The Oedipus-Industrial Complex

The study of human psychology has resulted in some of the most controversial scientific debates throughout recorded history. From astrology to phrenology, countless explanations for our thoughts and behaviours have gained popularity, only to be completely discredited years later. But perhaps the most fascinating of these controversies is the infamous theory known as Oedipus Complex, originally proposed by the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud is primarily remembered as the founder of psychoanalysis, a psychiatric epistemology designed to help patients overcome their repressions and neuroses. In many ways, psychoanalysis completely revolutionised our collective understanding of the human mind. We still live in Freud’s shadow today: psychological concepts such as defence mechanisms, dream interpretation, group therapy, and even the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind are all products of psychoanalysis. But for every pyschoanalytic idea that gained acceptance, there were also ideas that invited ridicule from critics – including the Oedipus Complex.

If it can be said that Freud needs no introduction, this is even more true for the Oedipus Complex. In many ways, its legacy now overshadows Freud, to the point where Freud’s own legacy is often reduced to the Oedipus Complex alone. Despite its controversial reputation, the Oedipus Complex has captured the imagination of the world, being referenced in countless books, movies, songs, and so on. There is almost a sense that if the Oedipus Complex was not real when Freud theorised it, then it eventually became real simply through the sociocultural process of hyperstition.

At its core, the Oedipus Complex describes the alleged attitudes of a (typically male) child towards their parental figures. Freud believed that boys had a subconscious desire to murder their father and seduce their mother, and chose to name this phenomenon after the titular protagonist of Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex. The familial relations of the Oedipus Complex are often presented as an inverted triangle wherein each tip of said triangle represents either the Child, the Mother, or the Father. The Child is the point at the bottom of the inverted triangle, whereas each of the two points at the top represent one of the respective parents. This figure is often referred to as the Oedipal Triangle.

The Oedipus Complex has been repeatedly criticised for its apparent lack of empirical support, but this has not stopped it from fascinating us. As previously discussed, the theory of the Oedipus Complex has significantly influenced a wide array of authors and artists. This could possibly suggest that there is some deeper truth to the Oedipus Complex that has not yet been officially recognised. Can the theory still be salvaged? Possibly, but doing so requires a complete reconfiguration of the Oedipus Complex. Instead of focus on the literal family relations of the Oedipal Triangle, let us zoom out and consider what the relations represent on a different level. When we talk of Father and Mother, let us not assume that we are discussing biological parents in a literal sense, but rather that we are discussing something archetypal or symbolic. As Freud himself admits, there is a striking “similarity between the process of cultural development and that of the libidinal development in an individual.” If we accept this, what truths might we possibly uncover?

Admittedly, this idea is not entirely new. Many psychoanalysts have already discussed the broader symbolic implications of the Oedipus Complex. For example, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once remarked that the “function of symbolic identification […] brings about a dissociation of the Oedipus complex in subjects exposed to such discordances in the paternal relation, in which the constant source of its pathogenic effects must be seen. Indeed, even when it is represented by a single person, the paternal function concentrates in itself both imaginary and real relations that always more or less fail to correspond to the symbolic relation that essentially constitutes it.” Lacan therefore argues that “[i]t is in the name of the father that we must recognise the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law.” What differentiates this current discussion is that the political implications of our findings will be more explicit than is typical of psychoanalytic discourse.

Before proceeding, it must be acknowledged that since we are dealing with archetypes and symbols that have been embedded within human culture for thousands of years, we inevitably brush up against problematic outdated stereotypes. In this case, the concepts of Father and Mother will inevitably be associated with certain behaviours that seem to enforce traditional gender roles. This is unfortunate, especially since it will undoubtedly fuel the dogged accusations of misogyny that have typically haunted discussions of psychoanalysis, but it must also be acknowledged that we are not referring to literal biological parents: the role of Father can be occupied by a female, and the role of Mother can be occupied by a male. Furthermore, the primary goal of psychoanalysis is to understand the human psyche, not to problematise or indict it. If the human mind understands certain concepts in terms of gendered relations because of cultural stereotypes, then it is somewhat necessary to use those terms in order to understand the mind itself. It goes without saying that sexism is an entirely abhorrent thing, and it should obviously have no place in the proper practice of either psychoanalysis or philosophy.

To begin with, we shall examine the symbolic role of the Father. According to Lacan, “we must recognise […] the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified [the Father] with the figure of the law.” In this context, the Father as figure of law represents repression, castration, and authority. In his essay The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud suggests that his readers “will no doubt be surprised to hear how often little boys are afraid of being eaten up by their father. (And you may also be surprised at my including this fear among the phenomena of sexual life). But I may remind you of the mythological tale which you may still recall from your schooldays of how the god Kronos swallowed his children. […] You will be no less surprised to hear that male children suffer from a fear of being robbed of their sexual organs by their father, so that this fear of being castrated has a most powerful influence on the development of their character and in deciding the direction to be followed by their sexuality. And here again mythology may give you the courage to believe psycho-analysis. The same Kronos who swallowed his children also emasculated his father Uranus, and was afterwards emasculated in revenge by his son Zeus, who had been rescued through his mother’s cunning.”

Lacan argues that “castration is what regulates desire, in both normal and abnormal cases.” This is exemplified in the typical “case of the neurotic”, who “underwent imaginary castration at the outset; it sustains the strong ego that is his, so strong, one might say, that his proper name bothers him, so strong that deep down the neurotic is Nameless.” This is because the neurotic patient “figures that the Other demands his castration.” This is despite the fact that the Other “does not exist” in a literal sense. The concept of the Other is simply a signifier for collective subjectivities that are external to the individual's own internal subjectivity and cannot be properly assimilated into the internal subjectivity because the Other's radical alterity prevents proper identification. This includes the rule of the Father, which the subject learns to obey during the process of castration.

When psychoanalysts talk about “castration”, they generally do not mean it in the literal sense. Rather, they mean it in a symbolic sense – the mental castration that an individual subject must undergo in order to be properly integrated into the existing social order. What is important to note here is castration does not actually require any real punishment: it is the threat of castration itself that produces the effect of castration. The process of castration involves an authority figure teaching the Child to repress their own libidinal desires, to behave like a mature adult, to obey the laws of society. As Lacan explains, it is “the assumption [assomption] of castration that creates the lack on the basis of which desire is instituted.” The “lack” in this context is, of course, the lack of the phallus (or, at the very least, the recognition of this lack) that occurs because of castration.

As with castration, mentions of the “phallus” within psychoanalytic discourse are not to be taken literally. Lacan argues that the “relation between the subject and the phallus [...] forms without regard to the anatomical distinction between the sexes[.]” This is because the phallus is not “an object (part-, internal, good, bad, etc.) inasmuch as ‘object’ tends to gauge the reality involved in a relationship. Still less is it the organ – penis or clitoris – that it symbolises.” Rather, “the phallus is a signifier”: it occupies the symbolic realm, signifying something other than its own literal meaning. But “it can play its role only when veiled” - in other words, a signifier can only be effective when its status as signifier is deliberately obscured from the subject’s conscious perception, and therefore appears as something other than the signifier itself (i.e as the actual thing-in-itself as opposed to just a thing that signifies something other than itself).

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek explains the psychoanalytic function of castration and the phallus by arguing that “symbolic power is by definition virtual, power-in-reserve, the threat of its full use which never actually occurs (when a father loses his temper and explodes, this is by definition a sign of his impotence, painful as it may be). The consequence of this conflation of actual with virtual is a kind of transubstantiation: every actual activity appears as a ‘form of appearance’ of another ‘invisible’ power whose status is purely virtual – the ‘real’ penis turns into the form of appearance of (the virtual) phallus, and so on.” As an example of this, Žižek describes “a judge who, in ‘real life’, is a weak and corrupt person, but the moment he puts on the insignia of his symbolic mandate, it is the big Other of the symbolic institution which is speaking through him: without the prosthesis of his symbolic title, his ‘real power’ would instantly disintegrate.”

Žižek also asks: “what, precisely, is symbolic castration?” The answer is that it is “the precise sense of the loss of something which the subject never possessed in the first place. Let us imagine a situation in which the subject aims at X (say, a series of pleasurable experiences); the operation of castration does not consist in depriving him of any of these experiences, but adds to the series a purely potential, nonexistent X, with respect to which the actually accessible experiences appear all of a sudden as lacking, not wholly satisfying. One can see here how the phallus functions as the very signifier of castration: the very signifier of the lack, the signifier which forbids the subject access to X, gives rise to its phantom[.]” Castration is “the prohibition of incest”, inasmuch as it represents the triumph of the Father over the desire to seduce the Mother.

The Father that devours and castrates his Child is embodied in various disciplinary institutions of society: the prison, the military, the school, and so on. In other words, the Father represents what the French philosopher Michel Foucault refers to as the “disciplinary society”, a society in which “the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use ‘lenient’ methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue – the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.” The previously discussed fantasies of being castrated or devoured by the Father reflects this, as these are fears primarily related to harm of the physical body. However, Foucault also argues that “punitive measures are not simply ‘negative’ mechanisms that make it possible to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to eliminate; but that they are linked to a whole series of positive and useful effects which it is their task to support (and, in this sense, although legal punishment is carried out in order to punish offences, one might say that the definition of offences and their prosecution are carried out in turn in order to maintain the punitive mechanisms and their functions).”

But what are these “positive and useful effects” of punishment? Foucault answers: “The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline’. […] In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.” In other words, the primary function of discipline “is to ‘train’, rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more. It does not link forces together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them together in such a way as to multiply and use them. Instead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform mass, it separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units. It ‘trains’ the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individual elements – small, separate cells, organic autonomies, genetic identities and continuities, combinatory segments. Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.”

Lacan makes a similar observation regarding the function of the symbolic order, noting that “[s]ymbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him ‘by bone and flesh’ before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and beyond his very death; and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgement, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it – unless he reaches the subjective realisation of being-toward-death.” Žižek also seems to suggest a similar phenomenon when describing castration as “the primordial loss which allows the subject to enter the symbolic order. Or – to put it more precisely – in contrast to the ‘normal’ subject, for whom the Law functions as the agency of prohibition which regulates (access to the object of) his desire, for the pervert, the object of his desire is law itself – the Law is the Ideal he is longing for, he wants to be fully acknowledged by the Law, integrated into its functioning[.]”

Freud acknowledges this in his book Civilisation And Its Discontents, arguing that “it is impossible to ignore the extent to which civilisation is built upon renunciation of instinctual gratifications, the degree to which the existence of civilisation presupposes the non-gratification (suppression, repression or something else?) of powerful instinctual urgencies. […] When this is so, the higher mental systems which recognise the reality-principle have the upper hand. The aim of gratification is by no means abandoned in this case; a certain degree of protection against suffering is secured, in that lack of satisfaction causes less pain when the instincts are kept in check than when they are imbridled.” Freud contrasts this desire for gratification – the “pleasure principle” – with the “death instinct”, more commonly referred to as the Death Drive. He argues that “beside the instinct preserving the organic substance and binding it into ever larger units, there must exist another in antithesis to this, which would seek to dissolve these units and reinstate their antecedent inorganic state; that is to say, a death instinct as well as Eros; the phenomena of life would then be explicable from the interplay of the two and their counteracting effects on each other.”

Foucault argues that the modern ethos of discipline is best embodied within “the architectural figure” of the Panopticon: “at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker, or a schoolboy.” Accordingly, “the major effect of the Panopticon” is to create “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.” The Panopticon therefore serves as a perfect example of the castrating Father. Just as castration only requires the threat of punishment rather than punishment itself, “the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. […] The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.”

What we see here in the Panopticon is, according to Žižek, “Lacan's ‘structuralist’ motif of the big Other as the anonymous symbolic structure.” Once again, Žižek uses the example of a judge to demonstrate this point: “When the subject is endowed with symbolic authority, he acts as an appendage to his symbolic title – that is to say, it is the ‘big Other’, the symbolic institution, who acts through him: take, for example, a judge who may be a miserable and corrupt person, but the moment he puts on his robe and other insignia, his words are the words of Law itself[.]” Except that “Lacan's big Other at its purest” is not a literal person (such as a judge), but rather more like God: “a machine which follows its inherent ‘natural’ laws” or “the order which regulates our universe, but remains purely virtual – is nowhere directly perceptible.” It is impossible to directly “experience the symbolic ‘big Other’ as such: either – in our ‘normal’ everyday life – we are oblivious to the way in which it overdetermines our acts; or – in psychotic experience – we became aware of the big Other's massive presence, yet in a ‘reified’ way – not as a virtual Other, but as the materialised, obscene, superego Other (the God who bombards us with excessive jouissance, control us in the Real).” It is therefore no coincidence that the building at the centre of the panopticon is typically phallic in shape.

It is here where we finally turn to the symbolic role of the Mother. According to Lacan, the Mother represents das Ding, “the beyond-of-the-signified. It is as a function of this beyond-of-the-signified and of an emotional relationship to it that the subject keeps its distance and is constituted in a kind of relationship characterised by primary affect, prior to any repression.” This “repression” occurs via the process of symbolic castration, where the child is forced to sever their emotional attachment to das Ding so that they can more effectively conform to the social order, accepting the limits that society places on enjoyment. In fact, “the whole development at the level of the mother/child interpsychology – and that is badly expressed in the so-called categories of frustration, satisfaction, and dependence – is nothing more than an immense development of the essential character of the maternal thing, of the mother, insofar as she occupies the place of that thing, of das Ding.”

Das Ding is also very clearly linked to the Death Drive, as the “one goal of the specific action which aims for the experience of satisfaction is to reproduce the initial state, to find das Ding, the object, again[.]” Lacan argues that “[t]he world of our experience, the Freudian world, assumes that it is this object, das Ding, as the absolute Other of the subject, that one is supposed to find again. It is to be found at the most as something missed. One doesn’t find it, but only its pleasurable associations.” These quotes serve as a precursor to how the British philosopher Mark Fisher describes the Death Drive: “[B]efore there is a sense of a ‘mother’ and a ‘child’, there is no difference between a mother and a child at all. It is this that is most earnestly desired: the annihilation of the individual subject and the return to the state of fusion in the womb. In other words, this is a form of death drive in itself: the annihilation of individual subjectivity, the return to a state of acquiescence, where you could say all desire is met but where also there is no such thing as desire at all. If all your desires are being quenched, then you don’t have desire anymore.”

Fisher contrasts the Mother with the Father, describing the latter as “the agency of mortification; the deadening of the flesh. In order to be initiated into society, you have to give up something crucial. You have to give up desire – and, specifically, you could say, this is desire for the mother. […] But now I think we can see where this desire for the mother comes from. It isn’t that the desire for the mother comes first. Instead, the desire for the mother stands in for some other desire, which is the desire not to exist at all as a separate entity.” After all, “what the death drive ultimately seems to be aiming towards, at least in one of its versions, is acquiescence, peace, ultimate calm – the release from desire itself. […] We can see it as if the organism is like an elastic band that is being pulled. It’s in a state of tension. And there is this innate impulse towards the release of that tension, just in the tension itself. If I keep pulling the elastic band, something doesn’t pull it back – it pulls itself.”

The separation of the Child from the Mother, both physically and mentally, constitutes a primary part of the primordial loss, the lack of das Ding, embodied in symbolic castration. Žižek argues “fantasy is the narrative of this primordial loss, since it stages the process of this renunciation, the emergence of the Law. In this precise sense, fantasy is the very screen that separates desire from drive, it tells the story which allows the subject to (mis)perceive the void around which drive circulates as the primordial loss constitutive of desire. In other words, fantasy provides a rational for the inherent deadlock of desire: it constructs the scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who stole it from us.” This is especially present in sexual fantasy, as supplemented by the Death Drive. Freud explicitly states that “we can obtain the clearest insight into” the Death Drive during sadomasochism, “where it bends the erotic aim to its own will and yet at the same time gratifies the sexual craving completely[.]”

To use an example from cinema, the Mother as Death Drive is represented by the Lady In The Radiator from the film Eraserhead (1977). The Lady In The Radiator appears in the dreams of Henry Spencer, the film’s protagonist, as an reccuring escapist fantasy as he struggles with the new responsibilities of parenthood. During these dreams, the Lady In The Radiator sings out “in Heaven, everything is fine” to Henry. Although a cynical reading of these lyrics may suggest that Henry is experiencing suicidal thoughts, the more general message is simply a longing for relief from material burdens – desires, responsibilities, and so on. The Lady In The Radiator is a source of comfort, and the film’s final moments depict her embracing Henry in a triumphant crescendo of light and noise, signalling both a libidinal and emotional climax.

Another cinematic example of the Mother as Death Drive can be found in the climax of The End of Evangelion (1997). During this scene, the protagonist Shinji Ikari unwittingly instigates an apocalyptic rapture known as the Third Impact. As part of this event, humanity is merged into one single consciousness – a single being, in the form of a primordial soup known as LCL. It is the complete annihilation of individual subjectivity. During the Third Impact, a scene is shown of neon green glowing crosses spreading across the globe, each representing another human who is absorbed into the singular being. As the wave of crosses spreads, the sounds of people screaming can be heard. But these screams are of an ambiguous nature, existing somewhere between cries of terror and cheers of ecstasy. This rapture is overseen by a gigantic white angel known as Lilith, resembling the physical form of the character Rei Ananami, who herself is a genetic clone of Shinji’s mother. The relevant symbolism is quite obvious here.

What we see here in these examples mirrors Fisher’s remark that “[b]oth dread and ecstasy arise from a loss of the sense of self as a delimitable entity: [an erasure] of identity that can just as easily be experienced as terror or euphoria.” This mixture of dread and ecstasy, of terror and euphoria, is embodied in Lacan’s concept of jouissance. But what we also see is the above examples is the symbolic resolution of separation anxiety – an anxiety that results from the separation of two entities, either through physical or emotional separation. In the case of birth, both of these separations are accounted for. The Child is both physically and emotionally separated from its Mother, becoming its own distinct entity. Prior to this, as Fisher explains, the distinction between the categories of Mother and Child did not exist. The Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank argues that this separation is deeply traumatic for the Child, and clarifies that this claim “is by no means to be taken metaphorically in any way – not even in the psychological sense.” Being born is quite literally a traumatic experience that shapes the individual’s psyche in various complex ways.

Commenting on the established structures of society, Rank observes that “our whole mental outlook has given predominance to the man’s point of view and has almost entirely neglected the woman’s. […] Both are the expression of that primal repression which tries to degrade and to deny woman both socially and intellectually on account of her original connection with the birth trauma.” The hegemonic nature of the “increasingly powerful state system administered by men is thus a continuance of the primal repression, which has as its purpose the ever wider exclusion of woman – just on account of the painful memory of the birth trauma – even at the cost of establishing the uncertain descent (semper incerius) from the father as a foundation for the entire law (name, inheritance, etc.). The same tendency completely to exclude the painful share of woman in one’s own origin is preserved in all myths in which man creates the first woman, as, for example, in the biblical story of creation.”

It is here that the true nature of the repressive interaction between the Father and Mother can be properly defined. Rank argues that the Oedipus Complex represents “the first valuable attempt to overcome the anxiety or fear of the (mother’s) genitals, by being able to accept them in a pleasurable way as libido-object.” But this attempt is inevitably “condemned to failure, not only because it is undertaken with an imperfectly developed sexual apparatus, but chiefly because the attempt is made upon the primal object itself, with which the entire anxiety and repression of the primal trauma is directly connected.” The overcoming of repression fails, and the Father continues to reign within the psychological landscape. This is then reflected in the structure of society, which adopts a repressive patriarchal formation in order to manage and repress its libidinal trauma. The Father is transformed into and embodied by various aforementioned disciplinary institutions. Rank thus argues that we are stuck in the “stage of social and human development which, on the one hand is made necessary and, on the other hand, is rendered more difficult by the birth trauma, namely, detachment from the mother fixation by transference of the libido to the father[.]”

My inspiration for this reinterpretation of the Oedipus Complex came from watching YouTube clips of Slavoj Žižek – in particular, a presentation hosted by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles in 2012 to discuss the publication of Žižek’s book God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. The most interesting clip of this presentation is where the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit is described as an “egalitarian community bound by love.” It is within this context that Žižek chooses to interpret Jesus Christ’s declaration that “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. […] Anyone who loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me; and anyone who does not take up his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me.”

How does Žižek reconcile this rhetoric with the “egalitarian community bound by love” supposedly represented by the Holy Spirit? He argues that the figures of “father or mother” should be interpreted not as literal persons but as the “entire power edifice” or “social hierarchy.” Therefore, the primary lesson of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is that “an egalitarian community outside of social hierarchy is possible.” This, along with the infamous book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, is what inspired me to reconsider the validity of the Oedipus Complex. By zooming out and applying it as a broader societal lens rather than a literal familiar relation, the value of the Oedipus Complex once again becomes clear.

Ironically, as Žižek notes, it was Oedipus himself who first overthrew the Oedipal Triangle by killing his father. Therefore, “in contrast to all of us, Oedipus is the only one without an Oedipus complex. In the usual Oedipal scenario, we compromise our desire by submitting ourselves to the symbolic Law, renouncing the true (incestuous) object of desire.” But, since the Oedipus Complex here is symbolic, “revolution is not an Oedipal rebellion against a paternal figure culminating in the killing of father but an event that takes place in a post-Oedipal space, triggered by an agent who passes through the zero-level of subjective destitution and assumes excremental identification.” In other words, “what matters is not the pain of martyrdom as such but the step outside the symbolic circuit which defines our identity.”

At a glance, it seems that our modern society has overthrown its repressive Oedipus Complex. We walk around with our smartphones in our pockets, able to instantly access a seemingly infinite range of different media. We freely speak our minds without risk of government censorship, and form communities with those who think similarly. We choose our outfits and hairstyles, customising ourselves as much as we want so that we are closer to our authentic inner selves. According to the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, “Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories [...] has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. [...] The walls of disciplinary institutions, which separate the normal from the abnormal, have come to seem archaic. Foucault’s analysis of power cannot account for the psychic and topological changes that occurred as disciplinary society transformed into achievement society.”

However, as Han is quick to point out, the Father has not been truly overthrown, but unconsciously internalised and thus rendered invisible. After all, “the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. […] Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is more efficient than allo-exploitation, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Perpetrator and victim can no longer be distinguished. Such self-referentiality produces a paradoxical freedom that abruptly switches over into violence because of the compulsive structures dwelling within it.” In other words, “[w]e had just freed ourselves from the disciplinary panopticon – then we threw ourselves into a new, and even more efficient, panopticon.” The neoliberal subject castrates themselves without the Father willing them to do so. This new form of “violence”, differing from that of the disciplinary society, “does not presume or require hostility. It unfolds specifically in a permissive and pacified society.”

The modern neoliberal regime is “fundamentally different from nineteenth-century capitalism, which operated by means of disciplinary constraints and prohibitions.” It “represents a highly efficient, indeed an intelligent, system for exploiting freedom. Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of liberty – emotion, play and communication – comes to be exploited. It is inefficient to exploit people against their will. Allo-exploitation yields scant returns. Only when freedom is exploited are returns maximised.” The subjects of neoliberalism believe themselves to be free, but this “individual freedom represents a ruse – a trick of capital.” Instead, “freedom itself is bringing forth compulsion and constraint. The freedom of Can generates even more coercion than the disciplinarian Should, which issues commandments and prohibitions. Should has a limit. In contrast, Can has none. Thus, the compulsion entailed by Can is unlimited.”

Han describes that the structural logic of this new regime as “smart power”, rather than disciplinary power. He argues that “power with a liberal, friendly appearance – power that stimulates and seduces – is more compelling than power that imposes, threatens and decrees. Its signal and seal is the Like button.” Smart power “cosies up to the psyche rather than disciplining it through coercion or prohibitions. It does not impose silence. Rather, it is constantly calling on us to confide, share and participate: to communicate our opinions, needs, wishes and preferences – to tell all about our lives. [...] The digital panopticon thrives on its occupants’ voluntary self-exposure. Self-exploitation and self-illumination follow the same logic. In either case, freedom is exploited. The digital panopticon lacks a Big Brother wresting information from us against our will. Instead, we lay ourselves bare voluntarily.” Whereas the repressive Big Other once loomed in the conscious mind, “the inhabitants of today’s digital panopticon never really feel that they are being watched or threatened. Consequently, ‘surveillance state’ is an imprecise name for describing the digital panopticon.” In the digital Panopticon, “everyone feels free” because smart power “says ‘yes’ more often than ‘no’; it operates seductively, not repressively. It seeks to call forth positive emotions and exploit them. It leads astray instead of erecting obstacles. Instead of standing opposed to the subject, smart and friendly power meets the subject halfway.”

Smart power, still secretly operating as the Father, lulls us into a false sense of security by disguising itself as the symbolic Mother. It makes itself soft and openly embraces us. In doing so, it exploits our Death Drive, luring us into a slow self-destruction. We experience a feeling of jouissance as we exploit ourselves and suffer through depressive burnout for the sake of improving ourselves. In the neoliberal regime, “the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes of optimisation.” Even the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed over three million people worldwide and continues to spread more with every passing day, eventually became something that we are now encouraged to simply live with and accept as a fact of life so that socioeconomic activity can continue as usual. No matter the pain and suffering it entails, the average neoliberal subject continues to willingly castrate themselves. Han observes that “today’s voters have no real interest in politics – in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like.”

Žižek asks: “why do we enjoy oppression itself? That is to say, power asserts its hold over us not simply by oppression (and repression) which are sustained by a fear of punishment, but by bribing us for our obedience and enforced renunciations – what we get in exchange for our obedience and renunciations is a perverted pleasure in renunciation itself, a gain in loss itself.” This “perverted pleasure” is known by psychoanalysts as “surplus-enjoyment”, a form of what Freud refers to as “Lustgewinn, a ‘gain of pleasure,’ which does not designate a simple stepping up of pleasure but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours in the subject’s effort to attain pleasure. Another figure of Lustgewinn is the reversal that characterises hysteria: renunciation of pleasure reverts to pleasure of/in renunciation, repression of desire reverts to desire of repression, etc.”

This paradox is inherent the function of desire, which “is always non-satisfied, since it always aims at something beyond every available object which is ‘never that,’ desire protects us from the suffocating over-presence of enjoyment.” But “if desire is by definition never fully satisfied, [then] enjoyment enacts a reflexive turn by means of which, while still missing the absent Thing, we achieve satisfaction in the very act of repeatedly missing it. This duality is at the same time the duality between desire and drive: desire stands for lack, non-satisfaction, while drive’s circular movement generates satisfaction. […] Desire is metonymic, always sliding from one to another object, again and again experiencing that ‘this is not that,’ and drive resolves this endless movement of desire by way of elevating the endless circulation around a lost object into a source of satisfaction.”

In other words, people subconsciously derive satisfaction precisely from not being satisfied. Žižek demonstrates this point with an anecdote from a Portuguese woman he met while on vacation, recalling that “when her most recent lover had first seen her fully naked, he told her that, if she lost just one or two kilos, her body would be perfect. The truth was, of course, that had she lost the weight, she would probably have looked more ordinary – the very element that seems to disturb perfection itself creates the illusion of the perfection it disturbs: if we take away the excessive element, we lose the perfection itself.” To get exactly what we think we want would be tragic, since we do not actually want what we think we want. Hence the infamous quote often misattributed to the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde: “There are two tragedies in life – not getting what you want, and getting it.”

The American philosopher Wendy Brown illustrates a different example of surplus-enjoyment in her discussion of identity politics. She observes that repression provides not just enjoyment, but also a source of meaning or a reason to live. As politicised identity “becomes invested in its own subjection”, it inevitably becomes “predicated on and requiring its sustained rejection by a ‘hostile external world.’ […] In its emergence as a protest against marginalisation or subordination, politicised identity thus becomes attached to its own exclusion both because it is premised on this exclusion for its very existence as identity and because the formation of identity as the site of exclusion, as exclusion, augments or ‘alters the direction of the suffering’ entailed in subordination or marginalisation by finding a site of blame for it.”

In other words, politicised identity “enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, dramatising, and inscribing its pain in politics and can hold out no future – for itself or others – that triumphs over this pain. The loss of historical direction, and with it the loss of futurity characteristic of the late modern age, is thus homologically refigured in the structure of desire of the dominant political expression of the age – identity politics.” Identity politics becomes a source of jouissance, deriving enjoyment from its own marginalisation. Brown describes these marginalised identities as “wounded attachments”, and argues that “identity structured by this ethos becomes deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuage the pain of its powerlessness through its vengeful moralising, through its wide distribution of suffering, through its reproach of power as such. Politicised identity, premised on exclusion and fuelled by the humiliation and suffering imposed by its historically structured impotence in the context of a discourse of sovereign individuals, is as likely to seek generalised political paralysis, to feast on generalised political impotence, as it is to seek its own or collective liberation.”

We can see similar behaviour reflected in Freud’s description of his neurotic patients: “The patient wants to be cured – but he also wants not to be. […] They complain of their illness but exploit it with all their strength; and if someone tries to take it from them they defend it like the proverbial lioness with her young. Yet there would be no sense in reproaching them for this contradiction.” He explains that “illness can be used as a screen to gloss over incompetence in one’s profession or in competition with other people; while in the family it can serve as a means for sacrificing the other members and extorting proofs of their love or for imposing one’s will upon them. […] It is curious, however, that the patient – that is, their ego – nevertheless knows nothing of the whole concatenation of these motives and the actions they involve. One combats the influence of these trends by compelling the ego to take cognisance of them.”

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard takes this hypothesis even further. In his controversial book Libidinal Economy, he (in)famously argues that a masochistic jouissance has always been inherent to the function of the capitalist economy. For example, “the strange bodily arrangement of the skilled worker with his job and his machine, which is so often reminiscent of the dispositif of hysteria, can also produce the extermination of a population: look at the English proletariat, at what capital, that is to say their labour, has done to their body. […] Death is not an alternative to it, it is a part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed [ifs ont joui de] the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening.”

In his commentary on Lyotard’s work, Mark Fisher remarks that “Lyotard suggests ways in which such body horror might be a realist description of late capitalism. Bodies under capitalism are not ‘alienated’, he insists, but machined, transformed, mutated[.]” Lyotard clarifies that this point is made “without any condemnation”, and also acknowledges that “the death drive of which Freud speaks […] underlies our own libidinal economism[.]” And this libidinal economism is not just present in the field of physical labour – it is present within all existing social institutions. The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari observe that “sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.”

This explains why repressive ideologies such as fascism have historically been so appealing to the proletarian masses, despite going against their best interests. It practically solves what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “the fundamental problem of political philosophy”, the problem “that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’ […] As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?” The answer is that we secretly enjoy “being humiliated and enslaved”, we derive a form of sadomasochistic jouissance from it, we become attached to our own suffering as a source of perverse pleasure.

Freud notes that “civilisation imposes an almost intolerable pressure on us and it calls for a corrective. Is it too fantastic to expect that psycho-analysis in spite of its difficulties may be destined to the task of preparing mankind for such a corrective? Perhaps once more an American may hit on the idea of spending a little money to get the ‘social workers’ of his country trained analytically and to turn them into a band of helpers for combating the neuroses of civilisation.” He compares this hypothetical project to the Salvation Army, but from our anti-capitalist perspective, something more radical may be proposed. Imagine, if you will, the People’s Psychoanalytic Army, a grassroots collective of revolutionaries who are as likely to carry copies of The Communist Manifesto in their bag as they are to also carry copies of Beyond The Pleasure Principle, with the goal of allowing to proletarian subject to harness “his own internal sources, by putting at the disposal of his ego those energies which, owing to repression, are inaccessibly confined in his unconscious, as well of those which his ego is obliged to squander in the fruitless task of maintaining these repressions.”

This is, of course, an incredibly absurd image. The People’s Psychoanalytic Army is a ridiculous idea, and should obviously be taken as a cheeky joke more than anything else. But it does raise an interesting question: does psychoanalysis contain progressive and/or revolutionary elements? This question has been a recurring source of debate within Marxist and post-Marxist communities. For example, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly adopt an anti-psychoanalysis stance in their collaborative works, choosing to develop their own original alternative of schizoanalysis instead. Meanwhile, Žižek seeks to redeem hidden liberatory potential from historically problematic projects such as psychoanalysis and religion, believing them to contain valuable insights about contemporary politics. This debate has not been conclusively settled, but I choose to cautiously place myself in the latter camp alongside philosophers like Žižek. Although psychoanalysis is not the only source of productive political tension, it nonetheless provides an effective framework for understanding human behaviour, enabling individuals to examine and overcome their own internalised repressions, as this essay hopefully proves.

Bibliography

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Žižek, S. (2022). Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed. Bloomsbury Academic