I have always assumed that the verb “to suck”, as a synonym for incompetence and stupidity, was a reference to the implied power inequality in oral sex, when it is the woman performing it on the man.
It feels to me now, that our ordinary daily discourse is filled with psychologically deep insights, coded in words we use reflexively.
Can we not perhaps posit that it actually references an incompletely developed persona, someone who is still in the sucking phase?
Freud, of course, had what I recall as his four phases: oral, anal expressive [I forget the word he used], anal retentive, and phallic. My grounding in Freud was done in German as an exchange student, many many years ago. It made no sense to me then, nor does it now.
Here is the thing: in my own life, in my own deep contemplation, I see no role for the anal at all. What I feel, what feels real to me, is that there are happy babies and unhappy babies. Unhappy babies enter life missing something, something so deep they cannot put words on it, or even name the emotion, other than to say they are missing something.
Stan Grof expanded the cartography of the psyche to include Jungian ideas, his own experience as an honest psychiatrist watching the importance of the birth experience, and of course orthodox biographical inputs.
What I would submit is that orthodox psychiatry really has no place-holder for Jung; none for Rank and Grof’s major contributions furthering Rank’s ideas; and none for traumas, particularly of omission, in the birth to roughly five years of age range.
As I said some time ago, my feeling is that they ignore these factors because they have no effective means of dealing with them. Abreaction was killed a century ago, in orthodox methods at least.
My dream, my ongoing dream, is that we become intelligent as a species, that we learn how to deal with traumas, that we learn how to digest experience, and that we all learn how to learn, how to be Good, how to be fulfilled, how to develop sacred rituals and places that fulfill the deepest needs we have, and do so consistently, reliably, as a matter of generalized deep wisdom.
This is my dream. This is my hope, and this is the organizing basis of my work, as chaotic and undisciplined as it is.