Pre-Oedipal Nietzscheans

The pre-Oedipal level of development, (which as adults we have access to, to varying degrees, depending on context and personality), appears to be the basis for mutuality -- indeed symbiosis -- and therefore a measure of egalitarianism. According to a theoretician who uses Kleinian object relations to suggest a psychological basis for a sense of political mutuality, the knowledge of the early dependency we have on our mothers remains a part of who we are as adults.

It seems to me that this is why those of the contemporary era, who embrace a version of Nietzsche's philosophy, are actually looking to reignite this mother-child dynamic in their own lives. They want that sense of nurturing and succour, whilst at the same time claiming the dominant or "mother as control figure" part of the relationship in relation to others who they posit as taking the role of the child.

By contrast, the Oedipal level is less free, since submission, in terms of this psychological construction, only occurs out of necessity and fear, and not as an intersubjective experience of mutural give and take, including nurturing. Instead, accommodation to the Oedipal level is based upon one's sense of a rational need to survive and compete, against social and material pressures from the outside and primarily from above. Since such a feeling of an absolute need to conform comes from the powers that exist in society as it already is, (and not as it might be modelled), conformity is imposed as "the law of the father". There is nothing or little experientially "inwards" about that. Rather, superego tends to impose itself in a manner that acts as a prohibition against looking inwards -- against having too much of a self.

So the Nietzschean of today seeks to awaken the buried pre-Oedipal aspect of his buried self-awareness, in order to experience the world in a deeply subjective manner, as if he were either the instigator or the imposer of dynamics which enact the dominating power of the mother or the neediness and submission of the child. (If he cannot take the position of the mother, he will readily fall into taking the position of the hungry and desirous child.)

My own prolonged experience of the pre-Oedipal state, (perhaps metaphorical, rather than actual), was in relation to Nature as the mother, granting me my desires bountifully and rarely withholding. Those who have experienced such an entirely fulfilling engagement with the world in its pre-social, natural sense -- the breeze, the grass, the sun -- will find this need by the Nietzschean to reinvent the Mother and the Child (as if to extract more nurturing from the Other) to be rather tiresome after a while.