Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis (Notes)

We are forever telling stories about ourselves – to others – to ourselves – we narrate others just
as we narrate ourselves – telling others about ourselves is doubly narrative – we change many
aspects of these histories of self and others as we change (as we grow) – (but it was Freud who
first developed a theory based on these narratives) – Freud’s unprecedented transformation of
narrative into theory – he invested the idiosyncrasies of narrative with the generalizing power of
a theoretical validity – in a letter to Wilhelm, Freud wrote – “ I have found love of the mother
and jealousy of the father in my own case too and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of
early childhood – if that is the case the gripping power of Oedipus Rex becomes intelligible” – in
the above letter he is transforming personal narration into path breaking theoretical discovery –
(what he does is he creates a theory based on a personal narration which he refers back to a story
– Oedipus Rex – whose existence confirms his experience and theory – the drama that Sophocles
wrote based on the Greek legend thus becomes a reference narrative – a specimen story of
psychoanalysis). He believes that his own experience and the existence of the legend of Oedipus
gives his theory universal validity.
The way in which Sophocles narrates the story is equated to the process of psychoanalysis – a
slow, step-by-step process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement, the
truth that Oedipus has killed his father and married his mother – Oedipus’ destiny moves us
because it is the fate of all of us – to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our
first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father – while the poet brings to light the
guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling us to recognize our own inner minds, in
which those same impulses though suppressed are still to be found.
Freud’s reference to Oedipus as a key-narrative – the specimen story of psychoanalysis – is
structured by three questions: (1) The question of the effectiveness of the story. Why is the story
so compelling, so moving? (2) The question of the recognition. The story has power over us
because it is compelling us to recognize something (3) The question of validity of the hypothesis,
of the theory which he believes is universal.
Lacan’s reading of Freud renews each of these questions in some crucial ways. The Oedipus
mythic reference hold the key to the crux of Lacan’s innovative and enriching insight into what it
is that Freud discovered and consequently into what it is psychoanalysis is all about. Lacan’s
views about the significance of the Oedipus story cannot be found in a single article or essay. It
has been derived by Shoshanna Felman from laboriously reading through all the works and
comments of Lacan. She has attempted a creative systematization of what may be called Lacan’s
revision of the Oedipus as a relation between three dimensions (1) the purely theoretical
dimension: How does Lacan understand the basic psychoanalytic concept of the “Oedipus
Complex”? (2) The practical and clinical dimension: what is in Lacan’s eyes the practical
relevance of the Oedipus to the clinical event, to the practical dealings with a patient? (3) The
literary dimension: How does Lacan understand the way in which the text of Sophocles informs
psychoanalytic knowledge?
While Freud reads Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to confirm his theory Lacan re-reads the text with an
eye on psychoanalytic practice. Lacan’s emphasis is on the role of speech or language in the play.
Lacan is more concerned with the structural relation between language and desire, a desire that
articulates itself substitutively, in a symbolic metonymic language and hence is not recognizable
to the subject. Oedipus Rex should be viewed as a spectacular dramatization, a calculated
pedagogical demonstration of this formula. Oedipus’s unconscious is actually the Oracle –
everything takes place through the role of the Oracle – the fact that Oedipus is truly other than
what he realizes as his history – he is the son of Laius and Jocasta but starts out ignorant of this
fact – the unconscious is this subject unknown to the self, misapprehended, misrecognized by the
ego.
Thus the story of Oedipus becomes the specimen story of psychoanalysis – it is at the centre of
each practical session of psychoanalysis – psychoanalysis is nothing other than the process of
recognizing the misrecognized part of the subject – to do this the subject must like Oedipus
recognize what he misrecognizes namely his desire and his history, as the subject at the
beginning is unaware of both – this is what both Freud and Lacan agree upon. However, the
nature of the recognition is somewhat differently conceived by Freud and Lacan. In Freud’s
analysis Oedipus recognizes his desire (incest, patricide) as (unwittingly) fulfilled whereas
Sophocles’ reader recognizes in himself the same desire as repressed. The recognition is thus
cognitive. In Lacan the psychoanalytic recognition is tied up with language, with the subject’s
analytic speech-act, and so it is performative – a symbolic action that modifies the subject’s
history. The analytical speech-act by which the subject recognizes, and performatively names,
his desire and his history has to be completed, consummated, by an ultimate analytic act of
speech which Lacan calls “the assumption of one’s history” that is, the ultimate acceptance and
endorsement of one’s destiny, the acknowledgement of responsibility and forgiving of this
discourse.
Oedipus the King in Oedipus Rex, however in Lacan’s eyes while recognizing, naming his desire
and his history does not assume them that is he accepts his destiny but does not accept (forgive)
himself. That is why Lacan would like to take us Beyond Oedipus: that is, first of all beyond
Oedipus Rex and into Sophocles’ tragic sequel Oedipus at Colonus.
II
It is only in the tragic sequel that the true assumption or acceptance of his destiny by Oedipus
takes place. In Oedipus at Colonus when he is about to die, he is told by his daughter Ismene that
the oracles have prophesied that he is strong and will grow to greatness. He then asks, “Is it now,
that I am nothing, that I am to be a man?” to Lacan it is clear that it is at this point of time that
Oedipus assumes the Other in himself, this subject beyond the subject, he assumes the radical
de-centrement from his own ego, from his own self-image, and his own self-consciousness. And
it is this radical acceptance, and assumption of his own self-appropriation that embodies for
Lacan, the ultimate meaning of Oedipus’ analysis. This significance is historically consummated
by Oedipus at the moment when he awaits his death.
The question arises, why death? Shoshanna Felman now tries to shed light on this question by
continuing the analysis of Oedipus at Colonus beyond what Lacan has articulated, using the
notions of Lacan. According to her the concept of Oedipus Complex encompasses two fantasised
visions of death: the father’s death and the subject’s own death. The Oedipus complex is resolved
through the child’s identification with his father, constituting his superego, in Lacan’s terms, the
resolution takes place through the introjection (acceptance and appropriation) of the Father’s
name. The first archetypal linguistic symbol (the father’s Name) becomes the factor which
represses and replaces, or displaces, the desire for the mother. In effect the child’s assumption of
his own death becomes a condition and a metaphor for his own renunciation. In Oedipus at
Colonus what is new is precisely the fact that Oedipus is born through the assumption of his
death into the life of his history. Oedipus at Colonus is about the transformation of Oedipus’
story into history. It is about the historization of Oedipus’ destiny through symbolization – the
transmutation into speech of the Oedipal desire. Oedipus at Colonus is not simply the telling of
the story of Oedipus, the drama of symbolization and historization of the Oedipal desire but
beyond that it is the story of the transmutation of Oedipus’ death into symbolic language of the
myth.
Lacan also applies the concept put forward in Freud’s essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” to
Oedipus at Colonus – Oedipal death-instinct and repetition-compulsion. Towards the end of the
play, Oedipus himself the victim of a curse and of a consequent parental rejection, pronounces in
his turn a mortal curse against his sons. Oedipus’ destiny is thus marked by a
repetition-compulsion, illustrating in Lacan’s eyes Freud’s tragic intuition in “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle.” Some consider Freud’s speculations in this essay as over-pessimistic and
unscientific but according to Lacan it is crucial for any understanding of psychoanalysis and
embodies the ultimate riddle. Oedipus at Colonus, says Lacan, is taking us beyond Oedipus in
much the same way as Feud is taking us Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Lacan is suggesting two
things: (1) That “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” stands to Interpretation of Dreams in precisely
the same relation in which Oedipus at Colonus stands to Oedipus Rex (2) That the significance
of the rejection of Freud’s later text by certain psychoanalytical establishment is itself part of an
Oedipal story: the story of the misrecognition, misapprehension and misreading of a history and
a discourse. The psychoanalytical establishment is still living in the last scene of Oedipus Rex,
repeating consciousness’ last gesture of denial – the self-blinding. Lacan however is striving to
make the psychoanalytic movement recognize what it misrecognizes and include the censored
Freudian text into psychoanalytic history and theory.
Oedipus’ analysis ends only at Colonus – this is the essential moment which gives its whole
meaning to his history. Similarly, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” can be said to give its whole
meaning to psychoanalytic history. In the sense that what is beyond the wish for pleasure – the
compulsion to repeat – radically displaces the conception both of history and of meaning. This
radical displacement is essential both to psychoanalytic theory and to practice. What is
psychoanalysis if not, a life-usage of the death-instinct – a practical, productive usage of the
compulsion to repeat, through a replaying of the symbolic meaning of the death the subject has
repeatedly experienced, and through a recognition and assumption of the meaning of this death
(separation, loss) by the subject, as a symbolic means of his coming to terms not with death but
with his life. This is what practical psychoanalysis is all about. “The Oedipus Complex” says
Lacan “is a dream of Freud.” This apparently transparent sentence is in effect a complex
re-statement of the way psychoanalysis is staked in the discovery that The Interpretation of
Dreams narrates: a complex restatement both of Freud’s discovery of the theory of
wish-fulfillment as the meaning – and the motivating force – of dreams, and of Freud’s discovery
of the narrative of Oedipus as validating the discovery of the theory. It was in effect, through his
self-analysis, out of his own dream about his father that revealed to Freud his own Oedipal
complexity, that Freud retrieved the founding, psychoanalytic meaning of the literary Oedipus. A
dream to any psychoanalyst, is not the opposite of truth; but neither is it truth that can be taken
literally at face value. A dream is what demands interpretation. And interpretation is what goes
beyond the dream.
In this respect “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” was at first conceived by Freud as precisely, a
rethinking of his theory of dreams which he openly spoke of in a paper he gave at the
International Psychoanalytic Congress at The Hague in 1920. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” is
thus itself a sort of repetition of The Interpretation of Dreams in much the same way a s Oedipus
at Colonus is a repetition of Oedipus the King. Indeed, like Oedipus the King, The Interpretation
of Dreams is the story of a riddle – and of its solution. Oedipus solves, first, the riddle of the
Sphinx (by the answer “man”) and then the riddle of who is responsible for Laius’ murder (by
the answer “I”, “Oedipus”). Freud solves the riddle of the meaning of the dream (by the answer
“wish-fulfillment). While Oedipus goes from the general, theoretical solution (man) to the
singular, narrative solution (me), Freud foes from the narrative solution (self-analysis, me,
Oedipus) to the theoretical solution (man, wish-fulfillment).
The later text, however, in both Freud and Sophocles, is not a simple “supplement” or sequel to
the early work, but its problematization. Both the later works address the riddle generated by,
precisely, the solution. In both Freud and Sophocles the final text thus narrates the return of the
riddle. At Colonus, Oedipus ends up presenting, not a solution but the very paradoxical gift of an
enigma: the gift of the enigma of his own death. Freud in his turn talks of death as a riddle.
The psychoanalytical establishment may have come to the conclusion that they in burying
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, buried Freud. If Freud however, is like Oedipus, not buried –
not yet buried – since the mystery of his mythic disparition is precisely such that Oedipus does
die or disappears but without leaving a corpse. And it is Lacan who tells us that Freud is not yet
buried. Psychoanalysts may say that in the meaning of the wish-fulfillment, in the meaning of
Freud’s story of desire, the tale is ended – but Lacan is there to tell us that not only is the tale
(Freud ‘s, Oedipus’) not ended but that Freud is bequeathing us “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”
so as to tell us nothing other than that this ultimate discovery, this ultimate enigma: that the tale
has, in effect, no end.
Thus, it is psychoanalysis itself which is now staked in the literary narrative, in the story of the
Oedipus. From the perspective of Colonus, Lacan is telling us, re-telling us, the very story of
psychoanalysis as “what cannot be told so simply: it was no simple thing.” And the story of
psychoanalysis is the very story of Freud’s telling and re-telling the narrative, in other words, of
Freud himself as narrator. And Freud is also far from being a simple narrator. “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle” is, like the Oedipus not a simple story, it is a strategic story. What Lacan is
urging us to recognize In Freud’s account, is the thrust, precisely, of Freud’s strategy as narrator:
not just what the story teller means to say but what the story teller in effect is doing with and
through his story.
“In the final analysis we can talk adequately about the libido only in a mythic manner: this is
what is at stake in Freud’s text.” In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud creates a new myth –
that of the death instinct – so as to demystify the literal belief in, and the simplified interpretation
of, his first myth of the Oedipus. Freud is thus, essentially, a demystifying narrator. But the
narrative strategy of demystification takes place only through a new narrative mythification. In
urging us to go beyond the myth, Freud also tells us that beyond the myth there is, forever, but
another myth. And it is in this sense that “the tale” is never ended. But who is speaking here?
Lacan’s voice fuses here with Freud’s in what Lacan would doubtless call, a narrative, a “mixture
of the subjects”: the story of Freud’s strategy as psychoanalytic narrator is, simultaneously, the
story of Lacan as psychoanalytic educator. If we ask what Lacan is doing with this story, the
answer would be, Lacan is training analysts. Lacan as narrator of Freud as narrator, Lacan as
narrator of Sophocles as narrator, Lacan in everything he says or does is always, above all,
training analysts. And that is why he picks Colonus as the truly psychoanalytic place; for if
Colonus marks the end of Oedipus’ psychoanalysis it is to the extent that Oedipus’ tale of desire
ends only through its own dramatic narrative discovery that the tale has in effect, no end. In other
words, analysis, and in particular didactic self-analysis, is in effect interminable. Colonus as “the
end of Oedipus’ psychoanalysis” marks the moment at which the analysand becomes an analyst.
Colonus echoes thus Lacan’s preoccupation as a training analyst. Lacan perhaps unconsciously
identifies with Oedipus at Colonus, just as Freud identifies with Oedipus Rex. Lacan identifies
naturally with the exile, since Lacan has been as a training analyst, excommunicated from the
International Psychoanalytical Association. Colonus thus embodies Lacan’s appropriation, his
assumption of his story, that is all at once his own death and his own myth – of the legacy of this
expropriation.
At the same time, then, that Lacan is talking about Oedipus at Colonus, he is telling and retelling
the very story of psychoanalysis, seen from Colonus, the story of Freud’s going beyond Freud, of
Oedipus’ going beyond Oedipus, the story of psychoanalysis’ inherent, radical and destined
self-expropriation. In subscribing to Freud’s psychoanalytic self-recognition in the Oedipus, as
the moment of psychoanalysis’ self-appropriation, its coming into the possession of its
(“scientific”) knowledge, and in censoring “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” as “nonscientific”
the psychoanalytical establishment has, precisely, tried to censor, to express this final Freudian
self-expropriation, and this ominous narrative annunciation, by the “father of the psychoanalytic
movement” of an inherent exile of psychoanalysis: an exile of psychoanalytic truth, into an
uncertain psychoanalytic destiny of erring. Lacan has raised his voice against this but his
protestation is in turn censored. Whatever the polemical pretexts or the political reasons, it is
clear that the repressive gesture is to eradicate from psychoanalysis the threat of its own
self-expropriation, to censor, in Freud as well as in Lacan, the radically self-critical, and
self-transgressive, movement of the psychoanalytic discourse; to pretend, or truly believe that
this is nothing other than a historic accident, to be easily erased, eliminated.
However, the repeated psychoanalytic censorships illustrate only the effectiveness of Freud’s
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” or of Sophocles’ or Lacan’s Oedipus at Colonus. They illustrate
the very Freudian myth of a death-instinct of psychoanalysis itself: the Oedipal repetition of a
curse in a discourse. Through his call for a return to Freud – a return to Colonus – Lacan
announces the return of a riddle. Lacan’s narrative is a reminder of the radical impossibility of
ever burying the unconscious. The riddle thus persists. A riddle is just a narrative delay, the
narrative analytical negotiation of some truth or insight and their metaphorical approximation
through a myth.
Myth in Freud is not a supplement to, or an accident of theory: it is not external to theory; it is
the very vehicle of theory, a vehicle of mediation between practice and theorization, the myth is
not pure fantasy but a narrative symbolic logic that accounts for a very real mode of functioning,
a very real structure of relations. The myth is not reality; but neither is it what it is commonly
(mis)understood to be – a simple opposition to reality. The relation is actually one of dialogue.
The myth comes to grips with something in reality that it does not fully apprehend, comprehend
or master but to which it gives an answer, a symbolic reply. The function of the myth in
psychoanalytic theory is thus evocative of the function of interpretation in the psychoanalytic
dialogue.
The psychoanalytic myth derives its theoretical effectiveness not from its truth-value but from its
truth-encounter with the other, from its capacity for passing through the other, from one insight
through another, of one story through another. Lacan’s involvement with the Freudian myth is
thus, radically involved with the difference Freud is introducing into the conception and the
practice of narration. Lacan’s own involvement with the psychoanalytic difference has three
aspects: (1) Lacan’s narration is very different from the usual psychoanalytic narration of Freud’s
accomplishment and theory (2) Lacan’s narration is about, psychoanalytic myth as the
introduction of a Difference (3) The psychoanalytic narration, in Lacan’s conception is always,
necessarily, different from itself. In the very way it is narrated the psychoanalytic theory
inscribes a radical self-difference. And this self-difference, this Spaltung in (within) the theory,
this unavoidable breach of theory, is embodied by the myth, is the myth. The myth is thus at once
the Other of the theory and that which gives the theory to itself, that which, from within the
literary gift of speech, founds the theory. And while there is no possible cognition of the myth –
no constantive exhaustion of the myth by theory – there should be a performative
acknowledgement (recognition and assumption) by the theory of its relation to the myth and of
the irreducibility of the myth as something in the theory.
And this is why Freud has privileged the Oedipus above all myths. In dramatizing language as
the scene of the unconscious, the Oedipus is archetypal of the psychoanalytic myth in that it is
the story of the narrative expropriation of the story by itself, the story of, precisely, the
acknowledgement of the misrecognition of the story by itself. As a narrative of this discovery, as
a narrative that is not just a discovery but of the discovery of difference the story of the Oedipus
exemplifies the problematic status of psychoanalysis telling its own story of discovery, and while
telling, acting out its own unconscious, thus discovering and rediscovering the difference
between what it’s telling and what it’s doing in the telling. The Oedipus is privileged because it
is, specifically, about the subversively performative aspect of mythical creation. The story of the
Oedipus is archetypal of the psychoanalytic myth in that it dramatizes speech not as cognitive
but as performative.
Beyond Colonus: Truth or Science or What Remains to be Narrated
If Freud’s psychoanalysis is, then, a symbolical reply to a reality it tries to come to grips with;
and if this symbolical reply is made of myth, it is to the extent that, in its function as a gift of
speech, the psychoanalytic myth embodies, and derives from a residue of action in the very
process of cognition of that action. Myth is thus a mediation between action and cognition,
between theory and practice. As we have seen in Oedipus, myth, is first and foremost, practically
efficacious, both clinically and literally. And it is perhaps because it combines the performative
power of the clinical event and the performative power of the literary resonance, the unique
performative encounter, that is, of the literary and the clinical dimensions, that the Oedipus has
worked so well as the specimen story of psychoanalysis: a specimen story which in the very act
of grounding psychoanalytic theory also points to action in cognition, of fiction in truth, of
practice in theory.
Action, fiction, practice are thus bound together in the irreducibility of myth from the science of
psychoanalysis. In Lacan’s case as in Freud’s case of the commitment to psychoanalysis as
science. Can the practice of psychoanalysis have a scientific claim? Lacan replies in the
affirmative. But his answer as usual is paradoxical. Science is involved in the practice of
psychoanalysis not because the analyst is scientific, but because the patient is or can be. But the
patient is not as we would expect, the object of the science of psychoanalysis, but its subject. The
subject of science can be defined by the structure of his relation to “truth as cause” in Lacan’s
conception, “the incidence of the signifier (insofar as it has caused the subject’s unconscious).
And this scientific cause is what the subject – the analysand – is after.
This commitment to the practice of psychoanalysis as science, concomitant with the
acknowledgement that psychoanalytic theory is fundamentally and radically composed of myth –
that the knowledge which is theorized out of the practice cannot transgress its status as a
narrative expropriating its secured possession as a knowledge – has repercussions both in theory
and in practice. It means that, to be truly scientific, the practice has to be conceived as antecedent
to the knowledge: it has to be forgetful of the knowledge. Like Oedipus, psychoanalysis has no
use of preconceived knowledge of the mythic story. In practice there is no such thing a specimen
story. It is precisely insofar as it embodies its own forgetting that the
Oedipus myth is constitutive of the science of psychoanalysis. And this science takes itself to be
a science only when it in effect forgets that it owes its creativity – the production of knowledge –
to a myth. To borrow a metaphor from Physics, one could say that psychoanalytic myth is to the
science of psychoanalysis what the Heisenberg principle is to contemporary Physics. It does not
conflict with science – it generates it – as long as it is not believed to be, erroneously, a certainty
principle.
The question of science in psychoanalysis is thus, for Lacan not a question of cognition but a
question of commitment. And the acknowledgement of the psychoanalytic myth is not a question
of complacency in myth but a question of exigency in and beyond the myth. Science is the drive
to go beyond. The scientist’s commitment is at once to acknowledge myth and to attempt to go
beyond the myth. The narrative movement of the myth is precisely that which always takes us
beyond itself.