You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What I would like to explore here is some possible unconscious and denied motives behind artificial reproduction as well as, more generally, the scientific manipulation of nature, of which it is only a small part. I say a small part and yet, more than any other project that involves the manipulation of nature, artificial reproduction has the feeling of ‘playing God’. Images such as Frankenstein's monster - the nineteenth century's version of the scientific creation of life - and the Brave New World's mass production of test tube babies haunt our imagination and remind us of the unconscious monstrous underside of science.
Hubris is the Greek word for humankind's omnipotent denial of its limitations - of its ‘playing God’. Hubris can be seen within the Oedipus complex as the rebellion against the father and the denial of his authority - ultimately the denial of castration. In this sense hubris would mean a theft and appropriation of that which does not belong to the son together with the grandiose phantasies of omnnipotence that such an appropriation creates. That was, I think, Mary Shelley's intention when she subtitled her book A modern Prometheus. In this Greek version Prometheus's theft remains the ambiguous and ambivalent foundation of science.
The theft from father is, however, secondary. Before that, and at a primary level, lies the theft from mother. To get to this primary theft we must look below the classical Oedipus complex into the early relation with mother. This early relation with mother involves an early identification with her for both boys and girls. Freud (1923) ignored this early identification with mother as far as the boy was concerned and stated instead in ‘the Ego and the Id’ that the boy's first identification was with his father. This is a different type of identification from the one he outlined in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (Freud 1923):
This is apparently, not in the first instance the consequence or outcome of an object-cathexis; it is a dir