Ryan's Traumatic Freudian Slips

1. Sexual Aberrations

At the outset, Freud “Let us call the person from whom sexual attraction proceeds the sexual object and the act towards which the instinct tends the sexual aim.” (1-2). He later argues, “We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct and object. It seems probably that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.” (14). Does drive, therefore, “create” the object? Are object relations a “function” of drive?


2.Infantile Sexuality

“To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not become independent of them until later...the need for repeating the sexual satisfaction now becomes detached from the need...” (48). This shift, the process whereby satisfaction can become “detached” from need, evidences a shift in understandings of childhood sexuality: how does it also suggest a dynamic process for refiguring object relations?

3.Puberty

“at a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction
are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual
instinct has a sexual object outside the infant’s own body...the sexual instinct then becomes auto-erotic...The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (88)

Given this trajectory (with elisions, for space’s sake), doesn’t Freud’s model seem to set up two concepts of drive, where one suggests that libido could emerge as an independent force, and the other emphasizes earlier object relations? Or is this a model where these aspects are in productive tension? Is this related to, or distinct from the nagging presence of nostalgia (Stewart) and the imprint of loss (Weiner)?


Fetishism (1928)

“the boy had refused to take cognizance of the fact perceived by him that woman has no penis. No, that cannot be true...” (162)
Here, Freud sets up the idea of disavowal, or perhaps, to be more correct, a process where a given reality is simultaneously acknowledged and denied. Marx’s process of commodity fetishism also involves an operation upon acknowledgement, upon conditions of knowledge. How do they contrast?


***agreed, Hollis, page 88 continues to reign supreme...