The Economics of Libido: Psychic Bisexuality, the Superego, and the Centrality of the Oedipus Complex

201 Pages·2015·0.61 MB·English

by  Trevor C. Pederson

THE ECONOMICS OF LIBIDO

THE ECONOMICS
OF LIBIDO
Psychic Bisexuality, the
Superego, and the Centrality
of the Oedipus Complex
Trevor C. Pederson
First published in 2015 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2015 by Trevor C. Pederson
The right of Trevor C. Pederson to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-177-9
Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain
www.karnacbooks.com
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR vii
PREFACE ix
INTRODUCTION xiii
CHAPTER ONE
Psychic bisexuality 1
CHAPTER TWO
“An array of ideal values”: ego psychology and the destiny
of the Oedipus complex 31
CHAPTER THREE
“We cannot fall out of this world”: psychoanalysis
and social ontology 93
CONCLUSION 139
v
vi CONTENTS
APPENDIX
On Wittgenstein’s private language argument 147
REFERENCES 167
INDEX 177
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Trevor Pederson is a mental health counsellor and psychoanalyst in
private practice in Casper, Wyoming. He is a doctoral candidate at the
Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. His dissertation introduces
a methodology for the psychoanalytic interpretation of film.
vii

PREFACE
I came to psychoanalysis from philosophy. I was interested in
synthesising the work of Marx and Nietzsche and along the way I
came across references to Freud and Wilhelm Reich. I came to see that
Reich had already successfully combined their work together, although
it had only been in spirit and not in letter. Not too long after I came
across the work of Lacan and Žižek and became enamoured with it
for a time. If Reich had been the spirit then Lacan surely was the let-
ter of what the change was to be. At least, the contradictions in their
thought didn’t bother me too much at first. They existed side by side
until I entered a counselling programme and began the slow process
of looking for ways to communicate the experience of sitting with a
patient. Faced with this challenge it was the work of Reich and his char-
acterology that allowed me to gain a foothold. The broad designation
of obsessional and hysteric was favoured by a few of my classmates
and one or two even attempted to make use of masculine vs. feminine
jouissance but there were no clear definitions of these concepts. More
often than not it appeared that anatomical sex alone was the justifica-
tion for labelling others. During this process I found myself forced to
read a lot of Freud. I didn’t like it. I believed, as many do now, that the
present always represents some progress and that Freud’s predecessors
ix