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Buchenwald 44: Of Oedipus and My Family on Freud’s Birthday

OEDIPUS

Today is Freud’s Birthday.

                                                  —- a flashback to an earlier post.

We are now almost six years since my father’s death and the animosity shown by my brother, especially in regard to the Buchenwald photographs taken by our father Robert continues.  Whether one is or is not a “Freudian,” it is hard not to see this as a result of Hugh’s failed efforts to resolve his conflicts with the two father figures in his life …. Robert and Robert’s first son, me.   Robert was a awesome figure,  utterly committed to his medical practice and able to dominate all family settings.  He rarely spent time with us children … even sending us off to summer camps added to Robert’s dominant role.
Robert’s own experience with Freud was dramatic.  His father, my namesake Schmoel Schwartz, was a very intellectual rabbi who was also a socialist.  My Dad relates Schmoel’s throwing him out of the house when Robert refused to attend Cheder (Jewish school) and announced he was an atheist.  Schmoel died when my Dad was in his teens. It was my grandmother, not my grandfather who helped Robert become a doctor.  I never heard a word of praise for Zaydie Schwartz from my father!
Much of my early life was carried out to conform to Robert’s wishes.  I remember during the Eisenhower years being at a party where my Dad excoriated Stevenson. Robert had some people over for a campaign party where I remember my childish dismissal of the Illinois intellectual as compared to the war hero.   As I got older, I never got over my dismissal of Stevenson even as in college I came to admire intellectuals.
My teen age period was also affected by a close brush with death when I was 12.  At that time I came so close that a family friend, a priest, actually gave me last rights!  I do not think my Dad ever learned abut this but I always felt that event made my Dad especially concerned about protecting me.
Conflicts between us did occur but mainly of an intellectual and political nature.  As my own knowledge of history and political experience grew, my Dad and I often fought over politics.  These fights were intense, as fights of two committed people usually are.  Especially after the death of my Mom, those around us could not see the love in those fights.
My brother’s experience with our father was very different.  The difference was complicated by the ten years difference in our birthdays.  During the years I was in my teens,  the time described by Freud as the period when boys’ sexual power becomes focused, I was away from home at school.  I left home completely at 17 when Hugh was 7.  So Hugh grew up and had  his adolescence in a home with a single  dominant male.  I suspect that my Dad’s dominance could explain why Hugh has invented  fantasies about my role in raising him.   I think, I, as the older brother, became the good guy in the inevitable Oedipal period.   Later, when we were both adults these fantasies have returned to create problems.

The mechanism is described in the following excerpts from Wikipedia:

In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrates upon a child’s desire to sexually possess the parent of the opposite sex (e.g. males attracted to their mothers, whereas females are attracted to their fathers).[1][2]  Sigmund Freud, who coined the term “Oedipus complex” believed that the Oedipus complex is a desire for the parent in both males and females.

In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, child’s identification with the same-sex parent is the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex; key psychological experiences that are necessary for the development of a mature sexual role and identity.  Sigmund Freud further proposed that boys and girls experience the complexes differently: boys in a form of castration anxiety, girls in a form of penis envy; and that unsuccessful resolution of the complexes might lead to neurosis, paedophilia, and homosexuality. Men and women who are fixated in the Oedipal and Electra stages of their psychosexual development might be considered “mother-fixated” and “father-fixated.”  In adult life this can lead to a choice of a sexual partner who resembles one’s parent.

 

Freud described the man Oedipus from Sophocles’ play:

His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours — because the Oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.  It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father.

Freud saw pubescent boys as living Sophocles drama. The boy, as his penis develops, begins to directs jealousy and emotional rivalry against his father — because it is he who sleeps with his mother . Moreover, to facilitate union with mother, the boy’s id wants to kill father (as did Oedipus), but the pragmatic ego, based upon the reality principle, knows that the father is the stronger of the two males competing to possess the one female. Nonetheless, the boy remains ambivalent about his father’s place in the family.

Defense mechanisms provide transitory resolutions of the conflict between the drives of the id and the drives of the ego. The first defense mechanism is repression, the blocking of memories, emotional impulses, and ideas from the conscious mind; yet its action does not resolve the id–ego conflict. The second defense mechanism is identification, by which the child incorporates, to his or her (super)ego, the personality characteristics of the same-sex parent; in so adapting, the boy diminishes his castration anxiety, because his likeness to father protects him from father’s wrath in their maternal rivalry.

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Posted 06 May 2014 by theaveeditor in Misc.

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