Tag Archives: oedipal crisis

“The World is My Oyster” (Not)

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I hardly know where to start.  This Donald Trump demon that has been unleashed on the American psyche has tripped all of my triggers too and “literarylew” has “more offenses at my beck than thoughts to put them in.”  So I’m reaching into my stuffed “beck” and pulling out, “The world is not my oyster.”

To Trump, the world is his oyster.  He is a two-year old boy who never had limits set when he went through the developmental stage of the “terrible two’s” and so remains a two year old boy, “breathing out threatenings and slaughterings” anytime he is faced with a limit.  All of us go through this developmental stage, very much related to what we clinicians describe as the Oedipal transition. Though this is a challenging moment in our young lives, most of us learn to control our rage and acclimate to the external world, accepting deferred gratification over immediate gratification.  Without this willingness, we fail to fully enter the human race.

I know it was challenging for myself and even remember a dream in my early thirties when I was beginning to address my early childhood repression.  In this dream I was a furious little tyke, red-faced, shaking my fist in defiance when denied what I wanted.  It took a girl friend at the time to point out, with a laugh, what that dream was about.  She knew me very well!  And I can tell you very clearly now, in my mid-sixties, I feel the frustration of dealing with the experience of the world not being my oyster.  I often declare, “I want it all” and add, “Why should I have to accept limits” as I deal with the frustrations of aging, especially the realization that the river Styx is fast approaching.  But mercifully, back in my terrible two’s, the gods (i.e. “God”) recognized he did not need to unleash a redneck Arkansas Trump on the world and tied me down with a fundamentalist Christian load of guilt and shame.  And, central Arkansas, you better be grateful to Him!

But Trump has used wealth to create a world for himself in which he could get by with the assumption that the world is his oyster.  And, now given to the severe pathology of the American psyche, the Republican Party finds itself willing to cater to his narcissism to the point that he is their nominee for the Presidency.  Furthermore, and gravely troubling to me, evangelical Christians are lining up behind him in over whelming numbers displaying a profound lack of critical thinking skills.

Accepting the fact that the world is not our oyster is merely accepting limits.  Watching Trump allows us to see an impulse that we all have, if we could only come unleashed for a few minutes.  I think Trump’s fanatical following by the Republican extremists represents their unconscious desire to become unleashed, to give vent to their darkest, most violent impulses which are a very “human” response to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”  But this is a dimension of the “human” experience that must be kept in check and certainly does not need to be encouraged by demogogues.

Language “Calming the Savage Beast”

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As I work with very young children as a substitute teacher, I marvel at the early childhood memories that come flooding back. The haunt of anxieties, fears, insecurities, and neediness surface though they no longer terrorize me. I have matured and have developed an ego, an ego which itself is mature enough to allow these feelings to resurface without feeling its integrity is jeopardized. So, I learn from this classroom experience even as I am patiently helping these lovely children to learn.

Neurology has taught us that our experiences from birth onward…and even before birth…stay with us and shape our lives. For the roots of the ego are organic and so we get a head start even before we are born; and, I would deign to say, even before we were a “gleam in our daddy’s eye.”

But especially after we are born, we soak up what is going on around us and begin to formulate an impression of the world, one basic impression being whether or not the world is an hospitable place to be. “Do I like this place or do I want to check out?” Fortunately, most of us are wired to want to hang around even if our world happens to be very ugly and the same wiring helps us develop coping skills (i.e. a “denial system”) that can thwart what would be otherwise an unbearable subjective anguish. But sometime the “denial systems” are too maladaptive and lead one beyond the pale when he/she grows up and begins to take part in the human carnival. That is when therapy becomes relevant and sometimes even incarceration and even…perhaps…capital punishment.

One of the basic tools of denial is language itself. It is our ability to formulate words and enter into the verbal world that calms the savage beast that reigns prior to that Oedipal moment. Nikos Kazantzakis pithily referred to those “twenty-six toy soldiers that guard us from the rim of the abyss,” George Eliot said that we should “speak words which give shape to our anguish.” and Conrad Aiken noted that,”to name the abyss is to avoid it.” And now I have suddenly wandered knee-deep into the field of semiotics. If you find exploration of the nitty-gritty of subjective development, of that moment in our early life when language is being “wrapped around” the primitive beasts of our early subjective anguish, let me suggest Julia Kristeva who has written brilliantly and eloquently on this subject. Her books draw from her practice as a psychoanalyst with patients whose denial system, i.e. “linguistic filter,” has been compromised either neurologically or by trauma. The Kristeva title which delves most deeply into this is Power of Horrors.