbolic father, a law forbidding parricide and the strict rules of exogamy, it should not be a surprise that castration would then be a symbol for that order: the opposite (the absence of the penis-phallus) of what centers the structure of that order (the presence of the penis-phallus). This sets up order and its other as an oppositionality, a binary, and difines chaos as the absence of this order rather as something radically different. What is crucial here is the difference between the absence of a specific order, and an understanding that might ~~position~~ the traumatic other, not as an "opposition" that negatively secures a certain position, but as potentially something radically or totally other. This something totally other might be a beyond, but for Freud and Lacan there is only ever lack and oppositions, which is my general thesis here. This is what I believe Derrida is alluding to when in "Speculate" he states the issue under consideration as "the question of position (Setzung), the question of positionality in general, of positional (oppositional or juxtapositional) logic" (Der87a 259).

With respect to Lacan, this (op)positional lack is what Derrida calls "castration-truth," and it is the basis of Lacan’s destinational linguistics, which in turn is the basis for his "return to Freud." For Derrida, "lack does not have its place in dissemination" (Der87a 441), and "dissemination" can be understood as an aspect of his adestinational take on language and writing. For Lacan, the Symbolic is both that which structures, its center, and that which is Other: the law of the father, that which structures the unconscious, and where signifiers somehow are always sliding despite being "anchored" by the transcendental signifier of the phallus. Lacan’s Real is the absence of the "Symbolic" with a capitol "S," and should be associated with its phallic center in the form of "das Ding." Lacan’s transcendental Oedipal structure is more linguistic, whereas Freud’s is more anthropological or mytho-idealistic. Whereas Lacan locates this oppositional, contradictory logic in language, which the unconscious is supposedly structured like, Freud locates it in the phylo-"genetic" primal phantasies. For both, however, it is "castration-truth," and both would argue that the unconscious does not mind such contradictions ("contradiction" is reduced to this specific presence/absence). The issue I want to draw attention to here, however, is that the trope of castration as lack and an opposition between order and the absence of order (not necessarily disorder) is common to what grounds both Freudian theory after Totem and Taboo and Lacanian theory in general. There is no place for something totally other than the place established by lack, something beyond this place or its (op)positionality. No place for chance; no chance of something otherwise than this place and non-place. With his conception of the Symbolic, Lacan faithfully returns to Freud’s "trauma"-structure trope of castration he posits with his phylogenesis. The quotes of "‘trauma’-structure" denote an (op)positional logic rather than one of radical alterity.

Some will object to my conflation of the penis and phallus, but I am following Freud, and Lacan, the latter of whom writes of the "real phallus" and "symbolic penis" (qtd. in Evans 141). Freud consistently conflates the two, as he does what is psychically real (because it is inherited phylogenetically) and what is "externally" and ontogenetically "real." Freud writes about trauma and its relationship to castration in his 1926 work Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. In this work we find Freud treating what he had earlier presented as a childhood sexual fantasy, that females have been castrated, as something quite "real":

Le manque à sa place. It is especially with respect to castration that the term "real" is used carelessly by Freud, as he refers to it as a "real anxiety" (XX 162) (where the danger is known and real), "real danger" (XX 126), and repeatedly as a fear (where the danger is known and real). Despite the confusing and illogical overlapping of categories, Freud makes little distinction between phalluses and penises. Indeed, foreshadowing my treatment of anxiety below, Freud makes little distinction between exogenic and endogenic dangers: "We should not be threatened with castration if we did not entertain certain feelings and intentions within us. Thus, such drive-impulses are determinants of external dangers and so become dangerous in themselves" (qtd. in Weber 56). And then, "… the external (real) danger must also have managed to become internalized if it is to be significant for the ego. It must have been recognized as related to some situation of helplessness that has been experienced" (qtd. in Weber 57). Castration assumes the position of, not a danger, but as danger itself, due to both its endogenic and exogenic "reality," that which connects the phylogenetic and ontogenetic.

The phallic order, the oedipal organization and organizing of the primal phantasies, would also seem to constitute the essence and the "point de capiton" of both sides of the various splits and the various pairs of primaries and secondaries in Freud’s theories. The phallic order, therefore, would be the origin of those ontogenetic orders of primary repression and would determine the ontogenetic "original experience of satisfaction," which would in turn determine the "perceptual identities" of both the primary process and the pleasure principle (I emphasize "both" here because the "perceptual identity" is the origin of both processes, according to Freud). Freud wrote to Jones on August 1, 1912: "Every internal barrier of repression is the historical result of an external obstruction. Thus: the opposition is incorporated within; the history of mankind is deposited in the present-day inborn tendencies to repression" (Sul92 370). The "external obstructions" of the primaeval horde can be linked to the primally repressed, which, Freud argued, like a magnet, pulls from the unconscious, and pulls on like material that reaches consciousness. Repression requires both a pull and a push, he argued. Besides being another indication of his commitment to thinking of repression as the interdiction of translating one identity into another, one position into another (op)position, this push-pull concept of primal and secondary repression suggests a necessary identity between endogenic reconstructions of phylo-"genetic" memory-phantasy and exogenic reconstructions of ontogenic memory-phantasy. The identity would be as necessary as repression and meaning.

Two of the primal phantasies–the primal scene and seduction–constitute a matrix of positive drives and aims. The primal scene positions the parents as sexual objects, imagoes of sexuality and sexual difference. Seduction denotes the aim of having sex with the sexual object. Seduction and primal scene seem to constitute what Freud called the "sexual instincts." Castration negatively denotes the basis for all of what Freud calls the "ego instincts": the whole (masculine) body being the basis of "the bodily ego" and the "ego ideal." The primal phantasies combine the dualism of sexual instincts/ego instincts (self-preservative instincts), which was Freud’s dualist position on the instincts prior to Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Obviously the primal phantasies are primal. Being phylo-"genetic" they would constitute a transcendental (always already) "origin" prior to any ontogenetic origin, including the "original experience of satisfaction," which inaugurates the primal process and the pleasure principle through its binding of the perceptual identity. Again, this perceptual identity constitutes a tendency or aim of whatever mobility follows its establishment as the basis of the primary process and pleasure principle; thus this mobility is not free. The original experience of satisfaction is often assumed to be the feeling of satisfaction at the breast. With phylogeny included in the process, a satisfaction that precedes the establishment of the pleasure principle becomes less enigmatic, at least superficially. Regarding the satisfaction of being fed, the primal phantasy of a sexual connection to the mother can serve as the basis for an "original experience of satisfaction" of the real thing. In other words, regardless of who or what feeds the baby, the satisfaction of being fed could be "experienced" and "remembered" as satisfying a desire to be sexually connected to the mother. The perceptual identity would, therefore, be determined to be one of sexual connection to the mother regardless of "mere contingency." Of course, this logic suggests that the reality principle could indeed be, according to Freud’s logic here, a "psychical reality" principle, since all of the obstacles to immediate repetition of the "original experience of satisfaction" would be encoded in the obstacles to such satisfaction inaugurated by the primal sons after the primordial crime. In other words, the "no" of the father during the oedipal years would also be independent of "mere contingency," and therefore the reality principle would be significantly, if not totally, determined by phylogeny. These phylo-"genetically" encoded obstacles of reality would act like the required preestablished Qh in the Project, which foresees the quantity required to meet the "exigencies of life," and thus establishes the ego: a similar logic to the push-pull logic of primal repression, where what comes from the "outside" is matched by what waits for it on the inside (predetermined, foreseeing). As I will argue later in terms of anxiety, Freud, with his phylo-"genetics"–especially with respect to the positive aspects of the primal phantasy of the threat of castration, the predetermined "no" of the father, and the whole-body ego-ideal–is guilty of the same hypostasizing of the ego of which he accuses Rank in his criticisms of The Trauma of Birth (see XX 150 ff.).

These phylo-"genetic" encodings, according to the logic of the Wolf Man case history, among other writings by Freud, would have precedence over the contingencies of life, such as being bottle fed, not witnessing your parents having sex, or not being afraid or anxious about castration. This line of argument returns us to the questions of Freudian theory and the beyonds of "external reality" and the depths of the unconscious. Freud’s phylo-"genetic" masterplot reduces these beyonds to its own logic: it moves toward totality. The only context for significance within this masterplot would be in terms of its origins and the phantasmatic structures of that origin. Thus the only events that matter are those that can be reduced to the code of this masterplot. Since psychic reality is privileged by Freud–it is the only reality that matters–all "events" are reduced to its code, even traumatic ones. With both "external reality" and the unconscious reduced to the codes of phylogeny, there is not much left to constitute a Jenseit, contrary to Cornell’s claim that it is certain that "Freud always returns us to the problematic of Jenseits, the other side, the beyond of the unconscious" (Cor98 139).

Freud’s etiological narratives–with the ending of his analysand’s supposed cure, cure being the sign of Freud’s mastery–transform from proximate-causal, causation limited to the individual, to masterplots, ultimate-causal narratives, or "racial masterplots," which include the whole species (see Sul92 365). This transformation can be seen in the difference between the two parts of the Wolf Man case: the part written in 1914, the original and major part, being more the former, and the later supplement showing signs of a "racial masterplot." This dramatic change might account for why there are no major case histories written by Freud after 1918, the 1920 case of the homosexual woman being, like the Dora case, fragmentary: after 1918 Freud seems more interested in ultimate-causal masterplots than etiologies, and case histories require etiological structuring.

Regardless of this dramatic change, Freud’s etiologies from 1896 up to 1918 have remarkable similarities in structure. Those who focus on the differences between the two "mainstyle" plots of 1896 and 1918 generally fail to incorporate phylogeny into their conceptions of the later masterplotting and to define adequately notions such as memory, fantasy, trauma, the primary process, and the pleasure principle, among others, in terms of Freud’s phylogeny. For both "mainstyle" plots, trauma exists either at the origin or at least in relation to it through deferred action or Nachträglichkeit. Though Sulloway misreads Freud’s phylogeny as "biogenetic"–it is neither biological nor genetic–he is a rare exception with respect to giving the primal phantasies their due with respect to trauma:

With the "seduction" etiology a sexual "scene" of violence occurs but is not registered by the infant as traumatic because the scene lacks a certain context for meaning for the supposedly pre-sexual child. With primal phantasies, the case is more complicated. The traumas of the sexual "scenes" of primal phantasies–primarily castration, but also the primal scene and seduction–would unfold during the first five or so years of life in an ontogenetic version of the trials of the primaeval son, which ends in either the resolution or non-resolution of the Oedipus complex. In both cases, there is a memory of trauma that is deferred until a later context. In the latter case, Nachträglichkeit, as a crucial component of Freud’s plot of original presence and destiny, is radically other to the deferral of différance.

Though the introduction of phylogeny and ultimate-causal narratives solve some of Freud’s problems–especially with respect to the repetition he posits at his origins, and the contingency of "external reality" not necessarily providing the scenes proper to his masterplot–they are also fraught with problems. For example, what might cause the non-resolution of the Oedipus complex is unclear given Freud’s privileging of the "psychic reality" of these primal fantasies-memories over the "reality" of the individual child’s unique experiences. More to the point here, the "traumas" of the primal phantasies are supposedly necessary for the normalcy of the sexual development of the child, whereas in the "seduction" etiology they were the source of pathology, that which disrupted the proper development. For example, the "no" of the symbolic father, an aspect of the primal phantasy of castration, would recall both the castration of the primal sons prior to their parricide–that is, the fantasy-memory of the primal trauma–and the flip side of this trauma, the totemic law. Whence the neurosis if the trauma associated with what disrupts proper development is also the foundation of the structure of that development? If a priori trauma and structure are combined, so are pathogen and normalcy. In the "seduction" etiology, the "scene" represents a violence from "external reality," and the psychic conflict arises with a psychic change: the pre-sexual child becomes sexual in puberty, and so gives the memory of "seduction" a new context and therefore a new and unacceptable meaning. Repression and neurosis ensues. The neurotic in this case is thus differentiated from the norm by the violent event of early childhood–that is, the chance violence that was forced onto the child and diverted from its normal developmental path. In the psychoanalytic etiology, the "scene" is ultimately psychic. What could possibly cause deviation in such a hermetic system?

"Castration-truth" reduces the potential trauma of the Other by treating that Other as the center of the Same–"trauma"-structure–and as a specific absence of the supposedly transcendental presence of the phallus: phallogocentrism. My goal here is to show how Derrida’s reading of Lacan in these terms in "La facteur de la vérité" also applies to the oedipal Freud and his masterplot when his reliance and belief in his phylogenetics is taken seriously. In the rest of this chapter, I will argue that Freud’s notion of castration becomes very broad in later works, especially Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, and that he reduces any possible ontogenetic event–all of "external reality" and its contingency, anything that might constitute a force for deviance from the prescribed path, anything resembling trauma–to castration. With this reduction, a reduction at the core of the introduction of phylogeny as the true "origin of origins," I am left with four "ifs" that take us in the direction of recognizing Freud’s phylo-"genetic" masterplot as something totalitarian:

… the n whence neurosis? Moreover, whence the split subject? What happens to psychoanalysis and the "Freudian breakthrough"? What would constitute a Jenseit?

My incomplete answer to this series of questions is that Freud’s etiologies change into masterplots with the introduction of his phylo-"genetic" masterplot, and one result of this paradigm shift from proximate-causal narratives to an ultimate-causal one is that the ending of the narratives, that which gives the narratives a sense, is no longer cure. Freud’s caput Nili of his masterplot is no longer the source of pathogenesis, but of a more fundamental and ultimate genesis. What is lost in the 1918 "logic" of the Wolf Man case history, the very logic that helps it avoid being an example of what Freud calls "kettle logic," is the sense of a pathogenic beginning. Trauma and the source of pathogen are like the repressed for Freud: they continue to return. It will even do so as Freud moves away from etiologies and becomes further committed to his phylogeny-based masterplot.

Freud defines trauma as the piercing of structure, what he refers to as the "vesicle" (see Der87a 347), a structured energetics of the "inside of the inside." According to Freud, there are two possible sources of energy or Q, both outside the hermetic system of the vesicle: the outside of the outside (the "exogenic" source or "external reality"), or the outside of the inside (an "endogenic" source that was, during the war years, the unconscious). Since Freud has such a specific conception or positioning of the ordering of the inside of the inside, the hermetic system, both of the outsides are treated as oppositions to that ordering. Ultimately, Freud equates these two "outsides," positioning both of their orders as orders, as positional, in terms of the negative of the order of the vesicle. In other words, both of the beyonds of the vesicle order are defined and reduced to the order of the vesicle, to the absence of its order. And ultimately, I will argue, neither beyond is ultimately considered as potentially different. This positioning of the outsides as positions, as orders or the absence of this specific order of the vesicle, is achieved by Freud via his "trauma"-structure trope of castration, which (op)poses what is otherwise as presence/absence and accounts for both. Freud, eventually reducing all disruptions to the order of the vesicle to castration, makes this order a phallocentric one.

Whatever contingency there may be in "external reality," it is reduced to the negative position of this order, its (op)position. The chance that either or both outside orders might be different than the negative of the inside order, might not be castration to its penis-phallus, is not seriously considered, just as the chance that the inside order might be anything but phallocentric is not seriously considered. Difference and chance are not seriously considered: therefore, something beyond these (op)positionalities is not seriously considered. Serious consideration would require something more than an occasional or oblique reference to some potentially "otherwise" concept–such as Bahnung, free association, overdetermination, the mobile cathexes of the primary process, the difficulty in taming sexuality, the supposed disorder of the unconscious, the thallus, and the navel of the dream, among others–which would later be buried by those aspects of Freud’s oedipal totality. It would require some systematic, logical, and fuller accounting of something beyond Freud’s phallic (op)positionality, not that his phallic order is really all that systematic, as I have also tried to show.

Would such a systematic account of a beyond to Freud’s phallic order necessarily reduce that beyond to another phallic order? Is systematicity necessarily phallic? Only if difference is nec essarily repressed by (op)positionality with systematicity, and if difference is reduced to sexual difference, and this is defined in terms of the phallus, as with Freud’s castration-truth. As Derrida argues, this repression and reduction of difference are not necessary. What is at stake for me here is whether this (op)positionality is something necessary to Freudian theory–whether anything would remain if it was taken away, left behind, "posted." With his phylo-"genetic" "origin of origins," Freud has reduced the "outside of the inside," the unconscious, to such an absence of the phallic order. What remains is the "outside of the outside," "external reality," the only source of contingency left to this metapsychology, and always a thorn in Freud’s side: the potential trauma of trauma. Freud’s masterplot, like a traditional novel, cannot help but repress contingency.

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