historically contingent types

This following seems to be largely my position with regard to Marechera, and indeed, with regard to myself in a way. The pre-industrial context that Marechera and I found ourselves in (and I wonder, perhaps this was less so for the white males of our culture?) led to individuated personalities which were, however, not premised on an Oedipal development and resolution very much. In fact, I would say that I developed an Oedipal condition rather late indeed, upon adaptation to migration, and then promptly undid it as I didn't like the feeling it gave me, of being trapped.

My father rarely made sense ,  so I did not attribute many insights to him, but he has mentioned, once, how after I turned three he was called up for military service and, upon his return, he had "lost touch with me" and in his view, our relationship was never the same. So perhaps this is also part of the basis for my lack of Oedipal conditioning. In any case, Marechera, too was without a father after the age of 11. Mike was without one after the age of 5. This is the character structure that I can most relate to, which makes sense to me.

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Critics have always emphasized that the basic experience of Malte [of Rilke's novel], the 28-year-old artistocratic Dane who comes to Paris with artistic and intellectual aspirations and begins to record his life crisis in his notebooks, is one of ego-loss, deindividualization, and alienation. Often this disintegration of the ego is attributed to Malte's city experiences alone, and his childhood, which also features dissolutions of self, is said merely to foreshadow, to anticipate the later experiences. Not only is such a narra-teleological account not tenable, oblivious as it is to the much more complex narrative structure of the novel and to the always problematic "inmixture" of past and present in narration, but the very thesis of disintegration of self, of Ent-ichung, actually presupposes a stable self, a structured ego, a personality in the sense of bourgeois culture and ego psychology that could then show symptoms of disintegration under the impact of the experience of the modern city. What if Malte has never fully developed such a stable ego? What if, to put it in Freudian terms, the id/ego/superego structure, which after all is not a natural given but contingent on historical change, had never fully taken hold in Malte so that all the talk of its disintegration was simply beside the point? What if the fixation on the ego, which the late Freud has in common with traditional non-psychoanalytic notions of self, identity, and subjectivity, was simply not applicable to Malte? What if Malte represented a figuration of subjectivity that eludes Freud's theory of the structure of the pyschic apparatus and that cannot be subsumed under Freud's account of the oedipal? Perhaps we need an entirely different psychoanalytic account for what has usually been described as disintegration of self and loss of ego in Rilke's novel.

 ( p 109, Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking time in a culture of amnesia.)