The “Oedipal Complex”

In “The Assault on Truth”, Jeffrey Masson detailed how Sigmund Freud early on stumbled upon nearly incontrovertible evidence that the sexual abuse of children–particularly young girls–was very common, even among Viennese elites.  He saw clearly the relationship between early unprocessed sexual trauma and hysteria, which had been his focal topic of interest.  He wrote a paper called the Aetiology of Hysteria (note how short the citation is) which he presented, and which was more or less greeted with silence.  No doubt many guilty men sat in the room.

Being fundamentally a vain and ambitious man, he realized, on some level (this is Freud we are talking about), that this work was a path to career suicide.  Thus, again on some level, he concluded that the patients must be fantasizing about such abuse, and we the modern Western world were eventually introduced to the idea that very small children have sexual fantasies about their parents, and not the converse.

Masson’s book was ground-breaking, and led in short order to a generalized awakening about the pervasiveness of child sexual abuse.  When it was published in 1984, the shocking revelations about a conspiracy in the Catholic Church to hide and protect pedophiles (as I have discussed, his role in covering up such crimes–and the discovery of his role–is likely why the last Pope resigned, in an historically unprecedented fashion) was years in the future. Altar boys were still being molested, and not believed when they reported their crimes.  This is not directly relevant to the point I’m about to make, but ponder that, and also ponder how in most of the world, there has been no such awakening.  It remains my strong belief that in the Arab world in particular, with its heinous and emotionally abusive segregation of and violence towards women, child sexual abuse must be endemic, both father-child, and brother-sister/cousin.

Here is the point I actually wanted to make: why not posit an inverse “Oedipal” dynamic?  Logically, if many children were in FACT sexually abused, were not many more simply looked at as sexual objects, in ways they could not understand, but readily felt?  What sort of introject is created when a parent expresses–perhaps unconsciously–sexual desire, but does not act on it?  Should we not have a name for what opposite sex parents feel when their children reach puberty and young adulthood?  Of course.  As a culture, we are imbeciles, primitives.  We feel and see almost nothing that matters.  We have iPads, but we do not understand love.

It is really a global tragedy that Freud both attained such influence, that he was clearly a genius, and that he abandoned nearly at the outset almost all of his most useful ideas.  My next post will be on Abreaction, which is a word I like the more I use it.