The Girard Reader (48 page)

This inopportune reappearance of the Oedipal triangle compelled Freud to admit that the

son might experience certain difficulties in repressing his Oedipus complex! In fact, it is

Freud himself who was having trouble disposing of the mimetic triangle. Haunted by the

mimetic rivalry, he repeatedly sketched out triangular formations he believed to

represent his complex, whereas in fact they depict a constantly thwarted mimesis -- an

interplay of model and obstacle that lingers at the edge of his thought but that he never

succeeds in articulating fully.

I limited myself to examining two or three passages whose comparison seems

particularly revealing; other passages could have been chosen

____________________

7. Ibid.

-238-

that would have suited my purposes equally well, including some from the so-called

clinical cases. In my chosen passages a term fundamental to Freudian speculation --

"ambivalence" -- reappears at frequent intervals. It seems to me that this term testifies to the existence of the mimetic pattern in Freud's mind and to his inability to express

correctly the relationship among the three elements of the structure: the model, the

disciple, and the object that is disputed by both because the model's desire has made the

object desirable to the disciple. The object represents a desire shared by both, and such sharing leads not to harmony, as one might suppose, but to bitter conflict.

The term "ambivalence" appears toward the close of the two definitions of the Oedipus

complex previously quoted. Here are the passages again:

His [the boy's] identification with the father takes on a hostile coloring and becomes

identical with the wish to replace the father in regard to his mother as well.

Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first.

His identification with his father takes on a hostile coloring and changes into a wish to

get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother. Henceforward his relation

to his father is ambivalent; it seems as if the ambivalence inherent in the identification

from the beginning had become manifest.

When we recall how the identification with the father is initially presented -- "This

behavior has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude toward his father . . ." --

we seem to be dealing with a unified relationship, free of ambiguity. Why then does

Freud, a few lines later and seemingly as an afterthought, attribute an underlying

ambiguity to this identification? Simply because he now senses (and his intuition does

not betray him) that the positive feelings resulting from the first identification --

imitation, admiration, veneration -- are fated to change into negative sentiments: despair,

guilt, resentment. But Freud does not realize
why
such things must happen. He does not

realize because he cannot accept a concept of desire based on mimesis; he cannot openly

acknowledge the model in the identification to be a model of the desire itself, and thus a

powerful force of opposition.

Whenever he encounters the effects inherent in mimetic desire and finds himself

struggling vainly to formulate its mechanism of rivalry, Freud takes refuge in the idea of

ambivalence. To label these effects as ambivalent is to confine them to a solipsistic

context, a traditional philosophic subject, instead of identifying them as a fundamental

trait of all human relations, the universal double bind of imitated desires. If we try to

grasp these effects of mimetic desire as individual pathology or psychology, they

become utterly incomprehensible; in consequence, we

-239-

ascribe them to "physical" causes. Freud himself conveys this impression and managed

to persuade himself that in using the term "ambivalence" he had made a daring plunge

into the dark regions where the psychic and the somatic meet. In reality, he was simply

refusing to decipher a perfectly decipherable message. And because the "physical" is by

nature mute, no rebuttal is possible. Today everyone imagines himself tuned in to the

"physical," able to decode the body's messages after the example of Freud. Yet in all

Freud's work there is not a single example of "ambivalence" that does not have its

origins in the obstacle-model.

To attribute the conflict to the "body" is to give up on the logic of mimetic desire that

can account most intelligibly and economically for all phenomena. With Freud, the

"physical" aspect of the subject, the corporeal regions of the psyche, are endowed with a

more or less organic propensity to run head on into the obstacle of the model-desire.

Ambivalence becomes the main virtue of the physical insofar as it nourishes the psyche; it becomes the
virtus dormitiva
of modern scholasticism in the face of desire. Thanks to

this idea and a number of others, psychoanalysis has been able to grant a reprieve --

even apparently to grant new life -- to the myth of the individual, by reasserting the

claims of the physical. Yet this is the very myth it should be trying to demolish.

Freud's use of the term "ambivalence" reveals a genuine, if very limited, recognition of

mimetic desire -- which is more than can be said for many of his followers. The

interesting question is how Freud managed repeatedly to misconstrue such a simple

mechanism. In a sense its very simplicity served to camouflage its presence; but there is

something else at work here as well.

That something else is not difficult to identify; we have encountered it at every turn in

the course of our inquiry. It is, of course, the hard core of the Oedipus complex: that

brief interval of consciousness when the patricide-incest desire is felt to become a

formal expression of the child's intentions. It is clear that this Freudian view makes

Freud's full discovery of mimetic desire impossible. To persuade himself that the

patricide-incest desire actually exists, Freud was obliged to disregard the model, insofar

as it is responsible for awakening the desire and designating the object. Freud was

forced to perpetuate a traditional, retrogressive concept of the desire. The drift of his

thought in the direction of mimesis was perpetually checked by his strange loyalty to the

patricide-incest motif.

As an interpretative tool the concept of mimetic rivalry is far more serviceable than the

Freudian complex. By eliminating the conscious patricide-incest desire it does away

with the cumbersome necessity of the desire's subsequent repression. In fact, it does

away with the unconscious. The concept explains the Oedipus myth and does so with an

economy and precision lacking in the Freudian approach. Why then, we

-240-

may well ask, did Freud renounce the superior utility of mimetic desire to lavish his

attention on the poor substitute of patricide-incest?

Even if I am mistaken--even if I am blind to the virtues of the Oedipus myth as a

universal model for the human psyche--still my question remains valid. It seems

unlikely that Freud ever formally rejected the interpretation I am proposing here as a

substitute for his complex; in all likelihood, it never came to his attention. Had it done

so, Freud would surely have taken it under consideration, if only to reject it. My reading

brings together a number of clues that seem to play little part in Freud's texts; the

obstacle of the patricide-incest motif once removed, we can bring together elements that

remain disconnected in Freud's own work. Freud was dazzled by what he took to be his

crucial discovery. Loyalty to this discovery kept him from forging ahead on the path of

mimesis. Had he done so he would have come to realize the mythic nature of the

patricide-incest motif, as it appears in the Oedipus myth and in psychoanalysis as well.

The whole of psychoanalysis seems to be summed up in the patricideincest theme. It is

this theme that has won psychoanalysis its glory and its notoriety, that has provoked the

incomprehension, hostility, and extraordinary devotion we have come to associate with

the discipline. It is this theme that is invariably invoked whenever any rebellious spirit

dares to cast doubt on the efficacy of psychoanalytic doctrine.

Freud's intimations of mimetic desire never crystallized into a theory. The founder of

psychoanalysis brooded over the same themes throughout his lifetime, and his unending

struggle to reorganize the elements of desire never produced truly satisfactory results,

because he refused to abandon his object desire, his "cathectic" viewpoint. The various

structures and examples of Freudianism, theoretical concepts such as the castration

complex, the Oedipus complex, the superego, the unconscious, repression, ambivalence

-- all these are nothing more than defensive positions in his eternal battle to resolve the

problem of desire.

Freudian analysis should not be regarded as a fully articulated system, but as a series of

experiments dealing almost invariably with the same subject. The superego, for instance,

is only a recasting of the Oedipus complex; the more I examine the origins of the two

concepts, the more convinced I become that their differences are purely illusory.

Freud at his best is no more "Freudian" than Marx at his best is "Marxist." Nevertheless, uncomprehending critics did on occasion provoke him to adopt a dogmatic line of

argument that his followers blindly accepted and his opponents as blindly rejected,

therefore making it difficult for any of us to approach these texts with an open mind.

Post-Freudian psychoanalysis has clearly perceived what must be done to systematize

Freudianism -- or rather, to sever it from its living roots. To assure the autonomy of

desire it is only necessary to erase

-241-

the last traces of mimesis from the Oedipus complex. Thus, the identification with the

father must be dropped. Freud had already pointed the way, after all, in
The Ego and the

Id
. Inversely, to establish the supremacy of the superego on a firm basis, one need only

eliminate all those elements that tend to implicate the object and the subject of rivalry in

its definition. In short, the post-Freudian psychoanalyst reasserts a system, an order of

things based on "common sense," such as only Freud himself ever challenged. In the

case of the Oedipus complex the father becomes a disgraced rival; thus there is no

question of his being a venerated model. Reciprocally, in the case of the superego, the

father is the venerated model, with no trace of the disgraced rival about him.

Ambivalence, it would appear, is good for patients, but of no use to psychoanalysts.

We are presented, therefore, with a rivalry devoid of preliminary identification (the

Oedipus complex) followed by an identification without rivalry (the superego). In one of

his earliest articles, "Aggression in Psychoanalysis," Jacques Lacan noted the

bewildering character of this sequence: "The structural effect of the identification with

the rival does not follow naturally, except perhaps in mythic thinking."
8. B
ut let us leave the myth aside; we will presently see that it can take care of itself. Moreover, the effect

noted by Lacan makes perfect sense in terms of the mimetic nature of desire, which

Lacan, too, failed to discover, forced as he was by his linguistic fetishism to reinforce

the more rigid and "structural" aspects of Freudian thinking.

The interest of Freudian analysis does not lie in its results, in its pretentious

accumulation of psychic agencies; nor does it lie in the spectacle of Freudian

apprentices clambering up and down the precarious scaffolding of Freudian doctrine

with an agility as remarkable as it is futile. It lies, paradoxically enough, in the ultimate

inadequacies of the whole system. Freud never succeeded in establishing the precise

relationship of the model, the disciple, and their common object, although he never

entirely abandoned the effort. Whenever he attempted to manipulate any two of the

terms, the third raised its head like a mocking jack-in-thebox, which his disciples made

haste to cram back in its box in the belief that they were doing something useful. In fact,

it is hard to imagine a more effective method of "castrating" the Master!

____________________

8. Jacques Lacan,
Ecrits
( Paris: Seuil, 1966), 117.

-242-

Both Nietzsche and Girard are "christocentric." That is, the real point of departure for both is the Crucified as the center of history. For Nietzsche, the Crucified is the center of
past
history but his reign over morality must end with the murder of God (
The Gay Science
, no. 125) and

the beginning of a new era. For Girard, the Crucified is the Innocent Victim who reveals the

scapegoat mechanism of human culture and the love that overcomes it.

From some point in the development of his thinking, perhaps in the late 1960s or early 1970s

in conjunction with his discovery of Dionysus* and
The Bacchae of Euripides
, Girard began

to see Nietzsche not only as the greatest thinker of the nineteenth century, but also as a

negative guide to the meaning of the Christian revelation. What Nietzsche intuited and

understood in Christianity he tried to exorcise from himself and his radical visions of a new