| Title | From Tragic Fall to Programmatic Blueprint |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | "Behold this is Oedipus..." |
| Contributor | Olga Cox Cameron (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0167.1.16 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/clinical-encounters-in-sexuality-psychoanalytic-practice-and-queer-theory/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Cameron, Olga Cox |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2017-03-07 |
| Long abstract | In the first flush of his discoveries Freud (1900) was much given to inventing mottoes for himself and for this new praxis which both excited and disturbed him. “Flectere si nequeo superos, Ach-eronta movebo,” he inscribes as epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams: “What have they done to you poor child?” he suggests to Fliess as he attends to stories of shocking childhood abuse (Masson 1985, 289). Reading this collection of queer responses to psychoanalytic theory I am tempted to affix Barthes’s (1975) statement, “we are scientific because we lack subtlety” (61), less as a motto than as a caveat to the large swathes of psychoanalytic theory which Alice Kuzniar challenges in her opening chapter “Precarious Sexualities.”It is as astonishing to psychoanalysts as to non-analysts that a theory predicated on the existence of the unconscious and therefore committed to the radical undercutting of an abid-ing undisturbed notion of the self should have lent itself with such stalwartness and consistency to a version of the Oedipus complex which in Kuzniar’s words presumes as its telos “a stable fixed identity of personhood that rests solidly within a unitary gender role and unwavering sexual object choice directed to the opposite of one’s own gender.” |
| Page range | pp. 285–299 |
| Print length | 15 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |