The Everlasting Relevance of Psychoanalysis

Family Values

Freud has been misunderstood for so very long. Forget all you’ve heard about the Oedipus complex or penis envy. Such terms are pop-Freudianisms at best and are an annoying distraction from Freud’s original insight that you’re a hopeless fuck-up. See, Freud’s basic contribution to philosophy and psychology is that, quietly simply, your family is fucked up, and your family fucked you up. Dare to differ? I challenge anyone to find an earlier thinker who asserts this position. It is quite original and, by the testimony of personal experience, very true. Recommended reading is Civilization and Its Discontents, which charts how an originary fuck up – your family – is mirrored on the systemic level in that great fuck up called civilization.

Chicks with dicks or guys with boobs?

Lacan was a Freudian, above all, but made a fundamental mistake. He eschewed the concrete philosophy of the Freudian fuck-up and got all abstract and Saussure like. Worse yet, he insisted upon the explanatory value of a specific metaphor that cannot but be read literally. He asserted the supremacy of the phallus, which we are supposed to take as the figure (figura) of gender difference in cultural not biological terms. Yet in the spirit of French feminism, whereby this biological metaphor is extended to the "black triangle" and the “two lips” (which bear their own significatory force), we may advance the argument that Lacan quite simply had no balls. That is, he forgot about the nuts.

In psychoanalytic terms, it’s the difference between two salient identities, typically combined in that figure of the “passive-aggressive” but more boldly pronounced by the bedfellow isms of Sadism and Masochism, of which there is an equal share among the sexes. There are dicks and ball busters. There are chicks with dicks, and guys with boobs, and gals with huge balls, and dickless dudes. There are dudes who like a little ball play mixed in every now, ok?, and there are those who are aggressively insistent, DON’T TOUCH MY FUCKING NUTS. These are revealing positions and complicate the simple Lacanian notion of the phallus as a biologically specific metaphor of the greatest cultural implications and responsible for some of the basic features of human social organization.

If we are going to literally be metaphorical, however paradoxical that sounds, then we have to heed this poetic dictum, dreamed up late last night as I was fading away: “Kiss Cass / And the whole rack of ham jacks.”