Freud and Femdom
Can femdom
BDSM be traced back to “mommie”? Or, rather, are femdom
scenarios a manifestation of unconscious desires rooted
in an unresolved Oedipal complex?
I’m
not sure how that works out, and anyone with ideas about
that should feel free to contact me.
An
Oedipal complex, according to Freud, occurs during the
so-called phallic stage of a child’s development. During
this stage, a child becomes preoccupied with his genitalia
and the focus of his sexual urges becomes his mother,
with whom he desires an exclusive relationship. The child
regards the father with jealousy, as a rival for his mother’s
love, as well as a source of castration anxiety.
Freud believed
that both boys and girls went through this stage; and
while it was incestuous for both genders, it hinted at
lesbianism with girls. Rock on.
I’m not sure
about any of this, although the literary references to
Oedipus in Greek Mythology is cool. For those who may
not know it: Oedipus, a prince in exile, unknowingly kills
his father and marries his mother, and this final realization
causes Oedipus to pluck out his own eyes. Talk about a
grindhouse ending.
Sophocles,
maybe the greatest of Greek playwrights, wrote a trilogy
of plays based on the myth. He also wrote a play called
“Electra.”
It was Carl
Jung, not Sigmund Freud, who names an Electra complex,
which is shorthand for a girl having “daddy issues,” in
much the same way an Oedipal complex is shorthand for
a boy having “mommy issues.”
Getting back
to Freud, it’s the fear of castration from a child’s father
that causes the child to repress the incestuous desire
he feels for his mother, and it’s this that finally brings
an end to the Oedipal complex.
Again, I’m
not so sure I believe in any of that.
I do enjoy
reading about Freud’s theories though, not that I think
they particularly shed any light on BDSM.
One Freudian
concept that I love and totally agree with is that human
beings are instilled with both a death drive (which he
named “Thanatos” after Greek mythology) and a life instinct
(which he named “Eros,” again after Greek mythology).
These two contradictory sides exist at once in everyone,
like ying and yang, like warring factions, and this would
account for much of self-destructive behavior.
Both parts
are instilled in us for a reason. We are born to live
and experience life, and we are necessarily born to experience
darkness on some level as preparation for own inevitable
death. Thanatos—or our own death—lurks inside all of us
like a cancer.
Do artists
have a greater degree of the Thanatos side, the dark side?
I would think so. I would think that they have a greater
understanding or connection to their own mortality, too.
And also I would think that this greater knowledge of
their own mortality would compel them to be death-obsessed
and, in some cases, even active baiters of the dark, the
Thanatos side, by engaging in risky if not life-threatening
behavior.
So,
elaborating on Freud’s notion in my own crackpot way,
artists are by nature imbued with an “unhealthy” balance.
Think
of it as bad cholesterol.
Which
brings us back to “unhealthy” fetishes and BDSM. Is a
tendency toward BDSM a greater manifestation of the Thanatos
side, an unbalance of the death-wish? Again, I don’t know.
But it’s something to think about.
The
writer character in my novel, Permanent
Obscurity, who I named “Dick,” may be seen
as having an unhealthy balance of the Thanatos element.
Certainly part of the story of Permanent
Obscurity hinges
on this death-wish imbalance. And, ultimately, Dick (the
eternally misunderstood/ignored artist-in-hell) turns
out to speak not only for himself but for all the other
characters in the novel as well, especially Dolores, our
anti-hero protagonist.
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Dolores & Serena:
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