Intellectual sleuthing

There are others whom I can understand intellectually, but no matter how hard I try I fail to be able to glimpse an overall logic in their systems of thought. Freud, for instance, only makes sense to me when I attempt to further complete the formulations I have obtained thus far from his oeuvre. I add that perhaps the obsession with the "Oedipus complex" and how pivotal that is supposed to be to family life has to do with a concern about "original sin". For, it is that which is forbidden, it seems to me, that really causes most obsessions of the mind, and so long as sexuality is not forbidden (nor made scarce by arbitrary bourgeois mores) there are surely more appealing objects of desire than one's parents.

Whilst on the topic of sexuality and how that resonates within the psyche, I admit to have only recently cracked another riddle that had perplexed me in the writing of another author whose work in general makes better sense. I refer to Georges Bataille and his concept of sexuality as "excretion". "But surely it is not excretion, but consumption?" I have said. The mystery is solved in the realisation that this concerns differences between the male and female sexual functions.

Finally, I turn to the issue of psychological projection which involves projecting parts of one's disposition into the natures and beings of others. Male psychologists tend to become particularly scolding whenever they suspect that psychological projection might be gallivanting on its hind legs. Only sleuthwork can make sense as to why this is.   Patriarchal reasoning would have it that projection is only possible when a weaker person seeks to project their negative characteristics onto a more powerful person in order to undermine them.   Priestly reasoning has a bad conscience about projection, since patriarchal structures cannot do without it for their maintenance.   Thus it becomes apparent that an almost universal way of becoming masculine in the eyes of others (and perhaps oneself) is to project characteristics deemed to be "feminine" away from himself and into women as such.

In essence, then, the male projects his negative characteristics into others -- and so he takes on his cultural attributes of masculinity as a result of expelling that which is culturally deemed "feminine" away from him. By contrast, women are taught that their real value is not to be found in themselves, but in the man with whom they fall in love. By virtue of such cultural training, women are more inclined to project their positive characteristics out of themselves and into male others, just as men are more inclined to project their negative characteristics out of themselves and into women.