APsaA Awards Third Annual Undergraduate Essay Prize: “To the Lighthouse and the Oedipal Triangle”

APsaA's Committee on Psychoanalysis and Undergraduate Education, co-chaired by Michael Shulman and Naomi Janowitz, is pleased to announce it has awarded its Third Annual Essay Prize to Caroline Beaton of Colorado College for her essay “To the Lighthouse and the Oedipal Triangle: Impotence, Erotic Degradation, and the Oedipus Complex from Freudian and Self-Psychological Perspectives.” The author summarizes her essay:

In “To the Lighthouse and the Oedipal Triangle,” I use Freudian and self-psychological models of the Oedipus complex and erotic degradation to explore the Ramsay family's psychical impotence and fragmentation in Virginia Woolf's novel. The “Oedipal triangle” refers both to the intricate, ambivalent relationship between mother, father, and son and to the connections between their Oedipal conflicts, degradation dynamics, and psychical impotence.

Freud argued that unresolved Oedipus complexes stimulate feelings of powerlessness, emptiness, and incompetency—in a word, impotence—thereby giving rise to erotic degradation dynamics by which the male seeks to degrade and then rescue his sex object to convince himself of his superiority and restore his masculinity. The first part of my essay points out how Mr. Ramsay and James's Oedipal rivalry for Mrs. Ramsay's affirmation and affection worsens their psychical impotence and increases their need to degrade and then “save” her to ensure their dominance and potency. Mr. Ramsay degrades his wife by persuading himself of her simplicity and ignorance. After internally satisfying his need for superiority, Mr. Ramsay can both rescue Mrs. Ramsay from her supposed senselessness and allow himself to be attracted to her.

In line with Freud's assertion that every hysterical symptom is accompanied by some degree of “compliance” and “participation of both sides,” To the Lighthouse presents Mrs. Ramsay as a necessary, though likely unwitting, enabler of these dynamics. Mrs. Ramsay acknowledges that she “did not like, even for a second, to feel finer than her husband” and defers to Mr. Ramsay in all her judgments. Ironically, Mrs. Ramsay's collaboration in mitigating her husband's psychical impotence facilitates James's Oedipus complex. The loser of an Oedipal battle and without undivided female affirmation of his own manhood, James is cast out, castrated, and destined to repeat these same erotic degradation patterns with Mrs. Ramsay herself or a replacement, such as his sister Cam, after Mrs. Ramsay dies.

Seen through a Freudian lens, it appears that James's and his father's Oedipal rivalry activates and then exacerbates their psychical impotence. The men degrade Mrs. Ramsay and Cam to remedy their feelings, but these dynamics prove ineffective because they reengage the Oedipal situation and because Mr. Ramsay's and James's need for female sex objects to restore their masculinity signifies dependence, which is counter to their desire for wholeness and autonomy.

Inner Fragmentation, Psychic Impotence

In the second half of the essay, I turn to self psychology to propose that Mr. Ramsay and James's insufficient self-object relationships, in combination with their Oedipal conflicts, cause their inner fragmentation, a concept akin to psychical impotence. Mr. Ramsay and James lack self-object relationships with each other as well as with Mrs. Ramsay, whose frantically scattered attention does not allow her to remain with either long enough to give them a sense of worth. Following Heinz Kohut's understanding of Tragic Man as one motivated by the desire to restore a cohesive self, I suggest that James and his father may reestablish their self-object connection with each other, and consequently diminish both their Oedipus complexes and erotic degradation dynamics with Mrs. Ramsay and Cam, during their journey to the lighthouse. On the other hand, Woolf's ambiguous ending may indicate that, despite their journey, the men do not overcome their Oedipal triangle.

Regardless of whether they rectify their impotence through improved self-object relationships by the novel's end, the Ramsay's' journey to the lighthouse signifies a quest for coherency that renders them Tragic Men in their final acceptance of the inevitability of failure. Mr. Ramsay's maxim, “We perished, each alone,” and James's realization, “We are driving before a gale—we must sink,” reflect their coming to terms with their ultimate powerlessness and death. Yet in their acceptance of mortality, a kind of existential impotence, Mr. Ramsay and James can finally find peace with their identities and completeness.

“To the Lighthouse and the Oedipal Triangle” attempts to supplement traditional Oedipal interpretations of the Ramsay family with an appreciation of self-psychological pursuit of integration that encourages recognition of a multi-faceted, multi-problemed, multi-healing self. Furthermore, by placing Freud's notion of psychical impotence alongside Kohut's concept of fragmentation, the essay encourages the possibility of considering that soul precedes sexuality. The paper ultimately unifies some dichotomous aspects of Freudianism and self psychology toward a broader understanding of the Oedipus complex and its constituents in psychoanalytic theory and literature.