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Freud's theory of the Oedipus Complex is a theory of such conflict stemming from our early relationships to parents and siblings. The Oedipus Complex is not a theory about 'sexuality', but a theory about sensuous-emotional relationships. As Freud put it: "a person's emotional attitude toward his family, or in the narrower sense towards his father and mother". Love and jealousy, rivalry and dependence are all mixed up together, directed to parents or their substitutes. Ambivalence is the order of the day. Not so much a story of 'sex' as an unavoidable psycho-drama with an infinite capacity for disguise and variation.
But there is one indissoluble link in Freud's sexual theories which may give us some hint as to why they have proved to be so disturbing. That is the intimate association between sexuality and anxiety. At first Freud thought that anxiety was caused if sexuality did not have an adequate outlet, as if some noxious hormonal substance built up in the body and poisoned it. Then he thought that anxiety was caused by repression of the sexual instinct. Repression meant there was an ill-defined sense of unease in the person, forever wary lest the banished impulses and phantasies break through the barrier of repression. The anxiety is a generalised feeling, more or less pronounced in different people and provoked by stressful circumstances, that something catastrophic or overwhelming will happen to you.
Finally Freud reasoned that it was not the repression that caused the anxiety, it must be the anxiety that caused the repression. We achieve our sense of sexual identity by overcoming various anxiety situations that scare us to death along the way. For instance, how does a little boy become secure about the ownership of his penis? He has confronted the terror that he might lose it. It sounds strange, but small children sometimes only feel they fully possess something when they think it might be taken away. Many games between adults and children play with this theme.
Whatever the merits of Freud's particular ideas, his overall thesis
is surely capable of investigation. He says sexuality is always linked
with anxiety. If we find a society or social group where this is not so,
we have disproved Freud's thesis. The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead
thought she had found such a society when she wrote her book 'The Coming
of Age in Samoa'. Unfortunately subsequent research showed that this was
not the case; the South Sea Islanders seemed just as hung up about sexual
matters as Mead's contemporaries. Perhaps modern society has overcome the
anxiety surrounding sex? We certainly seem more 'open' about it. What do
you think?
According to Freud, because of "an overwhelming mass of evidence", men dreaming of teeth falling out is caused by nothing other than the masturbatory desires of puberty. He explains: "But here I may draw attention to the frequent `displacement from below to above' which is at the service of sexual repression, and by means of which all kinds of sensations and intentions occurring in hysteria, which ought to be localised in the genitals, may at all events be realised in other, unobjectionable parts of the body. Only one feature - the teeth - is beyond all possibility of being compared in this way; but it is just this coincidence of agreement and disagreement which makes the teeth suitable for purposes of representation under the pressure of sexual repression."
Freud also connotates the wordplay and the 'Witz' element of teeth. In Austria there is an expression for the act of masturbation, namely: To pull one out, or To pull one off. There are expressions more or less similar in other languages. Dreams of pulling teeth, and of teeth falling out, are interpreted in popular belief to mean the death of a connection. Psychoanalysis can admit of such a meaning only at the most as a joking allusion to the sense already indicated.
In a sense, we think that Freud left out an important childhood phenomenon, namely: the shedding of teeth. Don't we all vividly remember a tooth losening in our mouths and the strangeness of that experience? And, as is nowadays recognised, that a baby and a young child regards his body, body parts, for instance his stools, as his possesion. Losing these possesions (the stools taken away by mother who says that they are 'dirty') can be a traumatic experience. An experience that perhaps is still haunting us in our dreams.
We also want to stress the relation between teeth, the mouth, and talking. We need our teeth to bite our tongue. And, showing one's teeth can be a form of agression and danger (not so different from laughing, but that is another theory!). In addition, dreaming of losing our teeth may be symbolic for losing our agression, and the powerlessnes we experience in our lives.