A GLANCE AT OEDIPUS:

SOME IDEAS ON THE IN/CAPACITY TO THINK

João Carlos Braga**

"...human kind

Cannot bear very much reality."

T.S.Eliot, "Burnt Norton".

As we learned from the correspondence of Freud(1), September of 1897 was the dawn of his comprehension of psychic reality, the turning point toward Oedipus. So, it is a happy coincidence to celebrate at the same time the Centennial of the birth of psychoanalytical thinking and the birth of one of its most original thinkers, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion.

Taking as my background this confluence, I am going to expand some ideas on Oedipus, as the core for the development of thinking. My starting point is at the conjunction of Freud's(2) proposal of the Oedipus Complex as a phylogenetical scheme for the apprehension of reality, and Bion's(3) theory of the mind. Both contributions point to the germinal mind, not only at infancy but also at one that evolves under our sight in the analytical relationship.

This approach bears a major turning point in the thinking of psychoanalytical practice. Namely it is the comprehension that we are not backward-looking, but forward-looking; not with something that is because it has been, but with something that is because it has begun. Being a phylogenetical endowment, it can be assumed that Oedipal pre-conception always is active in incipient mental processes, germinating and blossoming with the relationship of the individual with the parental couple in fertile intercourse(4).

Following these hypotheses, we can conjecture the destiny of thoughts being generated by the analytical pair. Doing so, they ask for the inclusion of a third group of ideas, the parallel existence of an inherent capacity for hallucinating besides the capacity of generating thoughts and of thinking them(5). This idea of an hallucinatory system enlarges extraordinarily, and turns much more complex our apprehension of mental life.

Assimilating original thoughts passes through its identification in personal experience, but suffers risks of misapprehensions. So, the opportunity to discuss them is precious. I have tried to diminish the inherent difficulties of this task by bringing together remarks on the Oedipus myth and descriptions of an analytical case, side by side with theoretical considerations.

OEDIPUS, A MYTH FOR HUMAN IN/CAPACITY TO THINK

The ancient Greeks narrated myths with the function of presenting the unknown. Initially they were concerned with the apprehensive sensorial world, but with time they focused on the mysteries of emotional life. Thus they reflected the enlargement of the human mind's capacity, not only as an instrument but also as an object of investigation of itself. I propose this as a model to approach the uses that Freud and Bion made of the Oedipus myth, namely, to reveal the enlargement of the frontiers of psychoanalytical investigation: from symptoms to the repressed and from what is symbolized to the discrete process of symbolization.

Taking the Oedipus myth as reference to his theory on the origin of thinking, Bion(6) gives substance to epistemologic necessities in psychoanalysis. He placed a psychoanalitical flag where there used to be a no man's land, visited by neuro-physiological and philosophical expeditions. After him we have at our disposal a psychological procedure instead of metaphysical and biological attempts of explaining the inception of thinking.

Experience with psychoanalytical theories brings some major comprehensions: the capacity to think, immanent to human beings, has not a pre-established development, but takes form precariously in everyone, after object relationships enclosing the Oedipal pre-conception. The fragility of this conquest is also at stake: Oedipus, an adolescent doubtful about himself, capable of going to Delphos in search of an answer to "Who am I?", becomes an adult that, to mantain an hallucinatory identity, needs to impede himself from thinking.

The Oedipal myth gathers and puts together the different elements of thinking process. The potentiality to think is elaborated in the encounter with the Sphinx and its impediments in Sophocles' "Oedipus the King". In one of the versions of the myth, Oedipus does not reply verbally to the Sphinx, but only touches his own head. In other words, responds with his reality: "It is I" instead of "It is the man". He does not know who he is, of whom born, but he is acquainted with his belonging to the class of men. Further, "Oedipus the King" can be seen as the description of the inherent vicissitudes to the turmoiled encounter of a person with his non-thinkable thoughts. The painful acquisition of the symbolic representation of himself will integrate his various realities. From man and woman, conditions in which to be a son, father or mother are not important, come the singularity: being that son from that couple.

It is worth noting the ancient Greeks intuition that thinking evolves through transgression. Consequently, to have his own's thoughts, Oedipus passes through their separation from his parent's ones: Polybus and Merope wanted him as son and heir; Laios demanded Oedipus submission when they encountered at the cross-roads; the Sphinx, the mythic mother-wife, threatened to suffocate his mind with her riddle; Jocasta fought to impede him the access to truth. All of them impersonate the impediments to the development of the personal thinking capacity of Oedipus. And their failures point to the strenght of the search for psychic truth. Here we conjecture being enacted the human roots to the in/capacity to think: the relationship with the creative couple that enables an individual to develop through identification his potentiality to think, also fertilizes the seeds of intolerance to reality. Oedipus, as prototype of this tragic human condition, remains a compelling model for us in our attempts to describe the contact with psychic reality. The losing of the capacity to think and the coming out of hallucinations are always at stake.

Let us remember that before Oedipus no one had decifered the Sphynx's riddle. It is this saga toward self-knowledge that we are confronted with, a mythical representation of the surging of human capacity to think. So, we must suppose that the discrete myth of Oedipus for psychoanalysis is beyond the dramas of incest and parricide. It is the mythical formula for the inception of human capacity to think, which is born in the relationship of a baby with the sexual couple that generated him.

SINGLING OUT OEDIPUS AS A PSYCHOANALYTICAL OBJECT

Alexander was in his thirties when he searched for analysis. He was overwhelmed by a tedious dissatisfaction, perceiving his life as senseless. He was married, father of four children and had left a promising personal career to go back to take care of one of his father's enterprises.

In the initial years he was able to work through elements of the Oedipal complex, mainly those described by Freud as its inverted form. In the fifth year Alexander's analysis underwent a long period of paralyzis, with threats of interruption. The two most outstanding psychic movements I could then single out were the terror of leaving himself penetrated by thoughts being formed after emotional experiences in the analytical relationship, and a violent expulsion of his emotions. The pattern was a vehement refusal to what I could offer him as my comprehensions. He appeared not to hear me and used to disappear behind a wall of words beginning with "It is not this, doctor", followed by long rationalizations that sought to prove that the truth was something else. However, many times he ended his speech by converging his remarks with what I had told him and it was frequently found that later this same content reappeared applied in his external life. The moments this inner turmoil subsided sufficiently to allow us a fruitful encounter, there surged reactions revealing confusion and terror: "I don't know who I am", was a repeated and pathetic affirmation. He was not able to understand my point of view that these moments were moments of lucidity, that he was able to grasp some truth about himself.

Most of the time he acted desperately as in the need of creating an asymmetry between us, like that current from the existence of a tertium quid. Now he attributed exceptional conditions to me, as fruit of my communion with a high authority, now he arrogantly scorned emotional life, parading the superiority of his father's possessions. Although recognizing psychoanalysis was helpful to him, a fertile partnership was tenaciously denied, systematically perverting the analytical objects throughout the splitting (container-contained).

The outstanding emotional experience I lived in his sessions was being paralyzed in the analytical function. The pest that was destroing Alexander's mental fertility came forth as a state of non-containment to oneiric thoughts, an intolerance to the capacity to generate, impeding the recognition of his necessity of another person in a living relationship. Evading the analytical intercourse, Alexander tried hard to induce me to work his behaviour and not the analytical experience. He fought to transform analysis into a source of problem solving; the fantasies, in actions; the emotions, in facts. Two models that frequently were present in my mind were the myth of Midas and the image of a neutron bomb with its capacity of annihilating life, but preserving buildings.

Yet, Alexander's analysis proceeded and I could observe subtle changes happening. He was paying some attention to his mental processes and was being more pervaded by his emotions. On my side, I recognized myself undergoing major fluency in my own processes of thinking during the sessions, with access to visual images asociated to his descriptions. My interventions, if brief and precise, could be heard attentively and tolerantly, many of them followed by his elaborations. And a new theme surged: he was experiencing a blossoming in his sexual life that was taking form as an intense involvement with a young prostitute. He was quite surprised by the delicacy of sentiments he was able to feel and by the absence of jealousy "of the others".

The problem I could recognize was that I was now being confronted with an increasing presence of incipient thoughts, with most of them evaded throughout actings. Meanwhile, Alexander refered two oneiric experiences that I took as signs of developing mental processes(7). The first experience, one only image, he described as an hallucination occuring at the beginning of his sleep the previous night: "I saw my father and my wife holding hands". He acknowledged it as an intense experience, causing him much irritation. He treated it as a fact, refused to free associate, and tried to keep it frozen. My choice was to point out to him the pain he endured in recognizing the existence of a couple, even the analytical couple.

A second experience, related as a dream three weeks after the first one, brought major elaboration: "I was with my mother and we both knew that my father and my uncle, his brother, had died. We were entering the room where the body of my father was. He was laid out on the floor, deformed, like an enormous fish with a big open mouth". Alexander was

excited, and his comments were directly associated to the contents of the dream images. He denudated the dream of its oneiric condition, turning it a fact. He became irritated with my intervention in pointing out to him his satisfaction with his ability to exchange reality for a version of it, following his interests.

SOME THEORETICAL INTER-RELATIONSHIPS

The above clinical vignette as well as the previous remarks on the Oedipal myth, introduces what I would like to discuss: the upsurging of a mind bringing in itself the hallmark of Oedipus. Bion's theory(8) points to a double root for the potentiality of symbolizing after emotional experiences: the capacity of integrating fragmented parts (EP-->D) conjoined with tolerance of realizing the creative pair (). The clinical description allows us to follow and to examine some byproducts of thinking failure (hallucination, reversal of alpha-function, transformation in hallucinosis), as well as the efforts to establish thinking procedures after the analytical experience (dream-work-a). In an emotional turmoil leaning to hallucinosis, there blossoms evidences of something new. Beneath the postulate that they represent emotional experiences being lived at in analysis, it imposes the recognition of Oedipal elements now being assembled.

I assume we have here a glance of the essence of Oedipus, put forward initially by Freud(9) as a phylogenetical heritage, and developed by Bion(10) as the private Oedipal myth. The experience of being part of a fertile couple takes an Oedipal hallmark: representations of a three folded relation come out of the bi-personal analytic relationship, pointing toward the existence of the Oedipal pre-conception.

A hundred years after Freud's initial reflections on this theme, we have not abandoned his thinking. Everyday, in our consulting rooms, we see people so deeply involved with their psychic objects, that they remain prisoners of infantile schemes regarding their relationships with their parents. We are able, after Freud, Melanie Klein and Bion, to identify archaeological levels in our abstractions of Oedipal material. They are archaeological in that particular meaning Bion(11) gave to this concept, taking after Freud's metaphor: the primitive continues to happen, and permanently distorts the present contact with reality. At mentally developed levels, we find symbolized conflicts of the relationship of the individual with the fertile couple; at primitive, non-symbolic levels, the analytic scene is impregnated by sexualized fragments of the individual relationship with various parental objects. In the twilight zone between these two levels, we find oneiric thoughts adapting themselves to Oedipal pre-conception and not to the sensorially apprehended experience. There is a fourth level that we can not know but can think about, that is, we can conceive the existence of an Oedipal primal endowment.

Bion's ideas give us a useful implement to work through thinking disorders at clinical practice. Like Oedipus, 2.400 years ago in Sophocles' masterpiece, as well as Alexander in his analysis, everyone is subjected to endure the painful vicissitudes of thinking already existing thoughts, still unthought. To correct the personal distortions of Oedipus, it is necessary to free its mythopoietic function at the very fresh start of mental development ocurring at the analytical relationship.

SUMMARY

The paper describes the author's elaboration on the germinal nature of Oedipus for mental life. Throughout the presentation there are some observations on the myth of Oedipus and on clinical material.

Following the thread of the development of psychoanalytical thinking, Oedipus appears in Freud and Bion as the pre-conception that organizes the human mind, and the myth being a compelling model for it.

The vignette of an analysis allows some glances at the work imposed on the mind to realize this very primordial relation. It is possible to follow its development in the fields of behaviour, oneiric elaboration and transference, throughout its transformations in thinking and hallucinosis.

ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

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MELTZER, D. - Dream Life. London, Clunie Press, 1983.

__________ - Studies in Extended Metapsychology. London, Clunie Press, 1986.

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___________ - Édipo: as Múltiplas Faces da Sexualidade. Presented at the "I Encontro do Grupo de Estudos de Psicanálise de Ribeirão Preto". Ribeirão Preto, September 13-15, 1996.

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___________ - A Apreensão da Realidade Psíquica e Sua Diferenciação da Pseudo-realidade Sensorialmente Apreensível. Open discussions held at the Brazilian Psychoanalytical Society of São Paulo (1995-1997) and at the Psychoanalytical Nucleous of Curitiba (1996-1997).

________________________

** Member, Brazilian Psychoanalytical Society of São Paulo and Psychoanalytical Nucleous of Curitiba.

(1) Letter to Fliess, September 21st, 1897.

(2) "From The History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918).

(3) "A Theory of Thinking" (1962); "Learning from Experience" (1962); "Elements of Psychoanalysis" (1963); "Transformations" (1965); "Attention and Interpretation" (1970).

(4)"Elements of Psychoanalysis",Chapter 19; "Transformations",Chapter 4.

(5)"Learning from Experience",Chapter 28; "Elements of Psychoanalysis", Chapter 11 and 18; "Transformations", Chapter 10; "Attention and Interpretation", Chapter 11.

(6) "Elements of Psychoanalysis", Chapters 10, 11 and 19.

(7) "Elements of Psychoanalysis" Chapter 19.

(8) "Elements of Psychoanalysis", Chapters 9, 10 and 18.

(9) "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918).

(10) "Elements of Psychoanalysis", Chapters 14 and 19.

(11) "On Arrogance" (1957).

AKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am grateful to Dr. Paulo Cesar Sandler for several helpful comments on a draft version of this paper and to Mr. Richard Ward Glatthar for his assistance in the English translation.

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João Carlos Braga

©1997 - Copyright by João Carlos Braga