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Oedipal Culture Hero Culture, Postmodern International Consumer Culture, Paranoid Culture, Paraculture, Incest Culture, Rape Culture, Murder Culture, Abuse-Centered Culture, Mute Culture
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also Emosexuality
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Introduction On the present page, I shall point out my critique of Oedipal Culture. If you lack out on knowledge about psychoanalysis, part of my argumentation may not be intelligible to you. You may want to study the following pages first: Terms Child Protection / Co-Dependence / Complexity / Continuum / Emosexuality / Emosexcoaching Emotional Abuse / Emotional Flow / Love / Narcissism / Oedipus Complex / Sexual Paraphilias Authors Alexander Lowen / Alice Miller / Carl-Gustav Jung / Erich Fromm / Françoise Dolto / Sigmund Freud Wilhelm Reich My critique of Oedipal Culture is inextricably woven with my critique 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 judge it to be another form 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 castrative; in addition, it is normative, and actually a tool for forging the ideal consumer child within a consumer culture that is based on the economic paradigm of total consumption. 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 pretends to use a mythical or metaphorical vocabulary, that is thus not to be taken literally, 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. Then you will see that this science of psychoanalysis actually exerts much 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 principles have never been applied, while those principles 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. We are not set in the world to engage in endless autoerotic self-satisfaction, but for embracing others lovingly. Child development, as a whole, today cunningly cheats about this fact and relegates the child to eternal masturbation in the name of their own best. They 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 auto-erotic and to develop erotic fixations upon their parents, but violently, by all police power in modern society, taken off 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. This 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 in order to better serve the child, but what is this service about down the road? To transform loving children into egoistic masturbators and incestuously fixated morons? 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: 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. Source: Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 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 per se 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 that goes through this society like a black Ariadne thread. 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. Source: Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 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 (...). Source: Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 70 (Translation mine) The Dogma of the Autoerotic Consumer Child Of course, it goes without saying that for those who still are even against children being autoerotic, Dolto’s ideas about child masturbation must sound revolutionary. 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 children 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. And this is not pedophilia, but first of all peer relations, as they exist in most native cultures, among children, not between brothers and sisters, but outside of the family, among children. However, 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 it 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 children: - Culture prevails! Françoise Dolto, when I interviewed her in 1986 in Paris, put it in the following terms: Françoise Dolto Interview It is true that Freud was normative in this matter. But why not? Psychoanalysis is not here for creating 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. Hordes of slave-psychoanalysts follow their master in this greatest myth of all myths that Freud has created with the whole of his doctrine of the Oedipus Complex. It’s simply not true what Freud said here. 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, so he was not that progressive child-loving psychoanalyst that history has made out of him, but a reactionary! And the advice that 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. And 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. Source: Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 74 (Translation mine) Intellect Boosting for Sexually Demanding Children So that means a child who is longing for stronger sexual fulfillment than that of masturbation has to receive a boost of their intellect. That is really giving a child a pear who asks for an apple. What such a child naturally wants is to be initiated into loving copulation, because in masturbation, as my research on bioenergy 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 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 Freudian 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 about 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 and culture-protection system such as psychoanalysis as 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 demanding 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. 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. Source: Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 54 (Translation mine) In the genital state, thought is characterized by common sense, prudence, and objective observation. It's what we call rational thought. Source: Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 54 (Translation mine) What about Qualifying Oedipal Castration as Child Abuse? My criticism of Dolto, 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. Source: Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 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./88-89 Source: Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie, Paris: Seuil, 1971, 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’ Source: Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 89 (Translation mine) I have outlined quite the same idea in my glossary entry on co-dependence. The fixation on a parent, especially the mother, beyond the natural mother-infant symbiosis, and thus until the age of 18 months, 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 much 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 co-dependence 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 about that, becomes the ersatz-mate for the parent. While this mating is in most cases not sexual, the consequences of mother-son co-dependence 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. Source: Françoise Dolto, Psychanalyse et Pédiatrie, Paris: Seuil, 1971, p. 130 (Translation mine) Rationality vs. Oedipal Mysticism It is not surprising because it 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 ever learnt to copulate and embrace another in love when they were young and still open for sexual learning. All rape research has shown that rapists are highly sexually inexperienced individuals who foster in most cases a highly repressive and moralistic worldview, that they thus suffer not from too much but from too little permissiveness and a blown-up super ego, and that they are pro educational and other 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. 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, this truth does not liberate, but enchains our children in even more co-dependence, even more emotional entanglement and abuse and even 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 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 unresolved Oedipus Complex and Narcissism. 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. See: Pierre F. Walter, The Idiot Guide to Sanity, Newark: Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, 2008, Chapter Three, The Oedipal Hero (Self-Help Textbook) and Pierre F. Walter, Oedipal Hero, Newark: Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, 2009 (Multimedia Production)
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Source: Wilhelm Reich, Äther, Gott und Teufel, Frankfurt/M: Nexus, 1983, p. 76. Translation mine. This book was originally published in its English version: Ether, God and Devil, ©1949, 1972 by Mary Boyd Higgins as Trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York. The first edition of Ether, God and Devil was published in the English language as Volume 2 of The Annuals of the Orgone Institute in 1949. While in the Anglo-Saxon world, the true reason for repressing the child’s emonic energy is hardly ever discussed, the lifting of the veil behind so-called morality used to be a strong domain of post-revolution French philosophy. Most people in the Anglo-Saxon world 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 naïveté 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.
All the quotes are my own translation from the French original.
Source: Deleuze/Guattari, op. cit., p. 8.
Source: Deleuze/Guattari, op. cit., p. 63
Source: Deleuze/Guattari, op. cit., p. 65 _____________ * English translation of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, l'Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, Paris: Minuit, 1973 (Collection 'Critique'). Whilst every effort has been made to ensure
that the details contained herein are correct and up-to-date, it does
not constitute legal, psychological, psychiatric or other professional
advice. I do not accept any responsibility, legal or otherwise, for any
error or omission. |
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Oedipal Culture
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
French
social historians such as