severity

I am the fan of a certain amount of authoritarianism, and believe it should be reintroduced into schools. Both Nietzsche and Bataille make the case, in some ways indirectly, that without authoritarianism there is also no space made for a psychological sense of the Sacred. In Nietzsche's philosophy, "severity" is of value because it creates the psychological basis for a sense of reverence. In Bataille's view, without an internalisation of this severity, transgression has no subjective meaning.

I read Samuel Slipp's writing on The Freudian Mystique, and I read other post-Freudian texts about the status and psychology of women. Many of the feminist approaches to psychoanalytic theory, seem to recommend, like Slipp, psychological solutions to remedy a societal disrespect for women, such as (in Slipp's case) for fathers to share more of the parenting, so that they also suffer from the projections upon mothers as being abject. (This mode of projection from their offspring is theorised to lower the status of women.)

I am extremely sceptical that such a solution (of making both parents abject) would have any real value. Perhaps if anything, it would provide the psychological basis for an even more rapacious anti-authoritarianism than we have today. (The situation today is that children still tend to respect fathers, but just not women).

Rather, what has to happen is that women -- especially female teachers -- are given a high level of institutional authority to discipline children from the very early years and onwards. This would lead everyone to understand that women are respected by society and capable of exerting great authority.

I think that it is a symptom of a society that has extremely imbalanced gender relations (maybe not at a formal, ideological level, but nonetheless at an informal, ideological level) that Nietzsche's psychological insights about the value of internalising severity is misunderstood as an injuction to terrorise women (no doubt this is considered justified due to their putative state of being inherently abject -- a projection that originates from childhood complexes.)

The reason I have no trouble seeing myself or other women as authorities is due to an extremely ferocious female teacher in my first year of school.