Indian Oedipus Embodied

In this paper, I would like to look at the well-known and interminable debate between culturalists and orthodox psychoanalysts – Is Oedipus Universal? Is Oedipus the great paternal symbol?

The debate began between Malinowski and Jones, resumed between Kardiner and Fromm on one side and Roheim on the other, and is still pursued by established ethnologists and distinguished followers of orthodox psychoanalysts. The original affective constellation, which composes an extreme point, argues that Oedipus was a real event whose effects are transmitted through phylogenetic heredity. And the other argument, which makes Oedipus into a structure, is an extreme position which argues the possibility of discovering the structure in fantasy, in relation to biological pre-maturation and neoteny. One is an original matrix, the other a structural function. But in both these senses of the universal, we are invited to “interpret”, since the “latent presence of Oedipus appears only through its patent absence, understood as an effect of psychic repression” (Deleuze). The structural constant is discovered through its imaginary variations. Geza Roheim points out “in all seriousness that the Oedipus complex was not to be found if it wasn't looked for, and that one wasn't looking if one hadn't had oneself analysed” (quoted by Deleuze).

The conflict between culturalists and symbolists causes mayhem everywhere. For if the institution is initially understood as a familial institution, it matters little to pronounce that the familial complex differs with the institutions, or that Oedipus is to the contrary a nuclear constant which families and institutions move towards. The culturalists refer to other triangles – for example uncles or aunts – but the Oedipalists have no difficulty in producing evidence that these are fictional discrepancies of one and the same structural constant, varied figures of one and the same symbolic triangulation.


Psychoanalytic Cure and Shamanistic Cure:

In certain communities (non-Western), the obligatory circumstances for Oedipus as a “familial complex” existing in the profile of the familialism acceptable to traditional psychiatry and psychoanalysis are obviously not available. The individual in the family from this community, however young, directly invests a social, historical, economic and political field that is not convertible to any mental structure or affective constellation. Therefore, when one considers pathological cases and treatment procedures in non-Western societies, it seems entirely insufficient to compare them with psychoanalytic procedure by identifying them to criteria adopted from, for example, a familial complex, – as seen in the attempted resemblance between the psychoanalytic cure and the shamanistic cure (Devereux, Levi-Strauss).

Victor Turner gives an impressive example of such a cure among the Ndembu. The example is the more unique because, at first glance, everything appears Oedipal. Effeminate, unmanageable, vain, unable to accomplish anything, the sick K is haunted by the ghost of his maternal grandfather, who cruelly reprimands him. How does the divination, responsible for stipulating the cause of the illness, proceed, and what is the culturally appropriate cure to alleviate his distress?

In order to diagnose and prevent the effects of the illness, the soothsayer and the medicine man begin a process of social analysis concerning the territory and its backdrop, the tribal chief, the lineages and their segments, the alliances and the filiations. Prophecy becomes a form of social analysis through which concealed struggles between individuals and factions are brought to light, so that that they can be treated by traditional ritual methods.

K's problems, if they are to be interpreted in a Western psychodynamic model, may be conceptualised as standard Oedipal strivings: his mode of regression and fixation at the early stage of his childhood, with defence mechanisms such as his isolation, misfortune and dislocation. As a matter of fact, the Ndembu analysis was never Oedipal; it was directly tuned in to social organisation and disorganisation. Rather than everything being reduced to the name of the father, or that of the maternal grandfather, the latter opened on to all the names of history. Rather than everything being focused on a peculiar lacuna of castration, everything was slivered – the flux of the chieftaincy, ancestry. The whole reciprocity of clans, alliances, and lineation collectively convey precisely the opposite of the Oedipal analysis.

Above all, how do we comprehend if someone asserts that they have discovered an Indian Oedipus or an African Oedipus or a Japanese Oedipus? They are the first to admit that they come across none of the dynamics that constitute the Western presumed Oedipus. Even if the structure is there, it has no existence whatever that is “accessible to clinical practice”. The knowledge, the wealth of experience of these professionals, is beyond any doubt. Highly Westernised psychiatry that has been transplanted onto other countries has sadly marginalised cultural understanding by denigrating rich cultural ideals, symbolism, myths and meanings and considering them inferior and alien to the understanding and treatment of psychological disorders.

Unlike Indian psychoanalysts, the Japanese have from the very beginning openly contended with the distinctive nature of the Japanese psyche and tried to frame relevant theories that diverge considerably from Western psychoanalysis. The Japanese, not being weighed down by a colonial heritage with its indigenous culture, have found it much easier to assert their Japaneseness. Thus, Dr Kosawa dismissed the Oedipus complex as not central to the Japanese psyche, and substituted the “Ajase complex”, taken from a Buddhist myth. In this the nucleus is not so much the son-father-mother triangle, as in the Oedipus myth, but rather the son-mother dyad, wherein the son is furious over his feelings of loss of his symbiotic tie with the mother, but later repents after becoming aware of her sacrifices for him. This is clearly of another order not only with regard to the Oedipus complex, but also with regard to working on the separation-individuation process in general.


Indian Family: A Developmental Schema and the Psychodynamics

In comparison to the Western familial situation, the Indian male is anticipated to remain closely involved with his mother throughout his life, and his relationship with her is far more powerful during the childhood stage than is usual in Western culture.

Within the Oedipal context, the Indian son identifies with the father as the ego-ideal and head of the family (if a grandfather is not fulfilling the role), and needs the father to give him psychic structure and organisation. “The father, paternal uncles, and grandfather gradually become an important intrapsychic balance to the intense mother-son relationship” (Grey, 1973; Kakar, 1980; Ramanujan, 1981). These elder males guide the son during his later childhood and adolescence through the strict traditions of the structural hierarchy in an overtly detached and authoritative manner, in which veneration and containment of feelings on the son's part predominate. This contrasts with the more informal relationship with maternal uncles and grandfather, evocative of the qualitative mode of hierarchical relationships in which the boy interacts more on the basis of his affinity. Hence, given the intensity and ambivalence of the mother-son relationship in the Indian setting, the need for the father's physical closeness and guiding voice becomes even more crucial, the necessity of the Oedipal alliance often outweighing the hostility of the Oedipus complex (Kakar).

“The guiding voice can become effective and the son's identification with his father can take place provided the father allows his son emotional access to him. But the principles of Indian family life demand that a father be restrained in the presence of his own and his brother's children. The culturally prescribed pattern of restraint between fathers and sons is widespread in India, sufficiently so as to constitute a societal norm” (Mandelbaum). Therefore, the son is susceptible to confusing and conflicting messages of simultaneous love and restraint emanating from his father's behaviour that leaves him lacking the required conviction that his father is a dependable “constant” to learn from, be loved by, and emulate. The unconscious anger of sons against benign but “intangible” fathers, whose paternity towards their children is suppressed in the neutralism expected by the extended family according to tradition, is one of the major themes in Indian personality.

The cultural emissary demanding that the Indian boy at the age of four or five surrender his intimate status with his mother is not just the father but the whole group of elder male members of the family. But his fury is not directed towards his father alone; it is dispersed against all the male authority figures that are accountable for taking his mother away. Therefore it is plausible, symbolically, that in Indian mythology Ravana, the abductor of the “good mother” Sita, has not one head but ten heads. Because it is dispersed to include other elder males, Oedipal aggression against the father, in its “classical intensity”, on the whole, is not necessarily present in the male population in India. This may vary from region to region.

Therefore, the variable intensity of the Oedipal conflict in different regions, the impetus of the identification of the Indian son with his mother, steer to a type of resolution of the conflict that diverts from the Western model. In the West the Oedipus conflict is usually resolved as the boy's aggressive stance towards his rival/father triggers anxiety that is in turn reduced by identification with the father.

Therefore, the above culturally influenced psycho-social constellation, the length and symbiotic nature of the mother-son relationship, the rupture of this connection at the age of four or five, and the radical alteration of the child's “lifestyle” and the young boy's disappointment when he perceives his father as more of an onlooker than an ally in his struggle to cope with his new life circumstances has to be explored, and the childhood origin of these constellations appraised, if we are to understand Indian patterns of authority and the emotional constraints exercised by certain type's of authority figures.

In India, carrying the burden of a strong pre-Oedipal feminine identification, and lacking a strong, supportive father with whom to identify, the boy is more likely to adopt a position of “non-partisan” feminine submission towards all elder men in the family. He trades his active, phallic initiative for an “apprentice complex”, as Fenichel called it, in which he takes a “passive-receptive stance” towards male authority hoping that one day he will be a man in his own right. The classical Oedipus complex, which has received considerable attention from Western scholars as well as exquisite psychological analysis by Freud, may not be the major “nuclear” complex in the Indian setting. The father-son encounter in India tends to be eclipsed by the earlier convergence of mother and son and the requisite need it has provoked in the latter. This is illustrated through clinical vignettes from my own clinical practice:

Mr S was a twenty-four-year-old engineer who had come for psychotherapy because of a general lack of interest in work, suicidal thoughts, and an inability to relate to people. He was the eldest son of his parents and had spent the first few years of his life with his mother at the home of his maternal grandparents and the extended family. When he was four years old S, along with his mother, moved to a different town, where his father worked in a bank. S's first memories of his father were of a harsh and authoritarian man, a father who had shattered the blissful intimacy between mother and son but who, luckily, was rarely at home. As the therapy progressed, S's memories of feelings about his early childhood years began to change. He discovered that under the overt hostility to the father, there were considerable feelings of affection and admiration. At the same time, the mother's image began changing from that of a loving mother absorbed in her son's welfare to that of an overpowering mother who gripped her son and undermined his efforts to become an individual separate from her. S's resentment of the father, he discovered, had less to do with so-called Oedipal rage and more to do with the fact that the father was so often away and deprived the son of any emotional access to him. Once, after his marriage, when S's earlier feelings of helplessness in the face of an overpowering femininity had been triggered again, he had the following dream:

“I am in our house when a gang of armed robbers led by a woman attacks our house. The female leader of the gang chases me through the rooms of the house. I pass by my father in the hall. He is lying on the bed with a gun, but it is not operative and he cannot help me, though he wants to. I am very frightened as the female robber runs after me, laughing and mocking me for not being able to defend myself.”

Another twenty-two-year-old patient with severe identity problems, who was struggling with his ambivalent feelings towards his mother, with whom he had a “symbiotic” relationship till late into childhood, had the following dream:

“I am lying on my bed when I see my mother walking towards me. She is half naked and has a laughing, triumphant expression on her face. I am very frightened. Then I see my father sitting in a corner of the room, busy talking to others. I see his strong, long arms and I try to reach and hold his arms and feel safe. But he fails to notice me.”

Clinical fragments of course do not “prove” anything, but they can be symbolic – in the above case illustration, the son's struggle with the overwhelming mother and her femininity is a major theme in Indian psyche and culture. The son needs his father to help him get out of this primary danger. Therefore, the necessity of Oedipal alliance outweighs the hostilities of the Oedipal Complex.

Turning from individual case histories to the wider culture, Indian epics are rich with examples of sons actively renouncing their sexuality. Two of the most popular illustrations of this theme are the myths of Bhishma and Yayati from the Mahabharata. Though these myths are constituted of a complex series of incidents, with many interconnected topics, their central episode, which the culture “remembers” again and again in its academic and artistic creations, is the son's sexual self-sacrifice. If the strength of Freud’s Oedipus complex is originated from the son's guilt over a fantasised and ultimately unconscious parricide, the “Bhishma complex” is charged with the dread of filicide. In emphasising the father's envy – and thus the son's persecution anxiety – as a primary incentive in the father-son relationship, Indian culture inverts the psychoanalytically postulated causality between the fantasies of parricide and filicide. The Bhishma solution of symbolic self-castration deflects the father's envy and the son's primal fear of annihilation at his hands, while at the same time it provides a way of keeping the bond of affection by submitting to the wishes of the father, society, and tradition. The father is the keeper of cultural values.

In Indian mythology, Oedipal myths have features of gentle benignity: neither of the parties to the conflict is blinded, injured, castrated or killed. In Indian mythology, the hero is one who obeys the will of the father. Obedience is the ultimate virtue. Therefore, not all fathers hate and mutilate their sons. Not all sons surge to undermine or kill patriarchs.


Freud: Jewish Family Psychodynamics

It used to be that Freud's Oedipus complex was the shibboleth of psychoanalytic explanation. Little boys of three to five years, and in more intricate ways little girls too, fostered wishes, in Freud's nineteenth-century diction, “repugnant to morality, yet forced upon us by all nature”. Sexually they craved their parents, while more violently they would overthrow the reigning patriarch and matriarchs who tended and protected them but who claimed their conjugal rights. Burdened by guilt or more primitively dreading retaliation in the form of castration, they escape their incestuous urge, subsiding first of all into a sexual latency and then as adolescents and adults looking for lovers other than mother or father.

Freud, as we are aware, struggled with his “seduction theory” for a long time. But what of Freud's own early or “screen” memories? His infamous nurse seduced and mocked him, inviting him to gaze upon the naked female body. His mother nearly exposed herself to her son: Freud reports it to his friend Fleiss in the famous 1897 letter when he narrates his sexual arousal as a young child towards his mother. He recalls that once on a rail journey, he caught a glimpse of her “ad nudam”, as he put it with Latin decency. Freud's use of a foreign language here is clearly an evidence of the depth of the feelings involved. The Latin words must act as the shield he needed to place between himself and the forbidden sights.

Martha Robert's book, From Oedipus To Moses, illustrates a compelling argument in favour of the influence of Jewish identity on Freud's background and thought. Robert emphasises that “the primordial murdered father in Freud's Oedipean drama was not a legendary Greek King but a gentle, unsuccessful Hasidic merchant from Galicia. Freud's position as the first-born son of a Jewish mother, who was herself brought up along conventional Eastern European Jewish lines, must be deeply significant for his perception of parent-child relationships and sex and gender roles”.

Therefore, Jewish family dynamics must have played a far more crucial role in the phrasing of the Oedipus complex than Freud himself appears to have acknowledged. Freud focused on the paternal power within the Oedipus complex in a way that failed to take into account the extent of the influence of the mother's role in the development of the infant and young child. “Indeed his idealisation of the mother-son relationship, in comparison with that between husband and wife, resembles a typical Jewish pattern far more closely than that of the patriarchal German family” (Meadow and Vetter, 1959).

Ernest Jones tells us that Freud's attitude to certain matters in his personal life was one of quite inexplicable “secrecy”. Jones conjectures that “in Freud's earliest years there had been extremely strong motives for concealing some important phase of his development – perhaps even from himself”. “I would venture to surmise”, Jones adds, “it was his deep love for his mother” (1958, vol.2: 455-56). Marjorie Brierley suggests, however, “that the discovery of the Oedipus complex may have been facilitated by Freud's need to bury much earlier and intolerable conflicts relating to his mother”. Mary Balmary has examined Freud's treatment of Oedipus Rex and she rightly illustrates that “with his emphasis on the desire and the guilt of the son, he has constructed psychoanalysis on a partial reading of the drama”. Balmary observes that Freud sees only “the guilt of the dominated, not that of the dominating”, whose murderous impulses are responsible for the disasters (Balmary, 1982:74). For it is the guilt and collusion of both mother and son which are responsible for the city's pollution. In Freud's terms, Jocasta is entirely dominated by the archaic laws of the pleasure principle. Indeed, she is the prototypical woman of Freud's theory – the woman so strangely split off from that idealised one of his mother-son duo – unable to renounce and sublimate her instinctual desires. Jocasta is also one version of that earlier, omnipotent pre-Oedipal mother, the one that Freud glimpsed only late in his life and which caused him so much surprise.

In his Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality, where he recounts the development of infantile sexuality in relation to maternal love and care, he specifically exempts mothers from any intention or responsibility. He seems to have turned a blind eye throughout his clinical work to the probabilities or incriminations of any real seductiveness on the part of mothers as, for example, in the case-history of Little Hans where he appears to regard the mother's sexual behaviour as quite normal (Kanzer and Glenn, 1984).

There is another example of repression by Freud which depicts together some of the varied themes of his life and also of his book Moses And Monotheism. One of its many anomalies is the exclusion, on his part, of the name of Karl Abraham from his list of references and sources. By excluding Abraham's essay, Freud omitted the most comprehensive psychoanalytic study of this subject. It was a significant one in that he was intimately acquainted with Amenhotep IV. Abraham's Amenhotep is a different personality from Freud's. Abraham credits the King's mother, Queen Tiy, with being not merely her son's guiding influence but the actual instigator of Egyptian reform. When Freud read Abraham's manuscript, he objected to Abraham's generalisation that “when the mother is particularly important the conflict with the father takes milder form”. Freud’s reply was, “I have no evidence of this” (Roith).

This brief exchange is quite crucial to the argument, for it can be seen that all Freud's identifications with heroic figures enabled him to identify with fathers who were dominant and powerful unlike his own, while removing these attributes from the maternal realm. Freud believed that nothing is ever forgotten that does not touch on a “personal complex”. Abraham's essay touched on what was probably Freud's most intense personal complex in more ways than one and it is no coincidence that one of his well-known, sudden fainting attacks took place during a discussion of this essay (Shengold, 1972).

By not heeding Abraham's essay on Akhenaten, Freud could continue to avoid the intolerable attribute of a woman's initiative in what he considered to be civilisation's most important progress: that a woman's influence over her son was embedded not merely in her physical or sexual image, but in an intellectual and spiritual capacity.


Social and Cultural Context

Cultures, it appears, differ with regard to which of the major universal human consternations they pick and choose to focus on. Classical psychoanalysis then is a child of the Western legacy when it places "Oedipal" as its core theme where sons and fathers encounter each other in conflict.

In an overview of the paradigms of Indian identity, written for the psychiatric relevance, Guzder and Krishna (1991) emphasise that “despite the great cultural diversity of India, Hindu and related mythologies of the idealised feminine-maternal have profound social and psychological implications for many Indian women”. As Kakar has insisted, “the mythic roots of Indian identity cannot be overestimated" (Kakar, 1978).

The combined male-female parental image is a frequent cultural symbol in images as Ardha-Narishwara (Shiva as half-man, half-woman) or Kali dressed for battle (as a phallic maternal image). The desire of men to be women, their deep identification with the primal mother, or their envy of female procreative capacities ("womb envy"), are suggested by Ravana's actions in the myth. The denial or irrelevance of triangular Oedipal conflicts or parental seduction here parallels other common myths that avoid triadic conflict and present primarily father/daughter (e.g. King Janaka/Sita) or mother/son (e.g. Parvati/Ganesh) stories without seduction or incest themes. A similar pattern is found in male myths of Ganesh and Bhishma, extensively discussed by Kakar (1981, 1989) and Obeyesekere (1990), where a son renounces his sexuality to resolve competitive sexual rivalry with his father. Such myths emphasise the child's renunciation of any wish to be possessed by a parent of the opposite sex. Passive action, fusion and self-sacrifice rather than overt rivalry or castration themes are more evident in these types of myth, which remain close to the prevalent ego ideal in Indian literature (Neki, 1973; Roy, 1975; Kakar, 1981).


Conclusion

To appraise the wider range of the developmental potentialities of humans as well as of their psychopathology, and their relationship with each other, one must take an in-depth gaze at the highly complex cultures and social institutions. Even though there have been significant shifts in the psychoanalytic field for some decades in both India and Japan, with substantial contributions from psychoanalysts in both societies, Freudian psychoanalysis has not given much importance to any cross-cultural perspective.

It is apparent from psychoanalytic work in India, Japan, and the United States that the kinds of potentialities persons actually develop, how they function and communicate within their society, their attributes and their experience in the world, depend overpoweringly on the given culture and society to which they belong. And when these cultures are embedded in distinctly different civilisations, the psychological differences can be considerable. The cultural ideals and symbol systems that give meaning and form to social patterns and child-rearing ultimately shape the development of potentiality and the range of individuation in a given society. In more theoretical terms, the psychic unity of mankind seems well established: that all humans are equipped with more or less the same range of potentialities. But how these common threads of humanity are coloured, and how they are interwoven with each other varies tremendously from culture to culture.

Following on from Spiro's (1992) psychoanalytic rebuttal of Malinowski's well-known thesis on the absence of father-directed Oedipal conflicts among matrilineal societies, together with clinical and ethnographic observations from Italy (Parson, 1964), India (Kakar, 1981, 1989 and Kurtz, 1992), and Japan (Roland, 1988), Obeyesekere proposes that such arguments over the existence of hidden Oedipal complexes must be clarified through “intelligent” (that is, revisionist) psychoanalytic formulations. He argues that “rather than accepting the universality of a Eurocentric Oedipus complex and measuring its goodness of fit with other cultures, it may perhaps be more appropriate to conceptualise ‘circles of desire’ in which several erotic and/or antagonistic relationships between various family members exist, and that certain segments of these relationships are privileged over others at varying socio-political periods in different Cultures: ... the Indian Oedipus is not a variant form of a universal complex: it is the segment of Oedipal relations that is culturally significant and also determinative of a great many neuroses”.

Finally, the significance of the Oedipal factor in our clinical work cannot be overvalued. It impacts the very foundation of the psychological structure of development such as patterns of attachment, affect regulation, sense of self, gender identity, and the ability to develop autonomy.

The psycho-social aspects of the Oedipus complex unfolding from this could not be more pertinent to the problems of our modern world. Against the rich tapestry of emotional experience of people from different backgrounds with their concerns and potentialities, clinicians should equip themselves with varied therapeutic manoeuvres that open up a wide range of culturally appropriate treatments and interventions that could be innovative and radical for the betterment of the mental health of society.


References

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Varija Rao has over thirty-five years' clinical experience of working with with childhood trauma, sexual abuse, self-harm, relational/attachment trauma, dissociation, and borderline personality disorder. She trained at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience in India, at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (in Family Therapy), and at University College London (in Intercultural Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy). In the 1980s she and a team of practitioners established one of the first therapeutic community services in India. She has worked in London in a therapeutic community; at a drug rehab centre; as a specialist in self-harm and sex abuse at a young people's counselling service for twelve years; and for ten years as a psychotherapist at NELMHT and the Maudsley. She was a professional member of, and taught at, the Bowlby Centre for Attachment-Related Issues and was also a professional member of the NAFSIYAT Intercultural Psychotherapy Centre. She has presented papers at national and international conferences. She had a private practice and offered clinical supervision to counsellors and therapists for many years. She is now retired.