Monday, April 06, 2009

Anals of Psychoanalysis

For research purposes, I bought a little essay about the idea of perversion in psychoanalysis.
It was on sale, okay? I couldn't resist. Reading about the oral, anal and phallic stages of human sexual development, it dawned on me that Sigmund Freud was an unbelievably imaginative dude (super smart too). Whether one agrees with him or not, his theories are wonderfully metaphorical and poetic and a lot of them seem to make sense.
For instance, according to this little book, cinema is a fetish, as it is the closest we have to human dreams (and myths and fantasies). The screen is like a giant teat. To me, it's more like a giant mirror, or a giant dream, the limpid pool where Narcissus falls in love with himself. There is a whole explanation that ties the phallic stage with the pleasure of viewing. Since the phallus can be seen, this is the stage that likes to watch or be watched. Or something like that.
I'm not sure I agree with the theory of fear of castration in women and the phallocentric Freudian premise that women bemoan their lack of a penis. He kind of totally neglects to mention that women may not have a dick, but we are the givers of life, the ones that get pregnant, and so to me, perhaps penis envy is precisely the reverse: men envy women because only women can bear children. This is the reason why they have oppressed and disrespected them and feared them since day one. Why would a woman envy a penis? What we have is perfectly fine. In fact, it may be even better, more complex. Nature is more fair than Freud. It gives men dicks to wave around, but to compensate, it gives women childbirth (and pretty amazing genitals). I don't think that the vagina or the clitoris are a failed or absent or stunted or castrated penis. Had Freud lived in a more gender balanced society, he may have had less machocentric theories.

Apparently, the repression in childhood of the anal pleasure of excreting is tied to later creativity. This totally makes sense to me.
1. You make doo doo. 2. You are taught to repress the pleasure of making doo doo. 3. Later, if you're lucky, it comes out as art.
The Nazis, however, were terribly stuck in their anal phase, and their perversity was to take everything so literally. So they wanted to cleanse the dirty elements in their society, and purify their race, etc, etc. They were obsessed with cleaning the shit around them, which to their mind were all the dark, non-Aryan people, and particularly the Jews. Anal people are controlling, tyrannical people who cannot sublimate their repression in a more creative, looser (so to speak) way, hence Nazis.
It should come as no surprise that Hitler was a failed artist (and suffered from constipation).
Disgusted with his own doo doo/doodles (am I being totally Lacanian, or what?), he set out to cleanse and remove the shit he saw around him and in himself. The crematoria, as the book says, were the anus mundi. People were fed into the ovens and then excreted. Fucking Hitler would have benefited from a a good Jewish shrink, for crying out loud.... Anyway... I am always deeply suspicious of overly clean people. Beware those for whom things are never clean enough.
As for what is perversion, perversely, the little book doesn't really say.

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