To my sister Rebeca
Who left us today
With her child's eyes
And her wonder at death
It is strange to be giving this paper just a block from where Oscar Masotta used to live with his partner Renée. This is what the presenter must have been referring to, when he mentioned the conference of 1973. But to give the full picture I should mention something I've never told anyone before. I was a close friend of Masotta for a long time: during that period he was full of a growing passion for philosophy, in particular for phenomenology, Marxism and social and political theory. We drew apart because of events, personal interests and perhaps because of ideas. Oscar, who was already the main figure in the Escuela orientación lacaniana2, had been tasked with organising the 1973 Conference devoted to celebrating Freud's centenary in which the German Embassy was also involved. They brought an exhibition of photographs which was set up in the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Medicine. Unexpectedly the German cultural attaché phoned me, and because, he said, he had read a recently published book of mine, Freud and the limits of bourgeois individualism, he asked me whether I would open the conference. Oscar—sadly—did not attend the event, where I spoke on ‘The Excluded Freud: the Problem of the Masses’. I think that the paper highlighted the differences that separated us, which perhaps are not quite as deep today, and now provide the occasion for an affectionate tribute to his memory. The title still remains valid and could be the theme of the following discussion.
In any case this is now an opportunity to enter into a dialogue at a time when intellectuals in Argentina hardly exchange anything at all, each one speaking alone or to his own congregation. The same is true of the many psychoanalytic orientations: there are various associations
inspired by Lacan's thought and which have behaved just like the left has in the political sphere. Each one follows its own line and is seen as incompatible with other tendencies, or an object of hate for them. So I am very grateful to Germán García for inviting me: at least we have been able to look one another in the eye, with, I hope, a certain sympathy.
Let's start with something fundamental, something that appears to be a sort of watershed. I think that today there are at least two ways of understanding psychoanalytic theory, whose creation we all acknowledge as Freud's work. There is his discovery, which continues to be Jewish in its cultural, religious and mythical origin, and an interpretation of his work, that of Lacan, which displaces and supplants it with a rationality and conception of the subject whose basis is to be found, I think, in the Catholic religious and mythological origin of his own thought. I understand the recourse to myth here in much the same sense that Lévi-Strauss understands totemism: a narrative that acts as an ‘mythical operator’ which gives meaning and order to the fundamental articulations and relations of human beings with other human beings, with nature and the cosmos: a conception of the world.
This difference between a creator and a re-creator would not be serious if it were not for the fact that Lacanian theory claims to instantiate the truth of Freud's theory: it provides the ‘scientific’ key to the latter, just as Christians read the Jewish bible, but interpret it on the basis of the New Testament. The same thing happens between Freud and Lacan: the Jewish Freud has to be read on the basis of the Christian Lacan in order to truly understand him. In my view, on the other hand, and I will give my reasons shortly, there is a decisive cut which separates the two and creates an opposition between them. Let's just think about the conception of truth in which they are respectively inscribed: Jewish truth passes through practice, Christian truth through revelation, or in Heideggerian terms through aletheia, unveiling. Even the blessed Ratzinger, a Nazi in his youth and now Pope in his old age, claims as fundamental for theology, both this distinction between Jewish orthopraxis and Christian orthodoxy and the difference between a religious mythology where truth is verified in the history of a people ‘chosen’ by Jehovah as his children and the truth of another conception which resides in an individual, Christ, being ‘chosen’ as the son of God the
Father. In Freud the meaning of the truth of the subject requires this reference to history and social processes as a premise of interpretation.
Let us begin with writing style. This will perhaps seem an unimportant detail, perhaps something detestable, but ‘style is the very man’ it is said. Style brings us a presence and a personal mode of being. Every style has a body and a face: it gives us a human being, says Freud, the Jew, whose style is radically different from that of Lacan, who therefore appears as a different sort of man. In the field of philosophy, theories about human beings all bear the name of their creator. This is not a chance or merely anecdotal observation. Nevertheless we still keep it separate from the very theory we study, even given our pronounced interest in the life of authors, which clearly demonstrates that we need something more to understand it and them: we need to know the author in his life in order to better understand his theory. In the model of the so-called natural sciences, on the other hand, the ‘subjective’ characteristics of the creator seem to get in the way and need to be discarded so as not to undermine their purely objective character: the ‘inhuman’ object requires to be stripped of the human for it to be reached in its truth, it is said. Hence, I think that at some point in the future of the ‘human sciences’ the personal history of the creator of the theory will come to form a necessary part of the understanding of the theory itself so providing a greater ‘objectivity’. The truth of a theory will have to include the historicity of its creator's access to history as the point of departure. I mean: the passage from infancy to adulthood, from myth to science. Hence, I believe, we could argue that the subject is the kernel of historical truth. The discrimination of the truth, always ethical, would be found there. In the human sciences, the desires that energise the researcher determine the meaning of theoretical elaboration, I believe. And what we are dealing with here is not the psychology of the author, whose life we spy on like someone looking through a keyhole, full of unhealthy curiosity, but rather an understanding of the lived premises that open up the sphere of his problematics and orient them: his mythology. Lacan himself says that Freud's psychology is not important, but then immediately gives us these relevant details: Lacan says that Freud's psychology is rather feminine, that he does not see him as father, and that the poor man lived out the Oedipal drama in the midst of the analytic horde. And that Freud was the Mother-Intelligence.
Subtle and acute, hitting you in the eye. But, I wonder, would not understanding Lacan's psychology require understanding him as Father-Intelligence?
I am not going to give an account of Lacan's psychology—I don't claim the ability to do it. You might say that my approach, fragmentary as it is, runs the risk of saying more about my own psychology. Right away, I have to confess that Lacan has always irritated me, having known his works now for a very long time, and having included him, by way of Pontalis, in the bibliography of the courses on ethics I taught at the Philosophy Faculty in Rosario during the latter part of the fifties. He irritated me because he had (and has) two features that I found unbearable: the first that he forced you to open your legs to understand him—not a very pleasant experience. Subjective or objective appreciation? As soon as you begin to read his texts, you feel this will to humiliate the reader, like Dante's command that you lose all hope at the gates of hell. Lacan uses the reader as a mirror: whilst looking into your eyes, he asks ‘eyes, eyes, who is the sharpest and most elegant thinker in the world?’ It's quite unbearable. Is this recognition of our personal human weakness, tied to our fragmentary and limited knowledge part of the unacknowledged premises of his theory? Isn't humiliation a signifier that pulses between the lines? And above all, doesn't the demand that we submit to his knowledge have something to do with the problem of truth and ethics? This is miles away from Freud and his respect for the reader, with his confession of his doubts and weaknesses, and of course, from so many other important and difficult writers who have asked courage and effort from us to arrive at what we believe to be an understanding of their work. It always seems strange to me that psychoanalysts who are capable of discriminating with great subtlety the many levels of meaning that circulate within discourse, have so blithely and happily accepted that the written communication of such a brilliant master, after so much emphasis on the discourse of the master and ethics, should demand this humiliation from them, often explicitly, turning them at least into complicit subalterns, and have said nothing. This affective resonance of his ‘objective’ thought determined the suspicions that underlay my approach to his theory: a sign of alarm in relation to the problem of its ‘scientific’ truth.
The second feature? After carefully reading a number of his works
dealing with central questions with pencil in hand, I am left with the impression that as we try to follow him to the end of his deductions, Lacan doesn't get there, he never arrives: he never finishes: there is no closure. Think of one Bergler who undertook to criticise him and received the lapidary judgement, ‘a demented unleashing of notions that he hasn't controlled’? Do you really understand the tragedy of Antigone better when after endless circumambulations he finally tells us that ‘she miraculously turns out to be the bearer of the signifying cut that confers on her the unsurpassable power of being what she is’? Do you really accept—given what you see in the profession—that the difference between psychoanalysts and their patients is that the former have ‘a wide awake desire’? Perhaps it's just that I haven't understood him, despite having read other, perhaps more difficult writers. Perhaps it hasn't happened like that with you, but you are not going to deny that it's frustrating, having to be consoled with such petty enjoyment given what was originally offered. I'm not referring to his formal schemata, his mathemes, his schemata of our own inverted image, but to the developments he makes which are meant to guide us towards the light, dragging us out of our imaginary darkness. I think that you have to engage in a deeply arduous task to get close to the ‘scientific’ truth, most especially when I see that woman-mother in his theory—and it's a fundamental difference from the Jewish Freud—woman as mother appears to be so negated that the death drive is located within her. And I am surprised that so many Lacanian women analysts blithely accept a theoretical conception that disqualifies the maternal-feminine, something Freud never does. Freud describes the present situation of women under patriarchy, not their pure essence.
Castration has a very particular sense in Freud and this is not the one Lacan gives it. This is why I now want to talk about the various versions of Oedipus—or better of the parental complexes. Freud describes castration as a fact of historical experience: a patriarchal determination in the splitting of the ego in our accession to culture. He does not offer a theory of necessary and efficient castration, he just describes it because it is present in the suffering subjects of our period. Freud does not say that the law of the father is a passive fact of structure: he clearly says that there is no law without violence and hence without resistance by the one who finally submits to it. It is not a formal and
peaceful pact where the grateful child receives his/her name in exchange for accepting the paternal law. The negative consequences in reorganising subjectivity which it announces are enormous: the three forms of death anxiety which armour and limit consciousness; the imposition of a terrorist reason which cuts the connections with the most vibrant forms of experience; the terror which limits thought and which is comparable with the war games of the military; the imposition of a vengeful, persecutory morality, which puts us under internal surveillance and unleashes the aggression against us from which power takes its nourishment; the ferocious distance from the maternal or its hallucinated proximity as sole refuge; and the cut between affect, imagination and thought. How can we deny that the law determines the splitting of the ego through the threat of death from a very early age? Hence it seems a madness to plead for castration to normalise us.
It might be interesting to ask if there is just a single Oedipus complex, a structure with its three moments, required as the basis of freedom and access to the second death, or if there are multiple forms of Oedipus, or better, if there are different parental complexes which might bear other names and not just the Oedipal triangle that appears to be canonical. What draws my attention is that in order to be inscribed in the name of the Father, Lacanians resort to a sort of supplication for castration. ‘Castrate me, because I'm going mad’ they seem to be begging (‘symbolically’ they add just to make clear what is at issue), as if metaphors used as concepts were purely theoretical and did not drag along with them images, fantasies, and emotions, redolent of a thwarted love, because the mortified threat of the maternal in our culture is so destructive, so annihilating. This is dealt with in the different myths which organise the different parental complexes. From which it would appear that castration has to be not just unwillingly accepted after a long struggle, as Freud shows when he describes the child's tragic confrontation, but something we pleas for so as to prevent the jaws of the crocodile—the female, maternal monster—closing and devouring us. Or at least this is how Lacan represents the situation. If it were not for the father who places that column of granite, that ‘rouleau’ between her teeth! As if the threat of the father were not as great, and even more terrifying, than that attributed to the mother. As if every mother, and not those of the structure, were as terrible as the one described
by Lacan. This is un-Jewish and so Christian. I recall the terror of the Jews during the mediaeval crusades and the alternative they were offered: baptism—symbolic castration?—Or death.
The place occupied by the mother in the so-called Oedipal triangle is what radically differentiates the Jewish myth from the Christian one, and from the other myths referred to in parental complexes. Who can guarantee that, even if it is only symbolic, Christian castration will not penetrate into the flesh and bleed the sensuous heart where it beats within us? Saint Paul, who knew something about this, asks that we transpose Jewish circumcision of the boy's penis and apply it somewhere else, and offers us the circumcision of the Christian adult heart to erase its mark on our body. In the Eucharistic meal, Christ offers us salvation and the guarantee of entry into the Kingdom, if we transform ourselves: become ‘flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood’ with Man, the Son of the Father, not of the mother. He asks that we exchange mother for Father within our body. So, distanced from her body and blood with the promise of eternity waiting for us, we are upbraided to circumcise our heart, which is maternal, down to its depths, in order to save ourselves. Judas, who seems to be more Jewish than the other disciples, does not betray his mother: he only betrays Jesus in order not to kill her. The other disciples, who are faithful to Jesus, express their fidelity by murdering what is most sacred and originary: they are traitors to the mother. Isn't this the beginning of the theory that transforms the Jewish Freud's Mother-Intelligence into the Christian Lacan's Father-Intelligence? Isn't the cut that so sharply installs the bar (in the subject) that of the Christian guillotine that leaves the head separated from the sensuous and emotional body and makes the abstract thought of the Lacanian signifier possible?
What a vengeful pleasure, then, for women to know that, outside them, from the place where they are seen by men, men themselves confirm that every man is castrated down to the depths. Men symbolically, women in their bodies. Nothing more cutting then than this separation that constitutes some (that is, women) as use value and others (men) as exchange value right from the very constitution of the subject. What's more, the theory of the subject carries its demands to the limit just when the social threat of terror has expanded globally, when Christianity and capitalism—now united and victorious—extend the myths of
the Christian West to the ends of the earth. A theory that so emphasises castration and matricide ought to fit perfectly within the unconscious of any woman forming part of psychoanalytic circles, but this would be scant consolation. What is most striking is that some of them so submissively accept this generalised castration of themselves and that the ‘small difference’ which characterises them subordinates them to the ‘greater’ difference. When they arrive at ‘middle age’, the climacteric, when their charms and attractions disappear, they too demand the mother's murder—only of the ‘bad and brutal’ one of course. Then ‘aesthetic castration’ appears, and ‘reproductive’ castration which follows on from the ‘castration of fluids and blood flux’, ‘the castration of health’ in toto, which is compensated for by the ‘phallicisation of the uterus’ which has now become inhospitable. They cease to be eternal nymphs and become matrons. I've just read it…
This is a first approach to what I want to deal with today, that is, the Oedipus Complex. In times when terror and the demand for correct behaviour have come to dominate our world, when virility entails biceps and the feminine strip-tease, where the figure of the crucified Christ with its extended arms is offered as the model of sacrifice and devotion to children from an early age, you will allow me to think that there is something a little odd in this stress on such a multi-vocal concept as Oedipus, whose amphibology, however theoretical or symbolic, ought to seem odd to you.
The difference is clearly apparent in the Freudian conception of the Oedipus Complex which Lacan, having turned it into an effect of the structure, the essence of subjectivity, strips of its tragic, affective and imaginary character, and most especially of its historical dimension. Lacan ends up saying that Oedipus is Freud's myth - isn't that so? Lacan is pure science: he doesn't have myths. However, what has to be taken into account is that when Freud elaborates his historical account of the passage from Nature to History, and with the supposition of a final collective and individual ‘natural’ form (the primal horde) from which is produced the first collective and individual ‘historical’ form (the fraternal alliance), he defines it himself as a ‘scientific myth’: he is attempting to recognise the mythical element of his own theoretical hypotheses. His own words. What is truly scientific about Freud's point of departure is that it is based on his experience with his patients in the
consulting room. In his patients he finds a patriarchal myth which organises and persecutes them. Hence only a myth, not the reason which organises consciousness, and a tragic myth at that, can give an account of the present complexity of their psychic constitution. But this is a myth whose historical logic he attempts to understand by leading it from the present to the past; hence the later recourse to literary tragedy in order to turn it into a typical myth. Science acknowledges its limits: it comes close to the myth of the patient, the ‘sick’ man, to help him understand his unconscious determination, which is historical.
When Freud uses the term ‘scientific myth’ he wants to draw our attention to the fact that he puts the word ‘myth’ next to the word ‘science’, because in some way for Freud the science of human beings has a relation to its very origin in the contemporary mythical from which it reaches out to organise the subjectivity of human beings and found their consciousness. Mythology is the subjective structure of the neurotic which presupposes the mythology of the culture of which he forms a part. Freud postulates, as suggested by the patient himself, the historical origin of this passage, which the patient is repeating as a precocious rite of initiation, whose development Freud offers in Totem and Taboo in order to understand that we have two fathers: a dead father and a live one. And Freud tells us: there is no ‘science’—secure, rational understanding—of the origin of human subjectivity.
Therefore, Freud begins with the conditions of historical production of human beings (to put it another way) but a production that has to find a mythical origin in order to understand the myth of the relationships which he witnesses as determinant in the culture of the present. We must not lose sight of this relationship between myth and science in Freud, which is very far away, it seems to me, from every formulation that would freeze it as exact science in the mathemes.
And if Freud's ‘scientific myth’ turned out to be false? If history had begun prior to the fraternal alliance and the murder of the father of the primal horde? The problem historically is patriarchy as the point of departure, and therefore the historical turn that lies at the productive origin of our Western, Christian culture, with its 2000 years of history, the final stage in which the innocent, original patriarchy finds its culmination. The material and economic conditions of production that describe historical forms provide a broad outline, whereas the
mythical conditions of subjectivity provide the fine grain, without which we could not understand the former. When Marx makes another mythical hypothesis and says that the slavery of women begins in the family, must we not presuppose a moment prior to this history, a previous moment when men confronted the dominance of women? And if Greek children are normal children, as he asserts, is he not saying that we who belong to Christian culture are not? Let's re-read Bachofen: even if matriarchy had never existed, woman=mother did once have a power that she has lost, and this shone forth in remote times. The Bible also gives us glimpses of the mother Goddesses who were defeated, prior to the ascendency of the Jewish patriarchal monotheistic god. If we are speaking of myth, and if we say that Oedipus is Freud's myth, then we have to ask whether this does not obscure our own involvement in a mythology that determines us: whether Lacan might not be nourished by myth, and that we, in following him, might not be as well. What is the myth of our Western Christian culture that we pass over in silence as if its aura did not halo our incredulous citizen heads? Perhaps that mater in her monstrous, destructive form, altogether rejected as atheistic materialism is what the quantitative spiritualism of finance capital has as its necessary premise, this exclusion of the maternal-feminine that Christianity put forward and prepared many centuries ago in the supplicatory figure of the Virgin Mother. And there might be a reason why Freud engages in a debate through Mother-Intelligence against the circumcised Mother in our human bodies.
It is worth asking if it there is not a determinate mythology—the Christian one—that pushes to an extreme the annihilation of the maternal and its power of gestation, its placental power—of complete pleasure.3 Here the mother's sheltering body has been transformed into vile and despised material, mortified nature, which appears as quantifiable, mathematisable, the support of social use value, that is, utilitarian value, exchange value, where all its negated sensuous qualities appear as supports for exchange value. Surplus value, it is worth remembering, only appears in Christian capitalism as infinite enjoyment, which creates the golden eggs, as Marx said, when the maternal has been turned into currency. When the ‘internally circumcised Jew’ appears, where it is not the penis that is circumcised but the heart, as Paul demands, following Jesus, he would not be merely Jewish, but purely, internally, a christianised
Jew. (That Marx should be right on something so precise demonstrates that we are not wandering in the dark. If not, how would one distinguish internal circumcision from external? Internally fraternalised Jews, with a whole heart, at a historical distance.)
Freud attempts to understand this rite of initiation into culture through the Oedipus Complex. Yet to fully comprehend this we may have to use Freud even against Freud himself; Lacan criticises it—it is Freud's myth, he says—but does so in a way that I think transforms Freud's Jewish Oedipus complex into a Christian Oedipus complex, and it thus becomes, if you won't be offended, ‘Lacan's myth’. Because of this I think we have to go back and look at the conception of the founding myths in the production of subjects in different cultures. To put it briefly: I do not believe that there is a single, universal, typical Oedipus complex which organises the different parental complexes. This forms a system with the ‘scientific myth’ that Freud himself describes. We therefore have to ask whether this patriarchal conception that appears within Freud's Greek Oedipus complex is a canonical form with which he can analyse all behaviour, all production of subjects in whatever human culture, however patriarchal it might be; and whether the role of the mother is determinant of meaning within the various myths and the resolution of each of them.
Only the essential features of the literary narrative of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex are retained: the son kills his father and marries his mother. Later, in Moses and Monotheism Freud adds two additional features to the myth, following Otto Rank's work, which had been written under his influence: the hero is born into a royal family, is abandoned and taken in by a poor family, returns and kills the father and becomes king. He creates social division, the distinction between upper and lower social classes. And Freud discovers that ‘the source of all this poetic production is the child's so-called “family romance’”. So, what we see here is that there is a father, a son and a mother, which, considered within the structure, represent all children as equivalent, as well as all fathers and all mothers. Supposing that the child is the one who endures the passive determination of the structure, do all mother and fathers have isomorphic features? For instance, does Jocasta as the model of the Greek mother correspond to the mother in Jewish myth or in the Christian one? Does the same model of the mother appear in the Jewish
myth of Genesis and Exodus? Is it the same mother who unleashes the colonial Oedipus complex of la Malinche, of the tragedy that is inaugurated when she presents her own daughter to Hernán Cortés so that her son, his father having died, can succeed as chief of the tribe?
Much later, in Moses and Monotheism Freud will recognise that the myth of Oedipus corresponds to the ‘average saga’ that retains all the essential features of the myths of the hero's birth. In every one of them, the hero is born in a royal cradle, is sent to his death but is rescued by a poor family and returns to kill the father and take his place. Freud indicates two exceptions: it is only in the Oedipus saga that the son is taken in by a noble family, and only in the myths of Jesus and Moses is the form inverted. In these cases, the hero is born into a poor family and is taken in by a noble family and then becomes the saviour of his people. Rich and poor, but this doesn't alter his thinking about the Oedipus complex. But let's look at a single feature which distinguishes the myth of Moses from that of Jesus, despite the common quality that Freud ascribes to them. Whereas Jehovah says to Moses, as he shows him the lands of Canaan where he has led the Jewish people after freeing them from slavery in Egypt, that Moses will never set foot on them (and he dies without crossing over into the Promised Land) Jesus, by contrast, opens the Everlasting Kingdom of the Father to every Christian who accepts the exclusion of the mother from deep within him. Jesus transforms historical liberation into imaginary delusion. There are not only different mothers but different fathers in the parental complexes and they are inscribed differently within the subjectivity of the child they conceive.
But if we consider other differences that are present in the myths of the birth of the hero, but have not been retained, allowing Oedipus to become a canonical model of psychic structuring, it is just this silencing of the place of the mother, the way in which it becomes insignificant, that changes the meaning of the complex and with it the production of subjects in history. There is a single reason: what is important is the place occupied by the father in relation to the child, but not the place and function of the mother.
In the case of the Greek Oedipus the function of the mother is fundamental. Doesn't the mother precipitate the tragedy? Reading the
tragedy without prejudice, we see her playing an abominable role: she is the one who delivers her child to its death, and it is surprising that the devastating shock that Oedipus feels when the secret is revealed to him does not shock those who play him. It is perhaps the most terrible moment of the narrative: once he understands that he is his father's murderer and that he has married his own mother, there remains only one last fact for his curiosity to be satisfied. When he asks who had given the child to the slave so that he could be killed, he gets an answer which is unendurable: it was his mother. Oedipus's horror cannot be narrated by the effect of closure of the tragedy, and he completes it in a most unexpected way. This is the foundation of the tragedy: so as not to obstruct political power, the power of King Laius her husband, a mother sends her own child to its death, and thus becomes a murderous mother. There are two Jocastas with the same name: the first is the one who murders her own child and the second the one who becomes her son's lover. When we consider the Greek Oedipus, we must bear in mind the place of the murderous mother and not limit ourselves to the second moment, the place of the mother as lover, the moment that fulfils the schema of the Freudian complex, or we will fail to understand the difference with other cultures where mothers have a different function, as happens in the Jewish and Christian ones.
And here we can see a different clue that might account for the metaphysical, Heideggerian, sophistication with which Lacan, blinded by Antigone's adolescent beauty as described by the chorus, interprets her role as a problem for the ‘being’ of her unburied brother. Since he is closed off in this first moment from the maternal in Oedipus Rex, he cannot account for the origins of her challenge in Antigone. Lacan is preoccupied with the death drive in Jocasta only in terms of the incest when she sleeps with her son, and not before. But Jocasta-the-mother in Oedipus Rex first betrays the ties of blood in giving her child away to be killed, and this first betrayal, which is the truly Oedipal moment—not that where Jocasta unknowingly becomes wife to her son—leads subsequently to the sacrifice of her daughter for re-establishing the ties of blood in burying her brother—which is where she confronts the political power of the new tyrant, Creon. Here Jocasta's dilemma is posed again: the maternal ethic retrieved against the patriarchal ethic of political power. The classical structure of the Oedipus
complex—not Jocasta's incest with Oedipus which is secondary, but the exclusion of the son sent to his death, which is primary—is modified and opens up other alternatives for its resolution. Antigone sees the prior figure of the tyrant Laius in Creon. And the mother's submission—betraying the laws of blood—to political power, that is the commandments of the juridical law of patriarchy.
Let us now consider the Jewish parental complex—the Jewish ‘Oedipus’—in its difference from the Greek tragedy. By contrast with Oedipus's mother, Moses's mother refuses to let him be condemned to death by political power and saves him. So a contradiction appears between the life ethic of Moses's mother and Pharoah's death ethic. The mother decides to save her son and secretly places him in a basket which she sets adrift on the river, from which he is rescued by one of Pharoah's slaves and shown to the ruler. Pharoah's daughter falls for the baby and the slave runs off to find a wet nurse. The slave is the sister of the baby's mother, and so his real mother becomes the wet nurse. Not only does the mother save the child, then, but she comes back to nourish the child again with her own milk. So, here the triangle of salvation is entirely feminine.
In Moses and Monotheism Freud argues that there is a difference from the typical myths of the hero's birth. In the case of Moses (and that of Jesus) the child who will become the hero is born to a poor family and becomes the saviour of his people after being saved by his mother from political persecution. The Jewish myth inverts the typical models as we indicated before. Freud also recognises this peculiarity—coming from a poor family—in Jesus. But it is no longer the same mother involved. Two different mothers emerge, but Freud does not tell us that in the passage from Judaism to Christianity the mother of Jesus is transfigured into the virgin mother. He does not linger on the difference that separates one mother from the other. (At most he tells us that in the figure of the Virgin there is a reappearance of the old pagan goddesses. Did perhaps the old goddesses give birth without having sex with other gods or demi-gods so preserving their virginity?) And that the mother-virgin no longer depends on political power but on a power superior to the political, that is, religious power, since she is presented as the spouse of God himself. This dependency on divine power imposes on the son the very death from which they had fled: only by dying
can the son be saved for all time. The mother is no longer the refuge of her hospitable womb, to which the child returns in moments of danger: now she is the site where once more the power of the Father is installed, now become God. The Christian child has no way out: he flees from political power but seeking refuge in his mother's womb, he is received by religious power: God the Father himself has now taken up residence in her womb. So here there are two deaths: the bad death of true death, by political power, and the good death of dying so that we can be saved in God himself. The welcoming and frigid Christian mother hands him over to another persecuting power, much more terrible than political power: if he wants to be saved from this first death of the living body, he must accept his sacrifice in the second, to save his spirit.
We can see how different is the place occupied by the mother in the Jewish myth from that in the Greek version. In the Greek myth the mother sends the child to his death in obedience to political power, whilst in the Jewish case, on the other hand, it is the mother who saves the child and confronts political power. At this moment the Oedipal triangle is completely transformed. This makes us think that in Jewish culture the mother occupies a radically different place to the one she occupies in Greek culture. Freud never asserts that the mother is the death drive, devouring and annihilating her child. When he describes the Oedipus complex, he does so in completely different way from Lacan. He says that it ‘structures an event’ where the subject is active and not merely a passive bearer of a structure, and its resistance becomes a tragedy: in an imaginary confrontation, by means of oral regression, where the child fights with itself so as not to lose the mother in the face of the father's threat. Lacan says, ‘no, let us put to one side his imaginary description, Freud's Oedipus is just his myth’. Clearly, his own version is science. Let's go to the structure. Isn't the symbolic structure, the chain of signifiers Lacan's mythology, which he gets from Augustine and his theory of the signifier in De Magistro?
In Freud the Oedipus complex is the premature equivalent of the first rite of initiation into social life that the child confronts. Clearly, in the Lacanian structure the mother is the zero that inaugurates it, therefore the zero, the void from which it is recounted. But not the place where signification begins, since the mother cannot be narrated because
she is non-signifying. Freud does not begin here with the void, but rather with the fullness that is the mother and he continues to indicate the fundamental character that the mother has in the origin of historical life for the child. In the Jewish tradition, the mother never has her welcoming and desiring carnality annihilated as she does in Christianity, as we will see. The woman-mother is a good idische mame, protecting the child; the father has to intervene to separate them and the child looks to him as a protecting god—the role that Freud assigns to him—or the bosom of Abraham, on which he will rest, he confesses, when he is dead. The boy knows that in time he too will become a father and will come to exercise the same power which the father now exercises over him and over the mother. But here mothers are not presented as murderers or as surrendering to political power. They have a child whose destiny is to free their people, not subjugate it as Oedipus does.
In Judaism the mother has a different role from the one she has in Greek or Christian culture. Traditionally, women have very different rights. In the Jewish Mishnah we have an account of customs which has been orally transmitted and provides the content of the everyday imaginary: women have the right to divorce, taking back the dowry that they brought to the marriage. They are severely punished for infidelity yet also have their rights, one of which is that the husband must satisfy his wife sexually, or at least try to. The number of times a week that he must fulfil his duty depends on his work: a tailor does not expend that much energy so he must fulfil his duty three times a week; a worker on the land can become exhausted so his requirement is once a week. I wonder what obligation would fall on psychoanalysts who spend the whole day ‘listening’?
In conclusion, let's now consider the Christian parental complex. Here there is a radical metamorphosis in history. The Jewish monotheist myth is transformed from a collective one to an individual one: it is no longer the salvation of a people which has been chosen by God, but rather of a man, the Saviour. The power of the anthropomorphic father of the Oedipus myth is replaced by the sacred power of an abstract God the Father. But above all the mother is profoundly transformed: she is a Virgin-Mother whom God inseminates. The new figure of the mother creates another myth, very different from the one where she
appears as a sheltering, desiring mother with full breasts, that passionate mother that we have all known, at least at some point in our early life, whose marks are indelible. And this leads us to our relations with other women. So, I think that this is where we see the degradation of the female and maternal function in Christianity: the function of the father is utterly annihilated and there is an extreme impoverishment of the succulent and jouissant fleshiness of the mother. With the Jewish mother, a new sense of meaning unfolds from her loving body, in her desire for the body of a man who, united with her in mutual desire, becomes a father. As it is, in the Christian myth, poor Joseph, Mary's husband, is only mentioned twice: and that's it. So, psychologically, we might think that the Virgin Mary hallucinated having a child with her own idealised father. Here we have the diminished father whom Lacan talks about, though for other reasons. This structural father corresponds to the Christian myth, because his wife denies his paternity to gain access to a different paternity which the woman bears from her own father. We might say that the Jewish Oedipus is a neurotic parental complex, but the Christian complex, where the three terms—mother, father and son are elevated to a bodiless infinity—constitute the frame of a psychotic structure. But Lacan gives it a different origin: the criminal desire of the mother which is revealed in Jocasta ‘is the founding desire of every structure, the origin of everything’ and is what determines ‘the origin of tragedy and humanism’. But once again Lacan assigns it to the place occupied by the devouring mother when she transgresses the law of incest and becomes the wife of her son, as in the second moment of the Oedipus complex. But he doesn't see what is really determinant: in the first part of the story the mother is not bound to her son as the fruit of an intense love that springs forth uncontainably from the womb that engendered him. On the contrary, she casts him away so that he might be killed. To me that is the true origin of Sophocles' tragedy. Everything begins there.
There are fundamental differences in these versions of Oedipus. And I wonder: Is it possible to analyse an Argentine neurotic, who is part of the West where Christianity has been at work for 2000 years, or a Christianised Jew, or a Bolivian where the cult of Pachamama—with another model of the mother—still has relevance, only using the single Greek myth of Oedipus? Isn't the model of the mother in a particular
cultural of religious myth, whether Jocasta, the mother of Moses or the Virgin Mary, determinant in the family, Holy or Profane? Would it not be extremely odd to resort to a myth—the Greek one—from a culture that has little or nothing to do with our own, to analyse something we would prefer not to face ‘like someone who doesn't want the Thing’, when in truth it is terror that orders our world and leaves us without even the embodied figure of a protecting mother to sustain us against its threat. The Christian myth, the origin of the devaluation of the body and the feminine, which founds the capitalism of quantification and individualism, is also the mythical foundation of every scientific and theoretical approach that one can make to any sort of human behaviour in our country, because it is the founding and sustaining myth of the whole Christian West. If we don't clarify this myth which organises the conscious and unconscious structure of the so-called ‘analysand’ as well as the analyst, some future Lévi-Strauss might say: ‘if in grounding your knowledge of the subject, you don't acknowledge your cultural point of departure, that is, the founding myth of your subjectivity, whether Indo-European or Indo-American, you are talking of something prior to and distant from science and from human knowledge. You are forming part of a mythological system, that of Christianity.’
Translated from the Spanish by Philip Derbyshire.
This is an edited version of a paper originally given at The Freud Event, at the Escuela de Orientación Lacaniana, in May, 2006. Oscar Masotta was the central figure in establishing Lacanian analysis in Argentina in the 60s and 70s, before dying in exile at an early age in Barcelona in 1979. Germán García, an epigone of Masotta's, is the leading light of the EOL, a novelist, analyst and public figure in Argentina.
Translator's Note: The pun in Spanish is difficult to translate: it depends on the homophonous link between poder placentero, placental power, and placer entero, full, or complete pleasure.