The Freudian Mystique

I've just been reading The Freudian Mystique by Samuel Slipp. I enjoyed it up to a point, although I found some of the assumptions in an an otherwise well written and well considered book to be a trifle too slick.

Slipp perceives, as I do, that is is the fear of the mother during the pre-Oedipal stage of childhood development that is behind social misogyny in the broader sphere of life. A terrible recollection of the mother as monstrously abandoning or monstrously engulfing is the source of patriarchal views about women. Such normatively accepted social evaluations are actually based upon primitive defence mechanisms: the splitting of ego along with projective identification onto women of the images engendered during infantile psychosis -- that is, when the child feels overwhelmed by the mother and distrustful of her, on the basis of her much larger size and power in relation to the child.

I had noticed this phenomenon writ large a few times myself, when it appeared to me that those who demonstrably had very little power in society (such as myself in some instances) were considered by key males (and indeed, up to a point, by males in general) to have no limitations in power whatsoever, but in fact to be terrifyingly powerful in our situation of complete lack of resources. So I understand then that the power that is projected onto me and other women is simply not real, but derives, somehow from the mind of the observer.

The strongest points in Slipp's book are his production of this analysis in scholarly terms, and his explanations as to why Freud himself avoided delving into the pre-Oedipal dimensions of psychological relations. Apparently it had to do with Freud's early emotional abandonment by his mother, as she dealt with bereavement, which led to his splitting his ego into two in relation to her -- he had to believe that she could do no wrong, otherwise the terrible feelings of abandonment he had experienced at this early stage would re-enter his consciousness and overwhelm it. So the pre-Oedipal aspects of development were best avoided by Freud, who needed to repress his own experiences of this stage.

The weakest points are a partial reversion to biologism. If women are by nature more in tune with the pre-Oedipal field (which is dubious), then how to explain Nietzsche and Bataille? Slipp's arguments could have been extended to show that when Nietzsche chose to reclaim what had previously, in Western culture, been considered part of the feminine preserve -- ie. irrationality and sexuality -- that he gained his mystical sense of the value of this irrationality through an ecstatic encounter with the pre-Oedipal dimension, experienced as the ontological core of the human psyche. Thus that which was culturally attributed to the feminine was re-appropriated in the philosophical reworkings of Western cultural ideas, and became attributed as masculine. Slipp does note this last point concerning cultural reappropriation, but doesn't recognise that what was reappropriated was, in fact, access to the pre-Oedipal dimensions of consciousness, itself.

Furthermore, it is a mistake to presume that this pre-Oedipal realm of awareness is a realm of "feeling" per se. I presume this notion comes from Darwinism and its idea that "ontogeny recapitulates phlogeny" (Ernst Haeckel, quoted by Slipp, 1995, p 29) - ie. that infantile developmental processes mirror the processes of the broader evolutionary development of the species). Slipp reimposes the very error that he is seeking to critique, in his splitting of the human psyche into male and female components, that are more oriented towards abstract thinking and relational (emotional) thinking respectively. Yet one ought to question in what sense the primary processes of the pre-Oedipal stage are in any way specifically "emotional" in a phenomonological sense. Rather than that, it seems to me that these processes are urgent and condensed expressions of general human awareness. They are emotional in this sense of communicating aspects of the psyche in a very condensed and immediate way -- and yet, I am not sure that they are actually emotional in the way that women have been pejoratively considered emotional, for centuries. Rather, the use of this pejorative term seems to be related to reflexive psychological anxieties about the pre-Oedipal dynamics -- a fear of being overwhelmed by them, as by the pre-Oedipal mother. It also seems that the nurturing aspect of the mother (a certain kind of reflexive attunedness to others in the process of nurturing) is being confused here with the unstable psychology of the nursing child. In any case, the two things are not "emotional" in the same ways, and so it is a mistake to think that the nurturing environment of the nursing mother would somehow keep the attention of the female child more easily, whilst being more uncomfortable for the male. This is not a simple case of "like attracts like" here, since the two -- mother and child -- are not psychologically alike.

And if like doesn't attract like on the basis of emotionality attracting emotionality, then Slipp still needs to find some other ways to consider gender differences, that do not rely upon essentialistic thinking. To give him credit, he does largely see that cultural ideas and the prevailing forms of nurturing (by mothers, and less by fathers -- although he acknowledges that this is changing) do largely serve to reinforce the dominant patriarchal values of our time.

Slipp, it seems, is also of the school that one attains, through one's early conditioning, a firm gender identity, or something may be wrong with you. (He thinks that something was wrong with Freud, in this regard.) The shamanistic capacity to slip back into the pre-Oedipal dimension, for sustenance, and then to return to a normal developmental state, is unknown to him. That one can overcome one's mother complexes by doing so is also not even anticipated in this work. it is also not yet established whether women or men have more shamanistic aptitude.

To the degree that shamanism involves a certain audaciousness and willingness to shatter the already existing self, men may be better culturally conditioned for it. But women, when pushed to their limits, can show incredible resourcefulness. Perhaps what they sometimes lack is a tradition in which to couch their experiences.