2015 Fall Semester: Constructing Oedipus Part III

Fall Seminar 2015 Constructing Oedipus Part III: The Structure of Narcissism and the Phallus Seminar is open to those registered as adherents, guests, and first time auditors of PLACE.  For those not in the Los Angeles area, you can arrange to attend with the improved Skype conferencing. Beginning Date: Saturday, September 26, 2015 Following Dates: Oct. 17, 31, Nov. 14, 28, Dec. 19 Time: 11:00 am -1:00 pm Place: Euclid By: Robert Groome  Seminar Description In order to resolve the major impossibility in constructing the Oedipus Complex, the St. Christopher Paradox, we began the Spring 2015 semester by returning to the texts of Freud to differentiate the common confusion of Ego and Narcissism. Freud calls the Ego " a failure of narcissism" or a "neurotic narcissism" which would later be given a title in Freudian oeuvre under the title of narcissistic transference or psychosis. Counter the common notion of the Ego as narcissistic, Freud's emphatically states that the Ego is its failure. Consequently, any attempt to construct the Oedipus in terms of a narration of a pre-formed identity of a Mama, Papa, and Child is also doomed to be a failure of narcissism. We showed, counter Jung's unary theory of drives and the ego, Freud's dualistic theory of the drives  (ego/sex drives) and narcissism (object-libido/ego-libido) required a theory of identification (not identities): How do we define one cup? We must begin to write something like a logic of the two: if it were two, then they would be the same (Leibniz's principle of indiscernibles was introduced and problematized here).  In constructing a libido theory in order to account for a self which is at once one, but two – that is both real and an illusion – Freud leaves the problem of identification at the level of rhetoric and myth: rhetoric being a use of language which both conceals and reveals the desire of the ego as Other; myth being an operator that allows for the resolution of contraries. In particular, Freud seeks to found the Oedipus Complex on another myth: the scientific myth of Totem and Taboo where the child, at the origin of time, identifies with a symbolic Father, the dead father, or what Freud would later call the Phallus. Calling the Phallus the marker of the desire of the mother, if someone is a father, then that someone is both what he is and something else – the lover, the breadwinner, the displaced father, etc. – for the mother as the marker of desire. Similarly, in attempting to determine the identity of one child, we discovered there were two (object-libido/ego-libido, ego-ideal/ideal ego) that contained a third: the Phallus identified with, by Freud, as the Father and the origin of the super-ego. In its most condensed manner, the Phallus P may be written in logic as a predicate of identity where two are brought together by a third:           P (x) <=> x   Freud's Oedipus Complex is never a question of establishing relations between people (egos), but an analysis of one ego, which is a two (narcissism) containing a three (phallus). For Freud, it is this 3 in 2 of the 1 which accounts for the Oedipus as a structure, as a relation of relations, and not a simply relation between people or subject and object. Four major texts were introduced to show the progression of this Freudian trajectory: Three Essays on Sexuality (1906), On Narcissism (1914); Libido Theory and Narcissism (1916), Infantile Genital Organization (1923). The participant in the seminar should attempt to read through all three texts before attending the Seminar. The Fall 2015 Semester aims to get beyond a rhetoric and myth of desire by constructing Freud's text in Lacan's critical reading through: a) Optics, b) Logic, and c) Topology. a) Optics – How is the Oedipus a Mirror? In a first time, we will return to show how the Oedipus can be constructed within the theory of Narcissism through Lacan's Optical Schemas. What is the passage of two in one that is brought in reference to a mirror? How does the problem of duality, unlike mirror symmetry, imply a triadic formulation (see C. Levi-Strauss, Do Dual Organizations Exist?)These constructions were only referred to without being constructed in previous semesters. The Fall 2015 Semester will be the first concentrated construction that seeks to go beyond the usual illustrative accounts. b) Logic – How is the Universal Oedipal? Second, it will be necessary to situate and differentiate how the Oedipus is not Universal, but the Universal is Oedipal in the construction of a logic that takes as its basis the modern reading of Logic since Kant's transcendental logic and modern mathematical logic from Boole, Frege, and Pierce, to Gödel, Tarski, and Hintikka. For it will be precisely at this critical juncture and logical construction that Lacan will reformulate the Oedipus Complex in a Logic of Sexuation by stating: "It is very well this logic that summarizes all of what is the Oedipus Complex." (Étourdit, p.14). The question that will be opened up, from the beginning, is how a universal can be established if it is not a question of a generality or transcendence, but a critique in the Kantian sense of the transcendental as Object? A similar question: What is the characteristic that makes modern logic mathematical? These seemingly unrelated questions will take us to the heart of the Oedipus Complex. In particular, it will be necessary to show their development in Lacan's critique of Freud: not only in dis-identifying the Father from the Phallus, but differentiating the mechanism of Psychotic delusion, forelcosure, (Verwerfung), from Primary repression (Üverdrangung) in the creation of a Logic of Sexuation. Reopening the Oedipus on the basis of its logical construction, Lacan has shown how to differentiate a Masculine logic of the Phallus from a Feminine logic of the Name of the Father. In its extension,  the Oedipus in Lacan's critique of Freud's Oedipus brings out a 4th (the Name of the Father) in the 3 of the 2 in the 1. What is almost never made precise is how this formulation establishes the basis of a topology. c) Topology – How is the 4th round of a Borromean lock the Oedipus Complex? In a third time, it will be necessary to show how the formalization of the Oedipus into a Logic of Masculine/Feminine Logic re-establishes the Freudian clinic of, respectively, Neurosis and Psychosis, on a topological basis. Lacan first brings together the problem of Sexuation as two modes of Mistake (Ratage): the first, a Masculine Mistake situates the Neurotic case; the second, a Feminine Mistake, situates the Psychotic Case. With each mode of Mistake comes a corresponding mode of Repair that Lacan's differentiates as, respectively, a Sinthome and Symptom; then shows how to determine this logic in topological diagrams of, respectively, a generalized Borromean and the 4th component of a Borromean lock which Lacan calls, respectively, the sinthome of Joyce and the symptom of Schreber in Freud's Oedipus Complex. In the lack of  a logical foundation in sexuation, the contemporary analytic literature runs rough-shod over these differences by simply repeating commentaries on basis of the descriptions of Lacan. Our seminar aims to provide the material elements for a construction of the Oedipus in the logic of Freud and Lacan that would account for the topology without feeling the need to merely repeat the illustrative commentaries. Our position is that there is no such thing as Lacanian Topology or Mathematics. There is only topology and mathematics that is to be constructed in a forum and clinic of Lacanian analysis. This third formulation will take place in the Spring of 2016.     September 2015 R.T.D. Groome Santa Monica, CA