Category: Psychoanalysis

The Warrior (and the Ghost) in our Genes

In our previous discussion on Ibsen’s Ghosts, we interpreted what Mrs. Alving means by her use of ghosts in the following passage:

“Ghosts. When I heard Regine and Oswald in there, it was just like seeing ghosts. But then I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them” (Ibsen, p.120)

We reached a possible interpretation of the ghosts Mrs. Alving refers to: social constructs, gender norms, culture, family rituals…etc we inherit that we have no control over. We do not have the power or opportunity to choose the kinds of things to inherit, to what extent they influence us, or even when they start affecting us. Thus raises the question: Are we capable of escaping this predicament?

Image credit: Psychlite, WordPress

Earlier this year in February, New Mexico Supreme Court upholds the murder sentence of Anthony Blas Yepez, who was convicted in 2015 for beating George Ortiz, a 75-year-old man, to death in 2012. According to the testimony given by his girlfriend, Yepez struck the man in the face, leading to his death. Yepez claimed that he didn’t remember what exactly happened next, only that when he woke up, he was lying on top Ortiz’ body. The couple then poured cooking oil over the corpse and set it ablaze, leaving the crime scene by fleeing in Ortiz’ car. 

Yepez’ public defender tried to present evidence about Yepez’ genetic information and history of childhood abuse. However, the Supreme Court rejected the evidence, with the state District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer saying that she felt “iffy” about whether it was “reliable enough to prove what it proposes to prove.” The warrior gene theory dates back to a discovery made by a Dutch scientist in the 1990s, which claimed that all the male relatives from a family in New Zealand with a history of aggressive violence lacked a specific gene critical for regulating anger. The theory has been hotly debated ever since. 

The finding naturally leads to this question: if the theory is true, is anyone accountable for the crimes they committed? Who should be responsible for their crimes? Is it the offender, or is it the lineage which he or she has no control over? Mrs. Alving proclaims we are all ghosts, and that when she “picks up a newspaper,” she seems to “see ghosts gliding between the lines” (p.120). Perhaps ghosts not only lurk in newspapers, they also lurk in our genes. 

Oedipus round-up: The crossroads

Pardon me while I recycle a little content.

There are so many roads to Oedipus and so many ways we could take out of it to what comes next. Here are a few older posts, or multiple versions of posts, that can take us in a few of those directions.

On summarizing the play: what matters? Why? (With a hat tip to Freud & Deleuze and Guattari.)

On genre: Is how we tell the story part of the story?

On scapegoating.

On the civic life of Greek theater.

How it started: the OG convener’s post.

Feel free to continue our discussions by commenting on any of the above. Or take us where you will.

Misreading Freud’s misreading

In some recent iterations of this class, we encounter Oedipus not just through Sophocles’ play but even earlier, via Tony Sampson’s strong endorsement of some prominent critiques of Freud’s definition of the unconscious. (At stake in his book Virality is how we understand crowd behavior — how imitative behavior from fashion to fascism operates.) Sampson illustrates how Freud’s thinking makes him an easy symbol for everything some later thinkers want to resist. The French psychoanalyst/philosopher duo Deleuze and Guattari even named their original collaboration Anti-Oedipus (1972). If we want to understand why, we’ll have to think about both what Oedipus meant to Freud and why that would come to stand for the things the rest of our folks seem to be resisting.

Freud, famously, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), writes:

There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus[.] … His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours — because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. 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 this is so. (301)

For Freud the subject is an individual, and its formation is a family romance. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the unconscious is not an individual, but part of a crowd, like wolves in a pack. “Who is ignorant of the fact that wolves travel in pack?” they ask in A Thousand Plateaus(1980). “Only Freud. Every child knows it. Not Freud” (28). In their Anti-Oedipus, desire is framed as fundamentally social, not familial:

[T]he family is never a microcosm in the sense of an autonomous figure [but is] by nature eccentric, decentered. We are told of fusional, divisive, tubular, and foreclosing families. … There is always an uncle from America; a brother who went bad; an aunt who took off with a military man; a cousin out of work, bankrupt, or a victim of the Crash; an anarchist grandfather; a grandmother in the hospital, crazy or senile. The family does not engender its own ruptures. Families are filled with gaps and transected by breaks that are not familial: the Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, religion and atheism, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, Stalinism, the Vietnam War, May ’68 — all these things form complexes of the unconscious, more effective than everlasting Oedipus. (97)

This heady stew, I take it, is what they mean in their later book when they refer to the unconscious as multiple, as “the buzz and shove of the crowd,” not to be mistaken for “daddy’s voice” (30). The big picture here is how we understand the very definition or nature of the individual. For Freud, the individual is always going to be Oedipal. For Deleuze and Guattari (and by extension Sampson) the alternative is, as their contemporary Michel Foucault put it in the preface to their work, to “‘de-individualize’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations” (xlv). Referring to Anti-Oedipus as an “Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life,” Foucault summarizes one of its key imperatives this way: “Do not demand of politics that it restore the ‘rights’ of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. … The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization. Do not become enamored of power” (xlv).

For all their resistance to Frued’s reading of the story, could it be possible that Sophocles’ Oedipus the King had been making a similar point all along? And why would this matter in a time of plague?