2.98
Following a kind of thread, a story of consolidation, we leap to one of those key thinkers who also looked back to the Greeks: Freud. Freud helps plant the seeds for a revolution in rethinking humans: he opens the clear rational subject to the darkness of the unconscious.
The fascinating thing is that while he opens the way for an array of forces that constitute and pull the subject apart, he nonetheless maintains the subject as the centre around which these forces dance.[1] This awakens us to the pull of gods who war amongst each other, but at the cost of secularizing and binding them to the internal world of a subject. As internalized, they’re distinguished from objective reality (fantasy/reality, internal/external); an imbalance of forces can also be treated (e.g., by bringing metaphoric, imagic displacements to words, thereby taming them[2]). Thus, when something is wrong, it’s something wrong with you: a psychologist or therapist can help you return to your self as an ideal, quasi-stabilized or balanced subject. And while I don’t doubt there are subtle, alternate readings to the account I’ve given, I’m painting a broad way we pick this up.
Freud traces many ruptures back to childhood trauma, further encapsulating forces within an identical subject who develops a life story through organismic development. The Oedipal Complex revolves around the dramatic triangulation of mother-father-child. As Deleuze and Guattari point out: “what a grotesque error to think that the unconscious-as-child is acquainted only with daddy-mommy, and that it doesn’t know ‘in its own way’ that its father has a boss who is not a father’s father, or moreover that its father himself is a boss who is not a father.”[3] “A child never confines himself [sic] to playing house, to playing only at being daddy-and-mommy. He also plays at being a magician, a cowboy, a cop or a robber, a train, a little car.”[4] The child and parents are always open beyond the confines of any triangulation or internalization, for they’re open dramatically to beings that call out and gods that war.
Deleuze and Guattari point out that the break between Freud and Jung is partly rooted in Jung’s refusal to link everything to the Oedipal Complex. Instead, Jung’s theory leads to archetypes: not just mother-father-child, but also magician, sorcerer, demon, and so on.[5] – And yet, even the archetype theory, while expanding past Freud’s constrictions, is still constricted: the collective unconscious speaks of a universal patterning and formation of our psyche.[6] (The same holds true for Joseph Campbell who, while opening us to the riches of myth, religion, and other traditions, puts all these voices around the centre of a psychoanalytic subject.[7])
That the gods war amongst each other doesn’t mean that they do so psychologically, i.e., within our psyche; gods and world don’t reside within the human subject. Instead, the gods can tear this subject open and leave its entrails scattered among the branches and leaves. As being-in-the-world, we’re exposed.
[1] It’s as though he subjugates Nietzschean insights to the selfsame subject.
[2] Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, eds. Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie Finke, and Barbara Johnson, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001), p. 923–6.
[3] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 97.
[4] ibid, p. 46.
[5] See §1.98. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 46.
[6] Carl Jung, “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious,” in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Part I: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol. 9, part 1, eds. Gerhard Adler, Michael Fordham, William McGuire, and Herbert Read, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 42–4.
[7] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Princeton University Press, 1973); Primitive Mythology: The Masks of God (New York: Penguin Books, 1976); Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God (New York: Penguin Books, 1976); Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God (New York: Penguin Books, 1976); Creative Mythology: The Masks of God (New York, Penguin Books, 1976).