Oh Mother

This week we focused on psychoanalysis with Freud and Lacan.

“It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse toward our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Lauis and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us fulfillment of our own childhood wishes. But, more fortunate than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and forgetting our jealousy of our fathers.” (816)

The Oedipus complex for Freud is the childhood desire to sleep with your mother and get rid of your father. Children are jealous of their father’s interaction and relationship with their mother, wanting their mother all to themselves.

“This act (of looking at oneself in the mirror), far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates—the child’s own body, and the person and things, around him” (1164).

Here Lacan is commenting on our fascination with mirrors as infants, which even chimpanzee’s realize is insignificant. The child begins to be fascinated by the imitation of gestures that occurs with the mirror. The child goes through a stage of desiring what others desire, in a way, imitating their gestures as if they were a reflection