Dissertation Episode 4: I Put My Collective Fist Into the Face of the Collective Unconscious or Psychoanalyze THIS!

I hate psychoanalysis. I hate it; I hate it; I hate it. I think it’s dumb; I think it’s sexist. I think I’ve read way to much psychoanalysis and stuff about psychoanalysis in the last week.

But honestly, let’s just look at this logically for a moment. The Oedipus complex (based on Oedipus) rests on the belief that Oedipus who killed his father and slept with his mother secretly wanted to both kill his father and sleep with his mother. The problems with this analysis are twofold: 1) there is no textual evidence that Oedipus wanted and/or knew that Jocasta and Laius were his parents; 2) Oedipus is not a real person; he’s a textual character. Therefore, to base an entire theory on what he “secretly wanted” assumes that he has a psyche to secretly want something.

I like to believe that the Batman secretly wants me in his bed, but probably if I based an entire psychology on that belief I would not be allowed to live an unsupervised life around sharp objects and children.

But hey, Freud gave us the unconscious and dreams and all sorts of good stuff and I will admit that. His writings on civilization in particular are interesting. That being said I read a little Jung yesterday and I thought, “I like myth. I like mythy stuff. I should like Jung.” Yeah. As is said in the land I hale from: “whoopsie-doo.”

Jung’s collective unconscious, kind of a neat idea if your twelve playing D&D, is based on the universalist idea of humanity. Well, what’s wrong with this universal idea you ask? The universal human is male, white, educated, heterosexual, and reasonably wealthy. Cause that is SO universal. I know that deep inside me, the place from which all my morals, courage, and independence arises, lives a wealthy, educated, heterosexual, white man. (Really, doesn’t that explain so much of my behavior?)

So here I am, reading Jung, screaming (SCREAMING) out loud and then crying deep inside because there was no one to understand my rage and pain. Apparently when you read Jung, no one can hear you scream. Not only is this collective unconscious formulated from a purely male perspective, but one of the archetypes, the anima, is that damned female influence that exists particularly to test, uplift, defeat, and perplex men.

And I should digress for just a minute: I’m at a place here where I’m not sure that I believe there is an inherent male or female perspective--I think I’m moving into a realm where we all just have “perspectives” that have been shaped by our lives and environments and, because society is gendered, we learn to gender those perspectives. Probably well over half of the ten people reading this are cursing at me now, but for the two or three that might take issue with my use of “male perspective” I wanted to throw that in. When I say male perspective what I mean is a perspective coming from a person that is classically close-minded and unaware of their biases in favor of stereotypical masculine traits over stereotypical feminine traits.

No doubt someone will still hate me for that definition but whatever. I’m a feminist. My rage is infinite.

Back to psychoanalysis, however…

I think myth is really interesting and I think the same stories appearing in cultures all over the world in all different time periods is equally interesting. I love this tactile proof we have that societies, despite some fairly major differences, all evolve in similar ways or at least with similar mythic constructions. However, once you start making claims about a “universal humanism” (a term that is fairly, if not certainly, indefinable) then lines get drawn between what is natural and unnatural, human and inhuman, etc. etc. This is how witches get burned, crusades and jihads undertaken, and citizens denied equal rights due to their sexuality, race, and gender.

When we say “universal humanism” what we mean is “how I imagine a utopist version of the human to be” and what we imagine the perfect human to be is incredibly subjective dependent not a little on our religious, social, and economic backgrounds.

I think psychoanalysis has some incredibly interesting things to say--certainly notions of repression and suppression have informed my knowledge of family dynamics my whole life--and we would never be able to explore so many “whys;” I.e. why we like horror, gothic, or grotesque. Furthermore I would agree that we are unaware of our reasons for behaving as we do sometimes--certainly all of us have ample proof of that.

But here’s my sticking point: I have yet to see someone say (in a scholarly article I’ve read anyway) that they are borrowing from Freud or Jung, or Freud and Jung, in “this” particular way but want everyone to know that, in general, Freud and Jung are sexists, ego maniacs. I just feel like that disclaimer should be at the start of any psychoanalytic text so I, the reader, can know that the author understands and acknowledges the ridiculous aspects of the theories being worked with.

Too harsh? Must be my penis envy.