I agree with Jacqueline Rose about Freud’s continued relevance to our understanding of sexualities (What Sigmund Freud Can Teach Us About the Middle East and #MeToo, October 10). One could argue that the modern-day movement for marriage equality began with Freud, given his refusal to pathologize homosexuality. Many people assume that the Oedipus complex is meant to produce boys who will grow up loving women, and girls who will love men (I would call it “Oedipus simplex“).
I wish Rose had mentioned what Freud called “the complete Oedipus complex” which suggests that each child forms both same-sex and cross-sex attractions. Little boys can have romantic feelings for Daddy as well as Mommy, like his famous case of Little Hans shown For whatever reason, it seems true that younger people are giving Freud a second look. In the past five years, 12 universities in the US have made it possible for students to minor – study a secondary subject – in “psychoanalytic studies”. At the University of Pennsylvania, where I taught, these courses attract a surprising number of students.
Deborah Anna Luepnitz
Philadelphia, Pennslyvania, United States of America
What Jacqueline Rose does not tell us in her very interesting article is that Freud wrote in 1930, in Civilization and its discontentsin an attempt to understand the barbarity of the First World War, that organized society and human drives are incompatible. Repressive sublimation, the idea that channeling our primitive desires to build society fails when repressed aggression leaks out into rape and murder – war in other words. Marcuse sought to address this incompatibility 20 years later in Eros and Civilization, in what became a clarion call to a future androgynous peace-and-love counterculture. Good news and bad news: the sexual identity thing seems to have worked, the end of all wars certainly hasn’t.
Desmond Hewitt
Marlborough, Wiltshire
