Early Father Identification

This very strong love for the ‘master’ and father-guru, however, intriguingly correlates with Freud’s expression of ‘early father identification’. “With the help of the super-Ego”, says Freud, “the [Ego] draws from the id’s accumulated experience of past ages in a way still non-transparent to us.”1

This concerns an “... identification with the father-being of early ages …”, and with the father before he actually appears as an entity, distinguishable from the mother, namely independently as a father2.

But should you be able to identify yourself with someone who can’t yet be perceived as an independent individual? Such a ‘father of early ages’ could only be a type of god, an already erected, distinct imaginary signifier, a type of ‘astral-mental entity’ or again the “female object”, the “Father-Metaphor”. In the end, Freud did not come up with an answer and it was Indian psychoanalysts, especially and interestingly, who went about finding a solution to this issue.3

The first of those psychoanalysts, G. Bose, developed a definition of a complex of ‘opposite wishes’ or affects in contrary to Freud’s definition of the Oedipus complex. For example, he contrasted a boy’s fear of castration to the ‘wish to be a woman’. This unconscious wish then had to be made conscious to the patient through the therapist, and subsequently, reconciled with the external situation. As a matter of fact, something similar is found in Surat Shabd Yoga in the emphasis of guru-‘bhakti’, the devoted love of the ‘master’ which we discussed just above.

Devotion and susceptibility were to be furthered to an extreme, which meant nothing other than emphasizing feminine structure in meditation. Whereas yoga creates the above mentioned ‘pleasure beyond the phallus’ by an unspecific devotion, the Indian psychoanalysts’ interpretation of a deep drive to femininity existing in every man did this in a scientific way.

 

1 Freud, S., GW XIII, Fischer (2000), page 285

2 Freud,S., GW XIV, page 21; I have indicated this isolated paternity further above when speaking of Gopi Krishna.

3 Hartnack, C., Psychoanalysis in Colonial India, Oxford Uni. Press (2001), pages 137-150. Footnote 22 above refers to a variety of modern attempts to theorize such a ‘high’ instance. Goetzmann describes it in the form of the Other who fleetingly existed at an early state of childhood. That fits well again with the idea of the “feminine object” or “Fathers Name”.

 

Anmerkung der Redaktion: Dieser Artikel stammt aus einer Beitragsreihe zum Thema: Analytische Psychocatharsis.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The Bible

You are here: Home Analytische Psychokatharsis Artikel Early Father Identification