Introduction: Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Work of Mourning

Abstract

This chapter discusses Sigmund Freud’s formulations of the Oedipus complex and of fatherhood. It offers an overview of the reception of these concepts by British, French, and American psychoanalysts, as well as social scientists, after Freud.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The Absent Father

At its origin, psychoanalysis was the work of mourning. Not any death was mourned, however, nor are we speaking about a random mourner. A father had died, and the mourner in question was his son Sigmund Freud.

Jacob Freud passed away on October 23, 1896. In July 1897, Freud embarked on a self-analysis during which he played the double role of analyst and patient, and focused on dreams rather than the free associations that he had encouraged in his earlier patients.¹ In the process, he would reflect on his relationship to his father, explore his own wishes and desires, but also formulate his ideas about the human psyche in general. The individual case study of Sigmund Freud led to Freud’s writing of a book, the Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams], that would become his best-known work and the manifesto of a new discipline called psychoanalysis. It was published in 1899—but was postdated with 1900. After all, Freud had conceived it as the work of the new century.

While the Interpretation of Dreams was written by a son, this son was already a father himself. Freud’s daughter Anna, who would later become a psychoanalyst too, was born a few months before Jacob Freud’s death, in December 1895. She was the last of Freud’s six children: three sons and three daughters all. But while Jacob Freud’s death would send his son off on a road of discovery, the addressee of its account was very much alive. During the period of his self-analysis, Freud directed many letters to a fellow physician, Wilhelm Fliess, and kept him abreast of the analytical process and his insights.

Fliess was an otolaryngologist who lived and practiced in Berlin. He had met Freud in November 1887 in Vienna. Fliess had visited the city, and upon the advice of Freud’s older mentor Josef Breuer, he had attended a scholarly lecture offered by Freud. After Fliess’ return to Berlin, he and Freud engaged in a correspondence of which only Freud’s letters survived. These letters offer insights into Freud’s own family life as well as early psychoanalytic concepts. In a triangulation that involved a father, who had passed away, and a friend, who was geographically absent, Freud established himself as an author who was not only eager for self-exploration, but also for male friendship.² While there was no question about Freud’s mourning, other questions soon arose. In his dreams and recollections, his father did not quite conform to then-current ideals of steadfast masculinity, and his behavior evoked the son’s resentment. Once, when Jacob Freud was attacked by a stranger in the street just for being a Jew, the insulted man had not shown any pride. He had just picked up his hat from the gutter and remained silent.³ No son should have to witness such embarrassingly submissive behavior. But as evidenced in his letters to Fliess, Jacob Freud’s son did not quite conform to the ideals of masculinity either, albeit in a different way. In probing his relationship to his correspondent, and discovering his attraction to Fliess, Freud was exploring his own sexuality and desire. He had to face his feminine side.

Just like Freud, Fliess was both a practicing physician and a scientist and scholar. His research was biologically based and highly speculative. In 1897, he published a book entitled Die Beziehungen zwischen Nase und weiblichen Geschlechtsorganen (in ihrer biologischen Bedeutung dargestellt) [The Relationship Between the Nose and the Female Sex Organs (Depicted in Their Biological Significance)].⁴ His theories led surgical experiments related to the nose by which he tried to reduce the complaints of female patients who were suffering from hysteric symptoms. One of these patients was Emma Eckstein. Fliess sent her to Freud after he had botched a medical procedure, and the incident takes center stage in one of Freud’s dreams of 1895, and appears in the Interpretation of Dreams in the “Analysis of a Specimen Dream.”⁵ Fliess also focused on the importance of biorhythms for both women and men. He thought that these would be influential for the classification of mental illnesses and helpful for the treatment of hysterics. In Der Ablauf des Lebens. Grundlagen zur exakten Biologie [The Journey of Life. The Fundaments of Scientific Biology], he set out to describe human biology in terms of 23- or 28-day cycles.⁶ This book was published in 1906, but already in his correspondence with Freud, he was focusing on collecting data for the study that Freud was eager to supply for his friend.⁷ Most importantly, however, Fliess would be the first theorist to propose a general concept of human bisexuality. “Only someone who knows he is in possession of the truth writes as you do,” Freud wrote admiringly to his Berlin friend, and while he would consider Fliess’ concept of bisexuality for his own work as well, his early analysis focuses on his development as a man, even though he could not deny his feelings for Fliess. Later, Fliess would blame Freud for having passed his ideas concerning bisexuality on to a third person, namely Otto Weininger, whose provocative study Geschlecht und Charakter [Sex and Character] was published in 1903, and gained immediate attention, thus sidelining Fliess’ discovery.⁸

In terms of his own analysis, Freud stayed on course. One important scene from his childhood that he could recall relates to his mother. In a letter to Fliess from October 3, 1897, he recalls the family trip from Leipzig to Vienna, where the family was about to settle for good. In the train, the two-year-old child had an opportunity to spend the night with his mother,⁹ “and there must have been an opportunity of seeing her nudam.”¹⁰ He continues to insert Latin terms that are perfectly suited for the scholarly and medical realm, and concludes by describing the effect of this scene, namely that his “libido toward matrem was awakened.”¹¹

“My self-analysis is in fact the most essential thing I have at present and promises to become of the greatest value to me if it reaches its end,” Freud explains a couple of weeks later in a letter penned on October 15, 1897, in which he also mentions various of his dreams. “If the analysis fulfills what I expect of it,” he writes,

I shall work on it systematically and then put it before you. So far I have found nothing completely new, [just] all the complications to which I have become accustomed. It is by no means easy. Being totally honest with oneself is a good exercise. A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood, even if not so early as in children who have been made hysterical. (Similar to the invention of parentage [family romance] in paranoia—heroes, founders of religion). If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the objections that reason raises against the presupposition of fate; and we can understand why the later “drama of fate” was bound to fail so miserably. Our feelings rise against any arbitrary individual compulsion, such as is presupposed in Die Ahnfrau and the like; but the Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he senses its existence within himself. Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one.¹²

Franz Grillparzer’s Die Ahnfrau [The Ancestress], a drama first published in 1817, features a son who kills his father. In the letter cited above, Freud does not only place his reading of Sophocles in comparison to Grillparzer’s work. Both plays are part of another triangulation as Freud refers to a third drama that would preoccupy him in the years to come. It is William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.¹³ With Shakespeare’s work, he thought to have found a family drama similar to Οἰδίπους Τύραννος [Oedipus the King or Oedipus Rex], and superior to Grillparzer’s Ancestress.¹⁴ “How does Hamlet the hysteric justify his words, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’?,” Freud asks, “How does he explain his irresolution in avenging his father by the murder of his uncle—the same man who sends his courtiers to their death without a scruple and who is positively precipitate in murdering Laertes?”¹⁵ While Sophocles’ play puts the generational sequence into question, Freud quite curiously mistakes a father for his son in this passage, and replaces Polonius with the young Laertes.

Freud’s letter of October 17, 1897, offers also his first consideration of Sophocles’ play as a key text for understanding the human psyche. Once again, a father and son were on the road. But while Jacob Freud, the father, met with insult, and remained passive, the same cannot be said about Oedipus, the son, who was quick to respond, and to get his way. We never learn about the identity of the stranger whom Jacob Freud encountered, but the stranger to whom Oedipus responded, and with a violent act, turned out to be his father.¹⁶ That story would now gain special significance, and carried forth from his letter to Fliess to the Interpretation of Dreams. There, he would reformulate his argument as follows, while providing a renewed reference to Grillparzer’s play:

If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which the contrast is exemplified. There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus, while we can dismiss as merely arbitrary such dispositions as are laid down in Die Ahnfrau or other modern tragedies of destiny. And a factor of this kind is in fact involved in the story of King Oedipus.¹⁷

It is Freud’s first mention of a phenomenon that he would name the Oedipus complex. Here, however, Freud no longer refers to his own personal experience. And as he moves from writing a personal letter to Fliess to writing a book for a general public, he no longer simply recognizes Fliess’ truth, as he once claimed, or his very own, as Oedipus did in Sophocles’ play. Instead, the story of Oedipus achieves a universal truth and provides a general key to the human psyche:

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. Our dreams convince us that that is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laïus and married his mother Jocasta , merely shows us the fulfilment of our own childhood wishes. But, more fortunate than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, in so far we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. Here is one in whom these primaeval wishes of our childhood have been fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the whole force of the repression by which those wishes have since that time been held down within us. While the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to light the guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling us to recognize our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found.¹⁸

His own case study provided Freud with a new understanding of Sophocles’ drama. Freud had already treated hysteric patients for several years by then, and had been hopeful to be able to cure them. Together with Breuer, he had published the Studien über Hysterie [Studies in Hysteria] in 1895. In October of that same year, he wrote to Fliess:

I am almost certain that I have solved the riddles of hysteria and obsessional neurosis with the formulas of infantile sexual shock and sexual pleasure, and I am equally certain that both neuroses are, in general, curable—not just individual symptoms but the neurotic disposition itself. This gives me a kind of faint joy—for having lived some forty years not quite in vain—and yet no genuine satisfaction because the psychological gap in the new knowledge claims my entire interest.¹⁹

But Freud also explained the “shock” in question as an early sexual incident in the female patient’s life that has caused trauma, and he urged the patient to remember her relationship with her father or perhaps other older men in her family circle. In his treatment of patients, Freud had set out to find those incidents that were seemingly forgotten by his patients, but curiously remembered as hysteric symptoms still.

With the discovery of the Oedipus story as a universal template, Freud moved away from the so-called seduction theory of his earlier work. Trauma could not only be caused by an actual incident, it seemed, but by an imagined one as well. Further, Freud was able to assume a different temporal concept of Nachträglichkeit (afterwardness, belatedness, or après-coup), in which the event was established in memory only.²⁰ For this discovery, Fliess’ former patient Eckstein, now in Freud’s care, was important as well. In 1895, he offers Fliess an “Entwurf einer Psychologie” [“Project for a Scientific Psychology”],²¹ and offers the following glimpse from her case study:

Emma is subject at the present time under a compulsion of not being able to go into shops alone. As a reason for this, [she produced] a memory from the time when she was twelve years old (shortly after puberty). She went into a shop to buy something, saw the two shop-assistants (one of whom she can remember) laughing together, and ran away in some kind of affect of fright. In connection with this, she was led to recall that the two of them were laughing at her clothes and that one of them had pleased her sexually.²²

The story is seemingly trivial, and young woman’s “affect of fright” is difficult to understand. Why was she so eager to leave the store? Freud has to refer to Eckstein’s associations and her earlier memories to find an explanation:

Further investigation now revealed a second memory, which she denies having had in mind at the moment of Scene I. Nor is there anything to prove this. On two occasions when she was a child of eight she had gone into a small shop to buy some sweets, and the shopkeeper had grabbed her genitals through her clothes. In spite of the first experience she had gone there a second time; after the second time she stopped away. She now reproached herself for having gone there a second time, as though she had wanted in that way to provoke the assault. In fact a state of ‘oppressive bad conscience’ is to be traced back to this experience.

We now understand Scene I (shop-assistants) if we take Scene II (shopkeeper) along with it.²³

In the first and in the second narrative, Freud relies on Eckstein’s memories, not dreams. Curiously, however, the second experience as an eight-year-old girl is able to comment on the later experience of the twelve-year old, and both of them reflect on the behavior of the grown woman in Freud’s treatment. The temporal direction is reversed; Freud has to forge his way into Eckstein’s past to find an explanation. When the eight-year-old girl is being molested by a man, would she already know about his sexual desire? As the twelve-year-old encounters the laughing salesmen, Freud discovers the opposite; the girl seems to take a liking to one of them. Here, Eckstein is already past puberty. Only later, after passing puberty, the young girl will realize what had happened before; only when encountering her own sexual desire, was she able to understand the earlier man’s intention toward the younger girl. As Freud realized, memories do not simply recall the past. They take place in the present and orient themselves according to the knowledge that one has in present time. Because of this afterwardness or Nachträglichkeit, nothing can be attributed to the past that could not be changed later on as well. Even trauma forms itself only belatedly, in seeming repetition of past experience. For the trauma itself, it is irrelevant whether the earlier incident existed or not; it is the memory that bears importance.

Sophocles’ drama did not only serve Freud to discover an old myth, but to rediscover it; to realize a truth that he must have known already. Later critics like Jeffrey M. Masson would famously criticize Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory.²⁴ In turning away from it, Masson argued, Freud consciously turned away from social reality and the large numbers of cases of child molestation in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Was Freud so conservative a family father himself that he chose to remain blind vis-à-vis the behavior of other fathers toward their young daughters? But in rejecting the seduction theory, and privileging the imaginary versus the real, Freud also set the framework for psychoanalysis proper. Even a son’s relationship to his father no longer had to be real, but could be imagined. The Oedipus complex moved to become psychoanalysis’ core.²⁵

The Drama of Oedipus the King

Perhaps it was not too far-fetched for Freud to focus on a literary work when arguing for the power of imagination, although the abandonment of the seduction theory also replaces the reality of an event in social life with that of a biologically based sexual development—as well as the shift from the girl as hysteric patient to the boy as the focus of the Oedipal complex. But Freud did not see Sophocles as the author of the story of Oedipus. The Greek author had not freely invented a plot; instead, he was a dramatist who transformed a myth for the stage. The myth’s significance reached beyond a single author’s achievement, and transcended classical Greek drama. In viewing Oedipus the King, Sophocles’ audience realized the story’s truth; they could recognize themselves. Still, it was the drama that taught Freud about the myth and thus, the drama’s greater truth. Sophocles’ work offered Freud insight, just as the figure of Oedipus in the play would gain his insights from the account of a truthsayer who, like the Sphinx, offered a riddle. “Do you know?” asks the blind seer Tiresias, for example,Verse

Verse All unknowing you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood, the dead below the earth and the living here above, and the double lash of your mother and your father’s curse will whip you from this land one day, their footfall treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding your eyes that now can see the light!Footnote

Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 473–479; in: Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone—Oedipus the King—Oedipus at Colonus, tr. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin Press, 1984), 183.

Oedipus seems to know enough to solve the Sphinx’s riddle—“What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?”—as he answers: man. But while he would know about the nature of man in general, he knows little about himself—at least, he does not know his true identity and history. He does not realize who his father is, or that he had killed his father at a crossing of country roads. He views himself as a stranger who had vanquished the evil Sphinx and has become King of Thebes as a reward; he does not know that he is not a stranger at all, but a Prince of Thebes; or that woman whom he would marry, the Queen, is his mother. Again, and again, the blind seer Tiresias would offer him hints and point him to the direction of his self-discovery, but it takes time until Oedipus is able to understand. Once he gains this knowledge, he blinds himself. His blindness will meet that of Tiresias. But did Oedipus learn something new in this process, or had he somehow known everything already?

Unlike Freud’s patients, Sophocles’ hero bears the physical mark of a swollen foot that is not a hysteric symptom. His tragedy is that he is unable to draw any conclusions from that which Tiresias offers. It is the audience of this play who knows, as it listens to Tiresias’ words. The problem of afterwardness becomes one of staging here, as Oedipus enters belatedly, only to miss part of Tiresias’ speech:Verse

Verse             A stranger, You may think, who lives among you, He will soon be revealed a native Theban But he will take no joy in the revelation. Blind who now has eyes, beggar who now is rich, He will grope his way towards a foreign soil, A stick tapping before him step by step.            [Oedipus enters the palace] Revealed at last, brother and father both To the children he embraces, to his mother Son and husband both—he sowed the loins His father sowed, he spilled his father’s blood!Footnote

Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 513–523; The Three Theban Plays, 185.

As in all true Greek drama, the last revelation comes to Oedipus as a surprise. Freud would introduce the idea of such a revelation or katharsis in his terminology of treating patients. Thus, he follows a Greek tradition where dramatic and medical professions come together. The classicist Jacob Bernays, an uncle of Freud’s wife Martha, had already pointed out the rich meaning of the word.²⁸ But there is a difference between a surprising revelation, and a revelation that equals recognition, or the recall of something that one already knew.

And unlike Sophocles’ hero, Freud’s Oedipus seems to act knowingly. He falls in love with his mother and kills his father with the purpose of removing a rival for his mother’s affection. In Sophocles, Oedipus does not even know that the man whom he kills was married—and married to his own mother; and Oedipus does not marry out of love, but political considerations and dynastic obligations. We do not know whom he desires. At the same time, Sophocles’ character is not just engaged in incest, but troubles the logic of generations that is crucial for the polis as well: His children are his siblings, too.

In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes: “Being in love with one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis.”²⁹ Freud’s version of the Oedipus story not only privileges private feelings over a political agenda while offering his own interpretation of what Oedipus may have known, but also focuses on mother, father, and son while neglecting other relations that are important to the Greek story. No siblings appear, for example. And Oedipus’ story is significant as that of a son only, although he is the father of children as well.

Laius, moreover, is not Oedipus’ only father. Indeed, Oedipus would look at Polybus, the King who raised him, as his father, while Laius believed his son to be dead. Even Zeus is called upon in the drama as yet another father by the chorus: “O lord of the stormcloud, you who twirl the lightning, Zeus, Father, thunder Death to nothing!”³⁰ And far from driving the plot by his own desire, Oedipus’ fate in Oedipus the King is already set by his own father’s actions, and a story that takes place before his birth. Laius had raped Chrysippus, a young man whom he carried off to Thebes before marrying Jocasta. The oracle of Delphi had warned him not to have a child; if he had a son, this son would kill him. Nevertheless, Laius fathered a child with Jocasta. When Oedipus was born, Laius tried to prevent what was predicted to happen, and thus to ensure his life. But the servant charged with killing the child merely abandoned him instead, after first injuring its foot: This child could perhaps survive, but was not to return.

Oedipus presents this injury, which results in a swollen foot—oid and podos—in his very name,³¹ but as Bernard Knox points out, the Greek word for swollen, oidi, retains an acoustic resemblance to oida, I know.³² With his name, the adult Oedipus acknowledges his father’s guilt without seeming to know of the deed. Much has been written on the topic of sacrifice in regard to Oedipus’ story. While the Biblical Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son and wants to follow God’s command, Laius attempts to sacrifice his son to avoid the Gods’ judgment.³³ Isaac was saved; Oedipus was only seemingly saved. Unbeknownst to Laius, he stayed alive. But when the adult Oedipus kills his father, he is not just acting on his own, nor does he realize the Gods’ plans for his own destiny only. He fulfills an oracle offered to his father, and becomes the Gods’ instrument in sealing Laius’ fate. It is Laius’ guilt that brings about Oedipus’ actions; Oedipus’ fate is not simply triggered by what he himself knows and does not know, but by his father’s actions and the Gods’ judgment. Oedipus may not know enough, but Laius does not either.

Is Oedipus’ story thus the tragedy of a son, or that of a father? This question has been posed by literary critics including Silke-Maria Weineck who have returned to the Classical texts, and who have shifted their attention to Laius,³⁴ by folklorists who have collected versions of the myth,³⁵ as well as psychoanalysts, who have pointed at different versions of the story.³⁶ And this question has been posed by critics who have been eager to distinguish between Sophocles’ story and that told by Freud,³⁷ who brought it into tune with Shakespeare, Grillparzer, or—elsewhere—Friedrich Schiller, a poet whom, as Freud would discover with the help of his student Otto Rank, had already theorized about the human unconscious.³⁸ Freud offers a reading of Oedipus the King that is not thoroughly faithful to Sophocles, but that is in conversation with other literary texts that posit a tradition of sorts. He wanted to be an original thinker, but also a thinker in good company and who had solidified his reputation by establishing his own lineage of thought: not necessarily slaying intellectual fathers, but adopting them. Perhaps, his reading of drama was to follow quite simply a logic of recall that Freud had sketched elsewhere: not so much as an example of Nachträglichkeit, as that of a Deckerinnerung, foregrounding one remembered detail or event while hiding, veiling, others.

Reaching for Universal Truth

In 1913, only a few months before the start of WWI, Freud published Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker [Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics].³⁹ It is a work that would reflect on his psychoanalytic experience, but would apply this to a sketch of cultural history that charted the development of society and the distinction between so-called primitive men and civilization. The book was informed by Freud’s extensive study of anthropological literature. In psychoanalytical practice, he asked his patients to remember childhood events,⁴⁰ so that by reaching back into their past, they would move forward. What they told was their very personal and private history. Freud, however, was interested in a larger picture. In sketching an outline for a history of civilization, Freud proposed to study the childhood of mankind. Vienna’s neurotic patients were to illuminate the course of human history, for it was by reaching back to the “savages” that Freud now wanted to offer new insights into their neurotic illnesses, while, at the same time, offering psychoanalysis as a tool to understand the course of history. The once absent father, murdered on some country road, turned into an omnipresent one. Freud cites the spirit Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade.”⁴¹

Freud discusses incest and its early prohibition, which led to more complex social structures while focusing largely on his readings about Australian Aborigines. He tried to show that civilization, and cultural development, rested on prohibitions such as that. Most strikingly, however, is his introduction of the Oedipus story, which as the consideration of the Oedipus complex had become a center point of his psychoanalytic treatment. “At the conclusion, then, of this exceedingly condensed inquiry, I should like to insist that its outcome shows that the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex.” Freud writes, “This is in complete agreement with the psychoanalytic finding that the same complex constitutes the nucleus of all neuroses, so far as our present knowledge goes. It seems to me a most surprising discovery that the problems of social psychology, too, should prove soluble on the basis of one single concrete point—man’s relation to his father” (156–157).

If the Interpretation of Dreams established the importance of the Oedipus complex for psychoanalytic theory and practice, Totem and Taboo tried to do the same for social anthropology. Freud wanted to establish a close connection between the psychoanalytic discoveries of an individual’s development and possible neurotic suffering, and the development of societies. Psychoanalysis was not just a field of medical investigation or philosophical speculation, but of social analysis as well. In the process, the Oedipus complex would become the focus point in the relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology that it remains today. Two questions seem to structure this encounter already early on. First, Freud’s insistence on the universal truth of his discovery rested on a description of a nuclear family—father, mother, son—and did not include the consideration of differently structured families: either families with different membership constellations or different father roles. Second, and this is related to the first, there is the issue of gender. Freud’s early concept of the Oedipus complex was largely sketched along the lines of the development of boys. Only in 1923, in his Das Ich und das Es [The Ego and the Id], did he consider a fuller treatment, and a description of the “complete” Oedipus complex that included the development of a girl.⁴²

The British William Halse Rivers Rivers and Charles Gabriel Seligman, anthropologists who were also physicians, were interested in Freud’s writings early on, hoping that they would provide support for the treatment of soldiers returning from the WWI battle fields with war traumas. Both were critical of Freud’s theses, and tried to test them with ethnographic material. The English translation of Totem and Taboo was published in 1918, just as WWI ended, and a more thorough international reception of the work ensued. As Eric Smadja points out, Bronisław Malinowski’s engagement with Freud’s work occurred after the publication of his monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), the result of his field work in Oceania.⁴³ In a sequence of essays, “Psychoanalysis and anthropology” (1923), “Psychoanalysis and anthropology” (1924), and “Complex and myth in mother-right” (1925), and finally in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), he argued against Freud’s model of human development as a universal one. “The complex exclusively known to the Freudian School,” Malinowski states there,

and assumed by them to be universal, I mean the Oedipus complex, corresponds essentially to our patrilineal Aryan family with the developed patria potestas, buttressed by Roman law and Christian morals, and accentuated by the modern economic conditions of the well-to-do bourgeoisie. Yet this complex is assumed to exist in every savage or barbarous society. This can certainly not be correct.⁴⁴

According to Malinowski, the Oedipus complex was absent in the matrilineal societies that he studied. In such societies, a boy’s desire was not directed toward his mother, but his sister. Ernest Jones tried to refute Malinowski’s findings already early on,⁴⁵ and with the financial support of Freud’s former student, the psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte, Géza Róheim departed for Australia and Melanesia to test Malinowski’s thesis. In 1932, Róheim published Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, in which he described repressed oedipal impulses among the members of a matrilineal society.⁴⁶ In 1982, the anthropologist Melford Spiro refuted Malinowski’s claim by reviewing Malinowski’s data, with Oedipus in the Trobriands.⁴⁷

But questions regarding the universal validity of the Oedipus complex continued to haunt anthropological research in regard to family formation, matrilineal versus patrilineal societies, and the role of women within society. Indeed, it seems that the disciplines of anthropology and psychoanalysis found points of contact, but have diverged in regard to their goals. Psychoanalysts have sought to theorize about human nature in general, while anthropologists have been eager to insist on their subject’s specificity, and on the differences among the peoples. There were also concerns in regard to Freud’s approach. Claude Lévi-Strauss questioned Freud’s description of desire by posing the model of an unconscious of devoid of content, initiating a structural understanding of the psyche. The motif of incest, for example, was not to mean anything in itself, and gain meaning only in the relationship to the other motifs.⁴⁸ “If a myth is made up of all its variants,” Lévi-Strauss writes in his study on “The Structural Study of Myth,” moreover, “structural analysis should take all of them into account.”⁴⁹ Elements can be rearranged, and further versions of a myth can be added. For Lévi-Strauss, Freud’s comments on Oedipus, his formulation of the Oedipus complex, becomes part of this collection, and takes his place next to Sophocles.⁵⁰

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia) in 1972, and followed up with a second volume of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie: Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus). They built on a structural understanding of desire while providing a Marxist framework.⁵¹ Family relationships as well as the repression of desires—important for Freud’s idea of civilization—should be understood within a model of capitalism, rather than severed from any economic context, they argued. Deleuze and Guattari do not make any distinction between the “savages” and a “civilized” Western culture, but between capitalist societies and possible alternatives.

Deleuze and Guattari were able to return to the anthropological insights that were formed in Australia or Oceania to Western Europe and Freud’s Vienna, and they did it in different ways than Freud in Totem and Taboo. While Freud (or Jones, or Malinowski) wrote about “savages,” Deleuze and Guattari were hesitant to distinguish between primitive and civilized populations, and to claim Western superiority. They wanted to consider class, for example, a category that Freud, treating primarily private patients from well-to-do households, for the most part neglected.⁵² With the fading influence of its aristocracy, Vienna was largely a bourgeois city; by 1918, it was a Republic. But Freud, whose family had belonged to the immigrants of Vienna’s Leopoldstadt or second district, must have known about the great poverty of many of the city’s inhabitants as well; their tight housing quarters that brought together members of an extended family. Between the World Wars, social movements in the city were strong, and tried to alleviate the situation with new housing projects and social institutions.⁵³ Perhaps ironically, Freud acquired his traditional Bildung, and read the Greek texts first, in the Leopoldstädter Gymnasium, the high school located in this center of immigration, with a student body largely drawn from Jewish families of modest means.⁵⁴ In Vienna as elsewhere, abandoned wives and mothers, as well as abandoned children, were common among the poor. While many men had to struggle to make a living, women tried to get positions as domestics, saleswomen, lower-level factory workers—or turned to prostitution.⁵⁵ In his critique of Freud’s rejection of the seduction theory, Masson stressed occurrences of criminal and even violent behavior in many households that were, perhaps, just better hidden in bourgeois homes.

Freud’s Vienna was not an ethnically homogeneous society, moreover, but increasingly diverse. The city’s population had grown rapidly since 1848. With the destruction of the city walls, Vienna’s territory was extended to include many new districts. New immigration laws made it possible for people from all parts of the Empire to settle there. As a Jew, Freud belonged to such a minority of new settlers, and was very aware of social prejudices and exclusions. But wondering about his father’s reaction toward discrimination, he did not consider his father’s father figures—or even ones of his own who might be in competition with Jacob Freud. In contrast to the Ashkenazi-Jewish tradition, for example, Freud did not choose names of his ancestors for his sons, but named them after his teachers Jean-Martin Charcot, Ernst Brücke, and even after one of the historical figures he admired, Oliver Cromwell.

This neglect has marked the profession of psychoanalysis deeply. The question of a “white” and bourgeois standard in regard to psychoanalytic theory has moved to the forefront in recent years, both in regard to the treatment of Black, Native, and Latino families in the United States, and in the resulting theorizing.⁵⁶ It has also had an effect on the choice of profession: Very few black students enter training to become psychoanalysts, a field that many regard as simply “white” or one of privilege.⁵⁷ In the United States, moreover, the history of slavery continues to mark the role of Black males within society, as family members, and on their own self-perception.⁵⁸

While anthropologists have taken issue with Freud’s concept of the family, early feminist theorists began to counter Freud with their distinction between sex and gender. Sex was linked to biology and defined the body as male or female, whereas gender was defined as socially bound. Freud had at least begun to relate a girl’s development to the model of the Oedipus complex by altering the model of attraction—a girl would move to desire her father and develop a hostility toward her mother. He referred to the Oedipus complex in his analysis of the development of boys and girls. Carl Gustav Jung coined a different term for the girl’s development altogether around 1913, namely the “Electra complex.”⁵⁹ Beginning in the 1970s, Freud’s description of female sexuality was criticized by French analysts such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. In his larger description of the Oedipus complex and human development, Freud had described a boy’s castration anxiety after realizing a girl’s absent penis, and on the other hand, a girl’s penis envy. For Cixious and Irigaray, female sexuality should not be defined by a lack. They countered Freud’s concept with their own description of the female human body, and female sexual development, rejecting “penis envy,” and redefining female desire.⁶⁰ “And man, are you still going to bank on everyone’s blindness and passivity, afraid lest the child make a father, and consequently, that in having a kid the woman land herself more than one bad deal by engendering all at once child—mother—father—family?” Cixous asks in “The Laugh of the Medusa”: “Let us demater-paternalize rather than deny woman in an effort to avoid the co-optation of procreation, a thrilling era of the body. Let us defetishize. Let’s get away from the dialectic which has it that the only good father is a dead one, or that the child is the death of his parents.”⁶¹ Irigaray in turn redefined desire, as her woman could please herself. Woman is no longer defined by the lack of a sex organ, but “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She finds pleasure almost anywhere.”⁶²

The American analyst Nancy Chodorow chose another route to critique Freud. She did not focus as much on his perception of the female body, but rejected the complementary role of a female Oedipus complex. “For Freud and the early analysts, the major oedipal task was preparation for heterosexual adult relationships,” she writes: “In the traditional paradigm, a girl must change her love object from mother to father, her libidinal mode from active to passive, and finally her libidinal organ and eroticism from clitoris to vagina. A boy has to make no such parallel changes.”⁶³ If Masson thought that Freud turned away from fin-de-siècle Viennese reality, Chodorow argues that he is too much in tune with it, favoring a heterosexual, nuclear family in which the man assumes a dominant role. If Malinowski questioned the validity of Freud’s concept in matrilineal societies in Oceania, Chodorow wanted to make room for more than heterosexual models in the very Western culture itself. She is, moreover, less interested in the position of the father, but in the role of fathering; and even more so, in the woman’s role in any family. For Chodorow, the central issue is a woman’s ability to bear a child, and the fact that she could assume the role of a mother:

[I]n a new interpretation of the feminine Oedipus complex, I suggest that because women mother, the Oedipus complex is as much a mother-daughter issue as it is one of the father and daughter, and that it is as much concerned with the structure and composition of the feminine relational ego as it is with the genesis of sexual object choice.⁶⁴

In insisting on the mother as a more active presence for the girl, Chodorow redefines the role of the father as well, and finally questions the heterosexual relationship as a universal template.

Freud’s attention to female sexuality came belatedly, and so did his attention toward non-heterosexual desire. Would the Oedipus complex work the same with boys or girls who do not desire the opposite sex? Freud may have shown tolerance toward homosexuality, as critics who follow Jacques Lacan’s attentive readings of Freud’s work are eager to argue.⁶⁵ But Freud displayed blindness as well, as most famously exposed in his case study of Ida Bauer (“Dora ”) called “Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse” [Fragment of a Case Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria]. Only in a couple of footnotes would he consider his patient’s attraction to another woman, an attraction that, however, would put most of his argument in the main text at rest.⁶⁶

While questioning Freud’s description of female sexuality or desire, Cixous, Irigaray, or Chodorow still operated with a stable definition of women for whom they sought to gain more rights, not the least that of pleasure. By the 1990s, however, this sense of stability began to crumble. Already in 1929, Freud’s student Joan Riviere published a case study of a female patient who would alternate between a more resolute behavior, and one that could be traditionally defined as feminine, and wonder whether womanliness could be understood as a masquerade.⁶⁷ Lacan referred to Riviere in a paper he presented in 1958,⁶⁸ and Judith Butler has expanded on Riviere’s insight in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).⁶⁹ If biological sex seemed fixed at first, gender could, however, be performed. In the context of performance, fatherhood becomes differently relational as well. But to what degree does the role of a father change for a person who performs as a woman at one point and as a man at another time?

“Integral to Freud’s oedipal story is the inevitability of patriarchy, a bias that has long served to justify the suppression of women, but I would also add has been detrimental to individuals who identify as male,” writes Cathy Siebold,⁷⁰ placing Freud’s work firmly within the context of patriarchal thought, and moving his interpretation of Oedipus firmly into the realm of myth. But could he also be read differently, as critics Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose would like to suggest, for example with the help of Lacan’s re-readings of Freud’s work?⁷¹ Or does one have to reformulate the Oedipus complex?⁷² And how does one, with or without Freud, conceive of the role of the father today?

The twenty-first century has not only offered additional work on the performance of gender roles, but biological sex has been increasingly been recognized as unstable, and not just because of the rejection of simple binaries. Biological sex cannot always be assigned simply one way or the other, and intersex persons have been subject to increased scholarly attention.⁷³ And sex assignment can change. A man who acts like a woman or wants to desire like a woman does not necessarily want to be a woman. People who are transgender, however, are not considering the questions of social gender roles, but of changes to the body. Often, persons who pursue a change of sex describe themselves as feeling misplaced in their body, of trying to correct a biological error. A psychological identity does not agree with the physical one. This feeling of mis-alignment between a body and one’s felt identity may occur in a son or in a daughter. But it can occur in a father, too. Does a child view his or her father who comes out as transgender as a father still? Television shows like Transparent move this question into the realm of popular culture, and at times even of a comedy of mistaken identities of a special kind.⁷⁴

There is not only the question of determining gender or sex, however, but an increased awareness of the split between a biological father and the father who assumes the role of a male parent. While this has always existed in cases of adoption, it assumes new importance when traditional family structures are no longer in place. Same-sex couples who raise a child may assume traditional gender roles, or not. When a biological or surrogate parent is openly introduced into the family, fathers, just as mothers, can double. Fathers can assume the role of nurturing care givers, a role traditionally assigned to women, while mothers pursue careers outside the home. “By allowing for the positive presence of the ‘real father’—and increasingly, of a plurality of ‘real fathers’—within the child development, contemporary psychoanalytic discussions of involved fatherhood present a significant challenge to Freudian notions of the father as an absent authority,” social psychologist Tabitha Freeman writes.⁷⁵ Adding to a discussion of changed family constellations, Freeman has provided data for cases in which artificial insemination was at play, the biological father absent, and no real replacement in sight.⁷⁶ Here too, social models evolved that question Freud’s assumption of a family structure that proves to be a specifically bourgeois one, informed by his place and time and personal experience.

The Father, Today

In her work on the treatment of children, the Freud student and British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein tried to change Freud’s time frame for the Oedipal complex, but she reflected on the role of the mother as well. Klein asked simply for a “good enough mother.”⁷⁷ Chodorow’s response to Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex is an increased stress on the female role of mothering. But while child bearing is and has remained a biological woman’s role, the task of raising children has very much changed since Freud’s time, and has increasingly become a father’s purview as well. It may be time to ask what a good enough father should be like.

Unlike in Freud’s time, marriage is no longer necessarily a desired condition if not a requirement for the formation of families, and at the same time, the concept of marriage has changed as well. Privileged women today may choose to have children out of wedlock and without male life partners, and suffer little discrimination. Professional women may choose belated parenthood, and rely on reproductive medical interventions. Other women may raise their children alone, but not out of choice. Children may know their biological father or not, or rely on a non-biological father. “Increased divorced rates and the inexorable rise in single-parent families have contributed to a social climate in which fathers, as consistent and stable role models, are increasingly unavailable to the next generation,” Anton Oberholzer writes, “Even unstable fathering role models are in short supply.”⁷⁸ But father roles were always unstable, as Sophocles’ drama shows. Fathers, in turn, may opt for parental leaves to spend more time with child rearing, or even choose to raise children on their own. Open adoptions offer their own parental constellations. Children are raised in households with two fathers or two mothers.

The traditional father, it seems, has not only been killed by Oedipus, but he is dead in some psychoanalytic theory as well.⁷⁹ In an article published in the New York Times, journalist Sarah Boxer states that “Oedipus Is Losing His Complex”:

[I]s it really possible in the late 20th century to read Sophocles’ “Oedipus Tyrannus” so that the central point of the drama is not Oedipus’ terrible discovery that in killing his father and sleeping with his mother he surrendered to his unconscious wishes? Sure, if you listen to the latest generation of theorists, who suggest that Oedipus’ shame about his crimes masked the real point of the story: the violence of fathers, the inevitable perversity of nature, the authoritarianism of the state and the patriarchal roots of society.⁸⁰

The present volume tries to put attention on the father once again, and test Freud’s model in the context of more recent psychoanalytic work, new sociological data, and theoretical reflection. Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family brings together scholars from different fields, as well as medical practitioners, approaching questions of texts and their sources, but also with psychoanalytic patients in mind. The book’s goal is not to provide a unified answer, but case studies in theory and practice in hope of inspiring a new consideration of the subject.

The chapters in Part I explore the work of Freud himself, and the early development of his concept of the Oedipus complex. Richard H. Armstrong is a trained classicist who has already considered Freud’s classic sources in his book, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World. This time, he will not write about Freud’s reading of Greek drama or his collection of antiquities, but of his relationship to Jean-Martin Charcot. Freud had spent a semester in Paris October 1885 to February 1886, and he was impressed with Charcot’s work with hysteric patients at the Salpêtrière hospital; he translated Charcot’s writings into German as well. In Chap. 2, Armstrong takes us back to Freud’s training in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, to map out the influence of “retrospective medicine” on Freud. While Freud’s later work in Vienna and his conception of psychoanalytic theory has often been viewed as a break with Charcot’s practices that relied on hypnotizing the female patients, and on visually documenting their hysteric fits, Armstrong gives evidence of a more enduring influence of Charcot’s work on Freud. Chapter 3 by Harold Blum, a psychoanalyst and scholar of Freud’s work and the former Director of the Freud Archives, takes us back to Freud’s early correspondence. Blum focuses on two of Freud’s letters, and in his close reading, he is able to sketch the development of Freud’s ideas of the Oedipus complex in more detail.

The book’s Part II focuses on Freud’s students, and on their reception of the Oedipus complex. It begins with a reconsideration of Jacques Lacan’s work. Was Jacques Lacan really a Freudian? That is the question that guides Mikkel Borch-Jacobson and Douglas Brick’s study of Lacan. They write:

Essentially, Lacan’s debate with Freud pivots on the Oedipus question, and this question, more than any other, supplies the key to the apparently heterodox reconstructions brought by the disciple to his predecessor’s doctrine. Indeed, Lacan’s reformulation of the Oedipus complex corresponds with a desire to solve a problem that, as can be shown, Freud was already obsessed with but that Lacan was undoubtedly the first to have deliberately confronted (note that I avoid saying solved). That problem is identification, as both the beginning and end of the Oedipus complex.⁸¹

In Chap. 4, Jean-Michel Rabaté takes up the challenge of considering the Freudian legacy in Lacan’s thought in regard to the Oedipus complex. While Lacan had claimed to be a faithful reader of Freud, Rabaté’s summary can point at the agreement as well as critical difference between these two analysts’ concepts.

Dorothea Olkowski in Chap. 5 turns to Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. As mentioned before, their Anti-Oedipe had tried to rewrite psychoanalytic theory within a context of Marxist materialism. They question Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex, but Olkowski is able to sketch the traces of classical Freudian theory in their work. The last chapter in this part deals with the work of two other students of Freud, Jung and Léopold Szondi. At one point, Freud had designated Jung as his successor, to lead the International Psychoanalytic Association. But differences between Freud and Jung led to Jung’s final departure from the IPA in 1913, just the year of the publication of Totem and Taboo; Jung founded his own association in Zurich in Spring 1914. Léopold Szondi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst who would practice in Switzerland after WWII, conceived of his own brand of psychoanalysis, fate analysis, which was influenced by both the classical Freudian theory and Jung’s insistence on the importance of myths and archetypes. Chapter 6 by Adrian Daub deals with the reception of Freud’s thought by Jung, Szondi, and Anna Freud, and he is primarily interested in exploring the idea of generation within the familial as well as the institutional context.

Part III of chapters focuses on contemporary case studies that deal with “fatherhood” in the light of social as well as analytic theory, as well as those that concern the history of the psychoanalytic institutions. The psychologist C. Jama Adams studies Caribbean immigrant and African-American families, and he is particularly concerned with the role of the father in these families. Chapter 7 cites examples from his work with minority students and patients in New York City. Adams is observing a doubling of sorts of fatherhood, and suggests to theorize about concurrent Black and white father figures in Black families. Patricia Gherovici is a Lacanian psychoanalyst who has worked extensively with Latino families in Philadelphia. She, too, has been concerned with minority families and underprivileged patients.⁸² She has been increasingly concerned with transgender patients in these communities, and her experiences entered her theoretical studies.⁸³ In Chap. 8, Gherovici offers case studies of transgender patients, and she asks: “Does a father need to be a man?” She theorizes about the relevance of the Oedipus complex, and the position of the father, in the context of transgender patients and families.

Fatherhood is not simply an issue within families, and the home, but also for public institutions. Freud himself was aware of his role as a father figure within the psychoanalytic association. With his establishment of a “Secret Society” of loyal students, Freud had even openly formed a family structure which was to compete against others, but also nurtured rivalry within.⁸⁴ Membership in local or international psychoanalytical associations has traditionally reflected a society largely dominated by white males, and questions of scholarly influence or administrative succession have often been dealt with within a context not dissimilar to Oedipal strife. Howard B. Levine has remarked upon this in regard to the role of psychoanalysts and the implication of such strife for the psychoanalytic profession.⁸⁵ The last two chapters in this part focus on the “fatherhood” in the context of the professional institution. John Frank’s question does not only refer to his experience in treating gay patients, but also to the status of homosexual patients within the psychoanalytic institute(s); he sketches a history of the institutional blindness (at best) vis-à-vis homosexuality in Chap. 9. In Chap. 10, I offer an institutional example of another kind that leads the reader back to post-war Germany and the re-establishment of the psychoanalytic associations there after WWII. The popular German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich defined the post-war German nation as one that had lost its father, Adolf Hitler, whose death it is unable to mourn. His bestselling book coined popular phrases like “a society without a father” and “the inability to mourn.” In turning post-war Germans into psychoanalytic patients, Mitscherlich was able to put any distinction between victims and perpetrators aside.

The final two chapters in this volume deal with the discussion of the role of fathers in film and literature. Laurence A. Rickels in Chap. 11 reorients the discussion of the Oedipal constellation in the light of current media theory, citing examples from popular literature as well as film, and he brings his examples in conversation with texts by Freud as well as Walter Benjamin’s study of allegory and the Baroque mourning play. Avital Ronell in Chap. 12 selects Franz Kafka as the subject of her study, and focuses on his well-known letter to his father. The letter exemplifies a son’s reckoning with a parent who seems both distant and omnipresent. If Freud may have regarded his father as too weak, Kafka thought of his as too strong. Did Kafka plan to mail his letter? Or was it simply a work of fiction? This is a question that has preoccupied literary critics for many years.⁸⁶ Ronell gives evidence that a single letter can contribute much to our understanding of the human psyche. But in writing about Kafka, she has also chosen an author of Freud’s own time, who has been an interested reader of Freud’s text.

The present book begins with a discussion of letters (Freud writes to his friend Fliess), and ends with a discussion of a letter (Kafka writes to his father Hermann Kafka). Freud and Kafka were sons trying to come to terms with their fathers. Freud’s letters can be viewed as the origin of psychoanalysis. Kafka’s letter did not even reach its addressee, but today, it has simply become world literature.