Oedipus in Arabia

I heard of Sigmund Freud as a child at one of the group gatherings that took place at our house in Beirut. My parents were Palestinian intellectuals with a large social circle. Groups gathered in our living room almost nightly. During one of these evenings, when I was eight years old, a guest uttered, “Sigmund Freud suggests children are sexual and that we all have this thing he calls the Oedipus complex.” Some people around the room expressed indignation. I pressed him to tell me more because I felt excited about what he was saying. He told me Freud “was a great Jewish psychoanalyst who taught us that people forget what they already know.” I was gripped from the inside out because I was always trying to forget what I already knew. One day, I thought, I will study Freud’s works. 

My childhood was spent trying to survive the material impact of living through a war. I had to flee, leaving behind scores of despairing people I loved. The wounds of war, forced migration, dispossession, and dislocation never fully heal. If you are lucky, you learn to make art with your pain. I imagine Sigmund Freud was one of the lucky ones. 

I traveled a long and winding road before I was able to train to become a psychoanalyst, to fulfill my childhood dream. Psychoanalytic institutes are collectives. They are run by groups of volunteers with coordinated practices. They have a culture. This seemed self-evident to me. And yet psychoanalytic institutional collectives appear committed to a worldview that denies the centrality of the links between groups or cultures and the unconscious.  

The institutional cultural practice of denying the centrality of culture and the collective puzzled me. After all, much of Freud’s pain, and humanity’s pain for that matter, was linked to racism, poverty, and war. He was a Jew living in a place and time of rabid and virulent anti-Semitism. His father did not have much money, and the family struggled. He was discriminated against in academia for being Jewish. He witnessed the ravages of WWI and lived through the buildup to WWII. He was forced into exile to save his family. Our personal histories, a Jew from Vienna and a Palestinian from Jaffa, are ironically similar. 

In my training, the Oedipus complex was presented as the central organizing principle in the unconscious of individuals and described as a family drama that revolved around the management of sexual and aggressive impulses toward parents and siblings. That made some sense, but like it was for Freud, the sources of many of my problems were the results of racism, poverty, war, and dispossession. These are large-group problems. They involve culture and the coordination of thought and practice in large groups of people and between large groups. What does psychoanalysis have to say about the links between large-group cultural practices and the unconscious of individuals? 

The types of answers institutional psychoanalysis provided were unsatisfactory to me. According to this view, the group and its culture are secondary to individuals and their instincts. Racism, war, oppression, and poverty are the results of individuals behaving badly and corrupt leaders having an outsized influence on the group. Those who tried to conceive of the problem in terms of cultural practices and unconscious social systems were expelled or obscured.  

Ideas about the centrality of culture and collective in the structuring of the unconscious have been largely walled off, extruded from our canon. Nevertheless, they reappear. A central idea that keeps blooming in the cracks of concrete walls regards the social unconscious in all its permutations or the ways groups and their cultures are reproduced in individuals and the ways individuals reproduce their groups and their cultures in their perception, thinking, and comportment. 

Freud’s ideas about culture were cultured in that they reproduced the cultural assumptions and positions of his large group—Colonial European culture. He struggled to see the ways his mind was ethnic, structured by the cultural practices of his place and time. His unanalyzed Eurocentric social unconscious compelled him to equate European culture with civilization. He took his point of observation to be absolute and saw other groups and cultures as less civilized or more savage. In doing so, he reproduced a glaring social problem—the belief in the supremacy of one’s culture that tends toward the denigration of difference and the oppression of Others. 

Freud was advised to reconsider his views about the role cultural and social systems play in structuring the mind. In 1927, the first American psychoanalyst, Trigant Burrow, published a groundbreaking book where he suggested the unconscious is structured by arbitrary social systems or cultures. He agreed with Freud’s elaboration of the dynamic unconscious and the centrality of sexuality, but he also saw the mind as being fundamentally social because perception is mediated by shared social coordinates or ideas. He coined the term “social unconscious” and defined some of its properties. No good deed goes unpunished. Freud expelled him from institutional psychoanalysis and excised his theories from our canon. 

The unconscious, for Burrow, is both universal and particular or ethnic. It is universal in that all people have an unconscious, and it is ethnic in that “arbitrary social systems” or cultures produce different ways of seeing, thinking, and being in the world. Cultures consist of shared ideas and practices that make communication between individuals and the coordination of practices among small and large groups possible. From this perspective, a human subject is inseparable from the group and its cultures because the group’s cultural system is mental. The mentalization of cultural systems produces a social unconscious that ties the individual to their groups and their cultures in a most fundamental, obvious, and deeply unconscious way. The mind is private and dynamic while being fundamentally relational and social. 

Trigant Burrow suggested a “social developmental model” that contains uncanny similarities to Winnicott’s “individual developmental model,” particularly Winnicott’s ideas about the earliest stages of development, where infants learn to give up omnipotent modes of thinking by recognizing their separateness and dependence, and the hard limits of reality. The successful negotiation of this “primitive” phase of development, according to Winnicott, allows the child to give up their omnipotence, accept their dependence on others, and develop a capacity for concern and the ability to play and work. 

Similarly, Burrow suggested that the social dimension of our unconscious is gripped by the illusion of our group or culture’s absolutism (compared to Winnicott’s individual omnipotence). We (large groups and the individuals that make them up) take our cultural and psychological position to be fixed and absolute—“Our way is natural or godly or superior.” From a fixed absolute position, we compare everything down from us, locating ourselves at the apex and others downstream from us. According to Burrow, this is a social developmental problem. Giving up our group’s and culture’s absolutism is as necessary for group development as giving up our individual omnipotence is necessary for individual development and growth. 

What would a resolution of the Oedipus complex that includes culture and collective in its basic conception of the individual-collective look like? It would entail the mournful recognition and the working through of our individual omnipotence and group absolutism. On the individual level, we work on accepting our dependence on people and on managing our destructive impulses toward them. On the social level, the work consists of giving up the illusion of our group’s and culture’s absolutism and seeing others as existing relative to us rather than beneath us. This is as much an individual task as it is a group one. Expanding our analytic culture to include insights on the group and its cultures is taking action on a group level, a precondition for group maturation. 

Combining the two levels, we can say that the Oedipus complex is about the management of aggressive and sexual instincts and drives toward parents and siblings and about becoming a member of a group with an ethnic identity and particular cultural practices. In other words, the Oedipus complex is ethnic. Its analysis must entail consolidating one’s core ethnic identity while opening it to the world in a dialogical manner, in a manner of mutual influence. This, to me, is about the respectful application of psychoanalysis across the spectrum of human differences. 

People from different cultures and social positions are fundamentally different while being entirely the same. This is a living paradox that needs to be accommodated in our theories and practices. In embracing the ways my culture, ethnicity, and social position are not like yours, I became more able to see the many ways your culture and ways of being are like mine.