Ich glaube, ich war schön: wenn ich die Lampe ausblies vor meinem Spiegel, fühlt ich es mit keuschem Schauer. Ich fühlt’ es, wie der dünne Strahl des Mondes in meines Körpers weisser Nacktheit badete so wie in einem Weiher, und mein Haar war solches Haar, vor dem die Männer zittern, dies Haar, versträhnt, beschmutzt, erniedrigt, verstehst du’s, Bruder? Ich habe alles, was ich war, hingeben müssen. Meine Scham hab’ ich geopfert, die Scham, die süsser als Alles ist, die Scham, die wie der Silberdunst, der milchige des Monds, um jedes Weib herum ist und das Grässliche von ihr und ihrer Seele weghält, Verstehst du’s, Bruder! diese süssen Schauder hab’ ich dem Vater opfern müssen. Meinst du, wenn ich an meinem Leib mich freute, drangen seine Seufzer, drang nicht sein Stöhnen an mein Bette? Eifersüchtig sind die Toten: und er schickte mir den Hass, den hohläugigen Hass als Bräutigam. So bin ich eine Prophetin immerfort gewesen und habe nichts hervorgebracht aus mir und meinem Leib als Flüche und Verzweiflung.
(Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Richard Strauss’s Elektra)
Let me share with you a painting.
This was done, unprompted of course, by my six-year-old daughter; the little bird on the left is her, the big one on the right, me; and the heart represents what hearts represent.
In sharing this with you, I want to make two points, which, in fact, are really only one point from two perspectives.
But first a brief discursus.
Carl Gustav Jung’s invention of the Electra complex earned him, as we know, Freud’s opprobrium. Freud was unwilling to contemplate a symmetric process on the part of the girl child to the male Oedipus complex which forms such a basic plank of his theory of male psychosexual development. The reason for this appears to have been that the initial infantile oral attachment is to the mother; in the male child, this attachment needs to be broken so that the object of sexual attraction is sought outside the family unit; for the female child the problem is not posed in these terms because the female/female bond to the mother remains. The female child thus would not form any infantile presexual bond and therefore not need to break this bond. As sexual development progresses, objects of attachment can only be sought in the outside world.
The Freudian account, I guess, is by now thoroughly unconvincing to any clinical psychoanalyst, who knows from repeated experience the importance of fixation on the father figure as a source of female neurosis.
In an earlier post, I reflected that Sex at Dawn, due to its deconstruction of the elemental nature of the nuclear family group, might anyway require a reevaluation of the Oedipus and Electra complexes. On reflection, Sex at Dawn does not really imply anything for Freud’s theory: the biological mother has an archetypal role and status in any society. However, I believe psychoanalysts have not awaited the findings of paleoanthropology to start to criticize both Freud’s and Jung’s accounts as reflecting contingent social circumstances rather than universal truths. As such, at the very least the intensity of the psychic conflict alluded to may be primarily a consequence of the poverty of adult social relations, whether male or female, to which children in industrial societies have access. If the mother or father fails or is absent, the available social tissue is insufficient to take up the slack. This would not have characterized pre-industrial, much less pre-agricultural societies, in which the absence of one or other parent is likely in any event to have been a common scenario and therefore one to which the human psyche presumably developed resilience.
Whatever its theoretical basis, however, descriptively the Electra complex seems to have been highly relevant in the environment in which psychoanalytic theory was born. Its clinical relevance probably explains why it is the only concept developed by Jung which made it into mainstream clinical practice. Post-structuralist, feminist and Marxist readings of fairy tales and dowry practices tell a similar story: whether or not the role of the father figure is to any degree biologically programmed, it is certainly to an extraordinary degree culturally reinforced. Jung was neither wrong to see in the neurosis with which Sabina Spielrein presented the shadow of her violent yet charming father, nor to identify a cultural pattern attested from the earliest literate societies (sex-negative patriarchy struck back when Stalin closed Spielrein’s experimental kindergarten in Moscow in 1926 on charges of sexual perversion and Hitler’s troops shot her for her Jewish origins in Rostov on Don in 1942)(1).
I would like, therefore, to bear witness in this way to the astonishing delicacy of the love between father and daughter. In our emotionally devastated world, each generation is still borne anew with all its potential for love. The emotional desert in which we all live certainly contributes in a major way to the semiotic charge of the relationship and its frequently unhappy course. And yet, we instinctively sense that we are in the presence of something deeply sacred – in many men’s experience perhaps uniquely and unbearably so.
In sharing the painting with you, I want to say something to women, and to fathers.
To women, I hope it shows you that, whatever has been your personal history, your love for your father has been a precious part of who you are as a human being. In all likelihood he was an inept, if not appalling guardian of the treasure entrusted to him. The treasure, however, is yours, and remains.
And to fathers of daughters (though frankly, it is really very similar with sons): please wake up and cherish this tender miracle which lights your days. In doing so, remember that we are the servants of our children, and not they of us.
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Notes:
(1) Jung’s proximate source seems not to have been Sophocles, however, but Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Strauss’s librettist whose words are cited at the top of this article.