Introduction: Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Work of Mourning

Weissberg, Liliane

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-82124-1_1

Liliane Weissberg²

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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

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Notes

1.
See Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, published as Studien über Hysterie, Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1895. The perhaps most famous case study in this volume was that of Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O.”) who coined a term that defined these free associations and the psychoanalytic process, “talking cure.”
2.
Liliane Weissberg, “Was will der Mann? Gedanken zum Briefwechsel von Sigmund Freud und Wilhelm Fließ.” In: Claudia Benthien and Inge Stephan (Eds.), Männlichkeit als Maskerade. Kulturelle Inszenierungen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. (ser.) Literatur—Kultur—Geschichte (Kleine Reihe) 18 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 81–99.
3.
Daniel Boyarin, “Freud’s Baby, Fliess’ Maybe: Homophobia, Anti-Semitism, and the Invention of Oedipus” GLQ 2 (1995): 115–147.
4.
Wilhelm Fliess, Die Beziehungen zwischen Nase und weiblichen Geschlechtsorganen (in ihrer biologischen Bedeutung dargestellt), Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1897.
5.
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definite Text. Ed. and tr. James Strachey (1955, New York: Basic Books, 2010), 130–145.
6.
Fliess, Der Ablauf des Lebens. Grundlagen zur exakten Biologie. Leipzig und Wien: Franz Deuticke, 1906.
7.
In regard to Freud’s trust in biology at this time, see Frank J. Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
8.
Richard Pfennig, Wilhelm Fliess und seine Nachentdecker, O. Weininger und H. Swoboda. Berlin: Emil Goldschmidt, 1906.
9.
Freud describes himself here as two or two-and-a-half-year-old; he would later state that he was four-year-old. The family moved to Vienna in 1860. See José Brunner, “The Naked Mother or, Why Freud Did not Write about Railway Accidents.” Psychoanalysis and History 9 (2007): 71–82.
10.
Freud, letter to Fliess, October 3, 1897. In: The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 268.
11.
Freud, letter to Fliess, October 3, 1897. In: The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 268.
12.
Freud, letter to Fliess, October 15, 1897; The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 272.
13.
See, for example, John Fletcher, “The Scenography of Trauma: A ‘Copernican’ Reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King,” Textual Practice 21 (2007): 17–41, here 21–24.
14.
Perhaps most prominently among Freud’s students, Ernest Jones would late take up a comparison of both works in his Hamlet and Oedipus, London: V. Gollancz, 1949.
15.
Freud, letter to Fliess, October 15, 1897; The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 272–273.
16.
No doubt, this turn of events in the Greek drama would also be attractive for Freud’s later contemplation on the notion of the “uncanny.” In regard to Sophocles and the uncanny, see John Gould, “The Language of Oedipus.” In: Harold Bloom (Ed.), Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. (ser.) Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 143–160, esp. 153.
17.
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and tr. James Strachey. Complete and definite Text (1955; New York: Basic Books, 2010), 279–280.
18.
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 280.
19.
Freud, letter to Fliess, October 16, 1895; The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 145.
20.
The English translation of the term “Nachträglichkeit” has been much discussed, see also Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York, Norton, 1973. For a discussion of the various translations of the term and its history, see also Jonathan House and Julie Slotnick, “Après-coup in French Psychoanalysis: The Long Afterlife of Nachträglichkeit: The First Hundred Years, 1893–1993.” The Psychoanalytic Review 102 (2015): 683–708.
21.
The “Entwurf einer Psychologie” (Project for a Scientific Psychology, 1895) was first published in 1950. In regard to the context and the late publication of the “Project,” see Zvi Lothane, “Freud’s 1895 Project. From Mind to Brain and Back Again.” Annals New York Academy of Sciences 843 (1998): 43–65.
22.
Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” In: Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, tr. James Strachey, ed. Anna Freud et al., 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), I: 282–397; here 353 (edition will be abbreviated SE).
23.
Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” SE I: 353–354.
24.
Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. See also the discussion in Lawrence Birken, “From Seduction Theory to Oedipus Complex: A Historical Analysis.” New German Critique 43 (1988). Special Issue on Austria: 83–96.
25.
See also the survey by Lowell Edmunds and Richard Ingber, “Psychoanalytical Writings on the Oedipus Legend: A Bibliography,” American Imago 34 (1977): 374–386.
26.
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.
27.
Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 513–523; The Three Theban Plays, 185.
28.
Jacob Bernays, “Zur Katharsis-Frage.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie. Neue Folge 15 (1860): 606–607. In regard to the issue of katharsis as “recognition” in Freud’s reading of the Oedipus story, see Rachel Bowlby, “Family Realisms: Freud and Greek Tragedy,” Essays in Criticism 56 (2006): 111–138.
29.
Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams, pp. 260–261.
30.
Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 229; The Three Theban Plays, 170.
31.
ποδός translates as foot οίδημα; as edema, lump, swell.
32.
Bernard Knox, “Sophocles’ Oedipus.” In: Bloom (Ed.), Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, 5–22, here 9.
33.
See Moshe Shamir, “Oedipus and Abraham,” Hebrew Studies 47 (2006): 275–279.
34.
Silke-Maria Weineck, “Heteros Autos: Freud’s Fatherhood.” In: Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper and Jakki Spicer (Eds.), The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century down the Royal Road (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 97–114; and Weineck, The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
35.
See, for example, Edmunds and Alan Dundes (Eds.), Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, and Allen Johnson and Douglass Price-Williams, Oedipus Ubiquitous: The Family Complex in World Folk Literature. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.
36.
Patrick Mullahy, Oedipus: Myth and Complex; a Review of Psychoanalytic Theory, intr. Erich Fromm. New York: Hermitage Press, 1948.
37.
Edmunds, “Freud and the Father: Oedipus Complex and Oedipus Myth,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 8 (1985): 87–103; Richard Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005; Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex,” tr. Janet Lloyd. In: Bloom (Ed.), Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, 103–126. This translation appeared before in Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Humanities Press, 1981; Jean Bollack, “Le fils de homme: Le mythe freudienne d’Œdipe.” In: Bollack, La naissance d’Œdipe: Traduction et commentaires d’Œdipe roi (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 282–321; Bollack, Ödipus: Von der Tragödie zum Komplex und vice-versa.” Maske und Kothurn 52 (1955): 9–16; Jan N. Bremmer, “Oedipus and the Greek Oedipus Complex.” In: Bremmer (Ed.), Interpretations of Greek Mythology (New York: Routledge, 1987), 41–59. See also Cynthia Chase, “Oedipal Textuality: Reading Freud’s Reading of Oedipus,” Diacritics 9,1 (1979): 53–68.
38.
Weissberg, “Freuds Schiller.” Friedrich Schiller and the Path to Modernity, ed. Walter Hinderer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 421–434.
39.
The book appeared first with a different subtitle, see: Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1918 (and in London with G. Routledge).
40.
See Taylor Schey, “Ritual Remembrance: Freud’s Primal Theory of Collective Memory,” SubStance 42 (2013): 102–119.
41.
Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, SE XIII: vii-162; here 155.
42.
In regard to the extended elaboration on the model, see the discussion in Eric Smadja, “The Oedipus complex, crystallizer of the debate between psychoanalysis and anthropology.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 92 (2011): 985–1007; here 987. Smadja’s essay offers an account of the early anthropologists’ reactions to Freudian theory.
43.
Smadja, “The Oedipus complex,” 988.
44.
Bronisław Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1927), 5.
45.
See Ernest Jones, “Mother-right and sexual ignorance of savages,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 6 (1925): 109–130.
46.
Géza Róheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: Culture, Personality and the Unconscious. New York, International Universities Press, 1950.
47.
Melford Spiro, Oedipus in the Trobriands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
48.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (ser.): Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine. Psychologie et sociologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1949. A translation of the revised edition appeared as: The elementary structures of kinship, tr. and ed. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer and Rodney Needham. London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969.
49.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth.” The Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955):428–444, here 435.
50.
Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” 435.
51.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’anti-œdipe: capitalism et schizophrénie I (ser.) Collection Critique. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972; English as: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. The second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia appeared as Mille plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980; English as: A Thousand Plateaus, tr. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.
52.
An exception here is perhaps Freud’s call for free psychoanalytic clinics, see Elisabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007.
53.
See Anson Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, and Sheldon Gardner, Red Vienna and the Golden Age of Psychology, 1918–1938. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers, 1992.
54.
See Jacques Le Rider, Freud, de l’Acropole au Sinaï: Le retour à l’Antique des Modernes viennois. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002.
55.
See, for example, Helmut Gruber, “Sexuality in ‘Red Vienna’: Socialist Party Conceptions and Programs and Working-Class Life, 1920–34,” International Labor and Working-Class History (1987): 37–68.
56.
See, for example, Jaipaul L. Roopnarine (Ed.), Fathers Across Cultures. The Importance, Roles, and Diverse Practices of Dads. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015.
57.
See the series of interviews, Black Psychoanalysts Speak, directed by Basia Winograd, https://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=pepgrantvs.001.0001a (access August 2021).
58.
Just as one early example of a study on absent fathers, see Marion Burger, “The Oedipal Experience: Effects on Development of an Absent Father,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 66 (1985): 311–320; studies of the effect of absent fathers in Black minority communities are usually conducted by sociologists, see for example the work by Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
59.
Carl Gustav Jung’s essay, published in the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen in 1913, appeared in a series of English lectures as “The Content of the Unconscious,” in: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (ser.) Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Series 19 (New York: The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1915), 67–71.
60.
Hélène Cixous, “Le Rire de la Meduse,” L’Arc 17 (1975): 39–54. A revised English version appeared as Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 (1976): 875–893; Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985 (Sexe qui n’en pas un, Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1977). Further critique came from analysts Julia Kristeva and Maria Torok. See also Nicholas Rand, “Did Women Threaten the Oedipus Complex Between 1922 and 1933? Freud’s Battle with Universality and Its Aftermath in the Work of K. Horney and M. Torok,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9 (2004): 53–66. While Maria Torok was working in Paris, Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst who had moved to the United States.
61.
Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 890.
62.
Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 28.
63.
Nancy Chodorow, “Mothering, Object-Relations, and the Female Oedipal Configuration.” Feminist Studies 4 (1978): 137–158; here 137–138.
64.
Chodorow, “Mothering,” 137.
65.
See Deborah Luepnitz, “Accentuate the Negative: Two Contributions to a Non-Normative Oedipal Theory,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 12 (2007): 44–49.
66.
Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901]),” SE VII: 2–122. See also Weissberg, “Exit Dora: Freud’s Patient Takes Leave.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 25. Special issue, Freud and Dora: 100 Years Later (2005): 5–26.
67.
Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (1929): 303–313.
68.
See Jacques Lacan’s “Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality (1958) [Presented in Amsterdam, 5th September 1960]”; see Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction II,” in: Juliet Mitchell and Rose (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (London: Macmillan, 1982), 27. See also Lacan, Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation 1958–1959, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 219): 159. The book appeared first as Lacan, Séminaire, livre VI: Le désir et son interpretation, ed. Miller (ser.) Le champ freudien (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2013). See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990): 55–73.
69.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. See also Weissberg (Ed.), Weiblichkeit als Maskerade (Frankfurt/M: Fischer Verlag, 1994).
70.
Cathy Siebold, “Is Patriarchy Inevitable? Rethinking the Freudian Myth,” Psychoanalytic Social Work 27 (2020): 42–60; here 43.
71.
Mitchell and Rose (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne.
72.
Catherine Chabert, “Incertitudes œdipiennes,” Revue française de psychoanalyse 76 (2012/5): 1623 à 1631.
73.
See, for example, recent work such as Renée Bergland and Gary Williams (Eds.), Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays on The Hermaphrodite. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012.
74.
The American television comedy series Transparent was created by Joey Soloway for Amazon Studios and debuted in February 2014 and ended after season five in 2019 after Jeffrey Tambor, who played the transgender father, was let go.
75.
Tabitha Freeman, “Psychoanalytic Concepts of Fatherhood: Patriarchal Paradoxes and the Presence of an Absent Authority,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 9 (2008): 113–139, here 131.
76.
Vasanti Jadva, Freeman, Wendy Kramer, and Susan Golombok, “The Experiences of Adolescents and Adults Conceived by Sperm Donation: Comparisons by Age of Disclosure and Family Type,” Human Reproduction 24 (2009): 1909–1919.
77.
See, for example, Melanie Klein, “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (1928): 167–180, and Klein, “The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 26 (1945): 11–33.
78.
Anton Oberholzer, “Foreword.” In: Judith Trowell and Alicia Etchegoyan (Eds.), The Importance of Fathers: A Psychoanalytic Re-evaluation (ser.) The New Library of Psychoanalysis 42 (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2002), xv.
79.
See Lila J. Kalinich and Stuart W. Taylor (Eds.), The Dead Father: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry. London: Routledge, 2009.
80.
Sarah Boxer, “How Oedipus Is Losing His Complex,” The New York Times, December 6, 1997, Section B, Page 7.
81.
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Douglas Brick, “The Oedipus Problem in Freud and Lacan,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 267–282; here 268.
82.
See Patricia Gherovici, The Puerto Rican Syndrome. New York: The Other Press, 2003; Gherovici and Christopher Christian (Eds.), Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious. New York: Routledge, 2018.
83.
Gherovici, Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism. New York: Routledge, 2010, and Gherovici, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference. New York: Routledge, 2017.
84.
See Phyllis Grosskurt, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1991.
85.
Howard B. Levine, “The Sins of the Fathers: Freud. Narcissistic Boundary Violations, and Their Effects on the Politics of Psychoanalysis,” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 19 (2010): 43–50.
86.
Weissberg, “Der Familienbrief als Genre: Franz Kafkas nie abgesandter Brief an den Vater.” In: Die Familie. Ein Archiv. MarbacherKatalog 70 (Marbach: DLA, 2017): 224–225.

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Weissberg, L. (2022). Introduction: Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Work of Mourning. In: Weissberg, L. (eds) Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82124-1_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82124-1_1
Published: 31 October 2021
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